Patient G-Mac ready to make another Major career move

Graeme McDowell has set his sights on a Claret Jug this week as he goes in search of a second Major championship title that will end all talk of him being a "one-hit wonder".

The 2010 US Open champion from Portrush has knocked on the door a couple of times at subsequent Majors, and started the final rounds of both the 2012 US Open and Open Championship in the lead group, only to come up short.

Now McDowell, 34, comes into tomorrow’s first round at Royal Liverpool not just in form following his victory at the French Open 10 days ago but ready to move his career to another level of success, by adding the Open to his US Open title.

“It would mean huge amounts to me. I feel like I’m ready to kick on to the next sort of chapter in my career now, and compete and win more Major championships,” McDowell said.

“I certainly don’t want to be a one-hit wonder. And I’ve learned a lot over the last few years since my US Open victory. Two years ago at Lytham was the closest I’ve come to an Open Championship. This is my kind of golf course this week. And I want to give myself as many opportunities as I can to win Majors.

“It’s hard to win. Week in, week out, there’s so many great players in the world. Winning regular tournaments is hard enough, winning the Majors is something different, something special.

” I’d love a Claret Jug. Probably that and the Green Jacket are probably neck and neck. The Claret Jug is probably the one that I feel like I have the game to win, as opposed to the Masters.”

McDowell’s Royal Lytham & St Annes near miss, when a last-round 75 put paid to his hopes as playing partner Adam Scott imploded over the final holes to let Ernie Els in for victory, was described by the Portrush man as the biggest lesson of all at the Open, but the Lancashire links along with Royal Liverpool are the courses on the R&A rota he feels he has his best chance of getting over the line.

“I like it because you can’t take trouble out of play.

“Perhaps at St Andrews, as an example of a golf course where the big boys can just aim as far left as they want and hammer it, and you can really take trouble out of play and hit it past trouble.

“I think Lytham kind of forces you into necks. This golf course kind of forces you into little areas.

“It’s well bunkered, there’s bunkers on the 260 and 290. Where you have to be disciplined off the tee and find fairways, and rely on good iron play. And I’m as good a sort of medium iron player as most. And this golf course demands a lot of that.

“This is definitely an Open venue which I look at and kind of think, ‘yeah, I could compete around here’, as opposed to, say, a St Andrews, if the wind doesn’t blow, it’s not really my type of Open venue.”

McDowell has form at Hoylake, just as he now does at Lytham, having led the Open on its last visit here in 2006, when he shot an opening 66, only to be eclipsed over the following three days by a dominant Tiger Woods.

“You just have to play your way into it, try and execute your game plan as well as you possibly can, and be as patient as you can.

“I think I’ve certainly learned a lot from my Major championship experiences over the years. And even back to ‘06 after I led after the opening round, and maybe sat in this chair and got a bit excited and ahead of myself and thought, ‘wow, this is kind of cool’.

“I engaged reverse gear very quickly as the weekend went on.

“A couple of years ago at Lytham maybe didn’t focus on my own as well as I should have. The back nine on Sunday, I was a couple ahead of Ernie Els starting on the 10th tee. Ended up playing the last nine holes trying to get out of Adam Scott’s way as opposed to focusing on my own game. So you learn things all the time, and that never-kind-of-give-up attitude, that you never know what’s going to happen, perhaps stood me in good stead a couple of weeks ago at the French Open.

“You learn things all the time. But I certainly learned that these things are marathons, not sprints. There’s a long, tough week ahead of us, and you really have to pace yourself and be patient,” he added.