Harrington has eye for a Major

After two top-10 finishes in the year’s Majors, Pádraig Harrington may well be back as a big-time contender, but the Irishman is not so sure he ever stopped being one.

Like Tiger Woods without the personal strife, Harrington has not won a Major since 2008, when the Dubliner won both the British Open at Birkdale and the PGA Championship at Oakland Hills. Like Woods he has plummeted down the world rankings as a desire to change his swing has cost him a long-time coach.

And like the 14-time Major winner from America, Harrington is back once again to the point where his game is now worthy of consideration when selecting contenders of this year’s British Open at Royal Lytham & St Annes.

A tie for eighth at the Masters in April and tie for fourth last month at the US Open, in the midst of a run of results the worst of which has seen him tie for 16th at the Scottish Open last week, will shorten a golfer’s odds with the bookies considerably and, as Harrington is fond of saying, you never see a poor bookmaker. Yet ask him whether he feels Harrington the Major contender is back and he answers: “I didn’t think he’d been away but, yeah, I suppose so.

“I look forward to the Majors and I would find the Majors easier than regular events, there’s no doubt about that. I mean, I’m in good form and I’m in a good enough place that it is about managing where my head is at going into this tournament.

“That’s what you want when you’re going into a Major. You don’t want to be here searching for your putting stroke or your swing or anything like that. You want to be turning up and just trying to get your head into the right place for the week.”

A session with long-time sports psychologist Dr Bob Rotella on Monday will presumably have taken care of the latter, while his work with swing coach Pete Cowen is reaping dividends following his split with Bob Torrance halfway through the 2011 Irish Open at Killarney.

That left Harrington’s putting as the final piece of the jigsaw to be inserted and the three-time Major winner is finally happy he has found the solution.

“If you looked at my stats — I’m not a lover of stats — but looking at it over say 2009, 2010, I would be excellent short-range and not great medium-range.

“I’m particularly trying to improve my ability to hole 15-footers, and I did a lot of practice on them. But I ended up with a 15-foot putting stroke for a four-foot putt, and I didn’t realise that.

“But I was just classic decelerating the putts. I had no idea that’s what I was doing, but that’s what it turned out.

“And it’s helped me a lot, because you miss a few putts, short putts, you’re losing confidence, you’re wondering if the air is gone sort of thing. So it’s nice to find it was more physical than mental, let’s say. That’s helped me on certainly putting better.”

Reading his putts is another matter altogether and Harrington has once again been mapping out greens with the aid of a spirit level, just to confirm his eyesight has not been deceiving him.

“I did go out and pick a number of pin positions on each green and took a spirit level out and measured the straight putt on basically all those positions trying to find the low point,” he explained of a practice round at Lytham last week.

“I was actually more practicing my reading of the greens than expecting that I can pick out where the pins are exactly going to be. But if I get one or two pins right the whole week, it will be worthwhile. It was really more an exercise in this is what I see and this is what the spirit level says I see, and just calibrating my eyesight.”

Vision restored, game facereturned. Harrington is back in business.