Triumph of the Likeable Loser

Before Padraig Harrington tees off at the B&H International Open at Wentworth this week, before he sorts out his clubs or assesses the course, before he goes through his mental exercises to focus on the goal ahead, he will do the following: ensure there is a good supply of pens in his bag.

Two years ago in the same tournament played at the Belfry, Harrington was subject to one of the cruellest punishments known in world sport. While sprinters can be awarded gold medals with the content of a pharmacy rattling around in their systems, and while the Football Association can receive not much more than a gentle tickle across the knuckles despite the violent racist behaviour of an alarming number of England followers, Harrington was disqualified on the spot for the appalling crime of failing to sign his scorecard.

"Well, I, I, well," says Harrington two years on when the proposition is put to him that the clerics behind the Spanish inquisition had a less draconian approach to sin than the regulatory system in place in golf. "Yeah. No it is. You're right. Tough. And it hurt at the time, I tell you that. It hurt."

No wonder. Harrington was leading the event by five strokes, looked a shoo-in for the £150,000 first prize and the criminal card in question marked a round that was a record for the tournament. Indeed that was the reason the misdemeanour came to light in the first place. No one spotted the card wasn't signed by the player until the owner of the hotel at the Belfry asked if he could frame it as a memento to hang on the clubhouse wall.

At that point the rule book winched into action: rule 6, sub-section 6 as it happens. Yeah sure, Harrington was told, you have played brilliantly, hit a record round that everyone wants to commemorate, but you did not sign your card so you are out. Which begs a rather important question of the player: if it is so essential to sign the thing, why did he forget? Especially since he is a qualified accountant, taught to understand the value of keeping paperwork in order.

"Ah, well yes," he says, smiling about it now that time has had a chance to erode the pain. "It was a tough, rough day, that's what you have to remember. We'd come in off a cold, wet course. A really tough day to play golf. We sat down on the bench and Jamie Spence was marking my card. And he passed the card across to me, with Michael Campbell sitting in the middle, and, as I say, it was a tough day and when Michael sees the card he just signs it, maybe he thinks it's his own. So the card then is just left sitting there for a few seconds. When I got the card, I checked the scores as you would do first, you know that's logical in any contract, you check before you sign, in legal terms as much as anything. So I would have checked the scores and then I'd have checked that the signatures were there. And of course they were. The fact they were the wrong signatures. Well, as I say, it was tough day."

Though he didn't trouser the cheque, the incident afforded Harrington considerably more than £150,000 worth of good publicity. Few could believe the dignity he showed at the time. He reacted to the bureaucratic madness with a calm that it is hard to imagine ever being replicated in other sports. Presumably that is something that golf teaches a player: when you are engaging with a sport as precious as this about its rules it teaches you to be philosophical about life's travails.

"This is an interesting question, but I'm not so sure of the answer," says Harrington. "Does golf make you or just reveal who you are? I used to think it builds a character. Now I'm not so sure about that. I think it just reflects who you are. The way I reacted at the Belfry, that was the way I was brought up."

But surely through the promotion of good habits and honesty in an entirely self-refereed game, golf must teach a player a lot?

"Oh sure. But I do worry about young kids playing golf as their only sport because it is a selfish game. It's a little bit like tennis. And in a slightly immature mind, they can learn bad things from it rather than all the many good things. I like to see kids playing golf, yeah, but I like to see them playing team sports, too. Because you have got to understand about winning and losing and that's a lot easier when you're playing team sports."

The son of a policeman who founded a force golf club, Harrington himself was a football goalkeeper well into his teens, when, he says, he realised that it was probably more fun to go off winning golf tournaments than to stand around in the rain picking balls out of the back of the net every weekend. So, brought up used to the requirements of a team dressing room, he revelled in last season's Ryder Cup.

"I think the Ryder Cup is almost unique in all sport, not just golf, because of the incredible intensity of that last day. It's all happening at the same time in 10 different places. Everything's happening all at once. To watch that is great, to play in it was just incredible."

And can the player enjoy it at the time?

"What I actually tried to do was go in with the attitude of enjoy it as long as possible. So many times in sport, you're thinking: 'Hmm, this is work, get down to it.' Well I set out with the determination to enjoy the tournament, I didn't do any practice in the week before. I went out just to have fun, bank it in the memory."

The question that is often asked of the Ryder Cup player is, after putting aside the individual rivalries for a week, does participation in the tournament alter the way he views the members of his team, who until they were assembled to take on the Americans, were the very rivals bent on stopping him earning as much as he could from the sport?

"Definitely, definitely," says Harrington. "Funnily enough the first one I played in more noticeably than this one. Even though we lost, it changed my relationship."

But, he insists, that doesn't mean the edge between the players goes.

"You know, the following week you'd meet up with the guys at a tournament and it was all hugs on the practice ground and a chat. The week after you'd get a handshake on the practice ground and a chat. The following week it was bit of a chat. Three, four weeks down the line, it's a nod. After that it's back to the usual, people just get on with their business. It certainly has an effect, deep down, you are bonded with these guys in a special and lasting way. But it doesn't affect the way you treat them on the course."

And what about the emotional legacy of the tournament? How hard is it to stop blubbing with pride and get back to playing golf for a living?

"Well I won the following week, so I must have done it quite well. It was a big high. But I think when it comes down to it, a lot depends on how your general preparation and fitness is. Fact is I'm pretty fit and have good routines which meant I could play the following week. Get back into it, get back to work."

It probably helped, too, that he has never touched a drop of alcohol in his life. Intriguingly, the way he can dismissively recall that he won a tournament the week after the Ryder Cup shows how much Harrington has progressed as a golfer. Three or so years ago, the memory of a victory would have been far less casually thrown into conversation.

Back then he was known as the golfer who always came second, the Paula Radcliffe of his sport. That was why the B&H debacle hurt so much: at last he had victory in his sight. But like the great British distance runner, he has made the transition in the past year to the top of the winners' podium and he is now far and away the leading golfer in Europe. And, he says, it didn't take very much to make the step up.

"I never got really stressed about being second. Not every time, but most of the time I came second there was a logical reason for it. So I took the attitude: 'right, I'm good enough to come second, I can see what's needed to make the step to first, let's do it.' I always felt I could get better and there's only one place to go if you improve from second, isn't there?"

Now he has got to number one, he adds, the work doesn't end.

"I heard this quote the other day which I think sums it up: there's plenty of room at the top, but there's nowhere to sit. You can't make yourself comfortable. If you feel like your swing is good, there's always other areas to the game, the short game, the mental side of things, there's so many intricacies and avenues in the game of golf you can never really master them."

And if he ever forgets the pain of failure that propelled him to the top, he can always pop round to his parents' house, he says, where he is confronted by another memory from the B&H every time he visits: the one from back in 1998 when he took 13 strokes on the par-five 17th.

"Of all the stuff that's in my parents' house, there's a few trophies and bits of glass and that, but there's no pictures of me winning trophies or anything like that. But there is a cutting of me from that 13 framed on the sideboard. It's a reminder that things can bite you in golf. You look back and it's a funny story now. It's pleasant, a bit of a laugh. Though I tell you one thing I regret about that," he smiles, pausing to recall his B&H past, "I signed the card for that round."