Pádraig Harrington: 'I have never been as excited about my golf'

His Ryder Cup duties might have ended, but Pádraig Harrington is busier than ever as he completes tackling three tours next year.

Pádraig Harrington returns to action in the Portugal Masters next week, looking to get his head in the game as he bids to qualify for the season-ending DP World Tour Championship for the first time since 2016.

Europe’s now ex-Ryder Cup captain (50) is back in full playing mode, and while he admits he got “lapped” in his first two appearances on the PGA Tour Champion, he doesn’t rule out at least challenging to make a seventh Ryder Cup appearance in Italy in 2023 and insists he’s more excited than ever about his game and just as focused on giving something back.

Yesterday, the Dubliner was back on familiar terrain at Dublin’s Marlay Park, where he’s designed a 3,000m-sq public putting course, inspired by the famously undulating, 6,000m-sq Himalayas putting course at St Andrews.

It will be free to the public when it opens next spring and it promises to be hugely popular in a city still sadly lacking in public golf facilities.

The project, which would cost €300,000 to build commercially, is being funded by the Pádraig Harrington Charitable Foundation with a golf development grant from The R&A and a grant from Golf Ireland, supported by Sport Ireland’s special projects scheme.

It’s being built in partnership with Turfgrass, one of the world’s leading golf course consultancies, and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council with Atlantic Golf Construction donating the sweat and tears by physically building what Harrington has designed to be a “fun” putting course with its humps and hollows intended to attract more people to the game.

The drainage and gravel foundations have been completed for the green, which is around six times the size of the average club green, with the whole facility connected to the irrigation system at neighbouring Grange Golf Club.

“It could be 20 years,” Harrington said when asked how long he’d had this idea in his head. “It’s a long time. I know all the public parks in the UK used to have putting greens 50 years ago.”

Harrington lived a 20-minute cycle away from the park, which until recently boasted a wonderful par-three course, where he taught his mother to play the game.

But he also saw the popularity of putting greens when he opened one at St Luke’s Hospital in Rathgar in 2006, where his late father Paddy was a patient and suggested repurposing the old bowling green.

“We know that people just like putting,” he said. “It’s the one sport, if we can call putting a sport, that somebody who is a complete novice will really enjoy and the better you get at it, the harder it gets. It’s only when you get good at it putting gets hard.

“There’s going to be loads of undulations on it. So there will be loads of fun and frustration in this. We will be putting to plateaus and over and around the hills.”

Harrington spoke around 15 years ago of designing a Padraig Harrington Academy but shelved those plans due to the need for commercial involvement.

“I never really like the idea of commercial… I wanted it to be free, just like this is free.”

The green, which will be seeded with cores from Grange or Dun Laoghaire Golf Clubs, will be a hard-wearing mixture of poa and bentgrass and offer up to 36 holes with a maximum stimpmeter reading of around nine.

As for his own golf, he found his Champions Tour debut eye-opening and good for his hopes of contending for a fourth major win when he plays the Masters, the PGA Championship, and The Open next year.

“It was interesting,” he said after finishing tied 55th and 18th in his first two starts. “I was well and truly lapped. I am maintaining the physicality for the main tour, thinking that I need it. Clearly it is the other parts that I need. So, it was a good wake-up call.”

Ranked 68th in the Race to Dubai, he will play the Portugal Masters and the AVIV Dubai Championship to try and break into the top 50 who will contest the season-ending DP World Tour Championship.

His Ryder Cup duties might have ended, but he’s busier than ever as he completes tackling three tours next year.

“I am running off the right-hand side of the page now with options of where to play,” he joked. “You know, some weeks I could play four tournaments.

“I have never been as excited about my golf, and I don’t know if it is because I am freed up after the Ryder Cup, or I have started on the Champions Tour, or maybe just the fact I am hitting the ball better than I have ever hit the ball. But I am excited.”

As for Europe’s record 19-9 Ryder Cup defeat on his watch, he expects to debrief the European Tour in the coming weeks.

“I haven’t been available,” he said before repeating his theories on why the US won so well.

“They got the right winds when they practised early there. Everything else they did, we do.

“The big difference for them is telling their team who would and wouldn’t play foursomes and fourballs and putting them in a pod of three, so they knew who they would and wouldn’t play with. It gave them clarity.

“They didn’t have that turmoil which they normally have on a Friday — ‘Why aren’t I playing? They were well versed in what their roles were during the week. They’ve got smarter, clearly.”

Lee Westwood is favourite to be named as captain for Rome, but while he could make that team, Harrington sees him passing on the captaincy as a difficult choice with a long line of players, including Graeme McDowell looking to do the job in Adare Manor in 2027.

“Only a madman would take it in the US,” he said. “Not only did I do it in the US, I believed I could win it in the US. That defies logic. If Lee doesn’t take 2023, then he’s stuck with 2025 in Bethpage. Does he opt out of that? What’s coming down the road in the Ryder Cup is tough. Players are going to lose out.”