Harrington: US Copied Euros; What It Was Like to Play Against Tiger

Europe’s most recent Ryder Cup captain, Padraig Harrington, is just beginning to turn the page on the team loss to the US at Whistling Straits. After some reflection he noticed that the US team has started to “copy” what Europe has been doing, and he believes that’s one reason the Euros lost and the US won.

“Until somebody finds the next unknown, at the moment we don’t know what that is, but it’s hard to get an edge,” he said before playing in the Furyk & Friends PGA Tour Champions event. “Europe should be proud of the fact that we pushed the U.S. team to really work hard and explore every avenue to make themselves the best team. No longer can they just throw the balls up in the air and go out and play.”

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He also believes that having that weekend of practice two weeks prior to the final Sunday event helped the US team a great deal because they saw wind that was close to the wind during the competition. During the Ryder Cup week the wind was different on practice days than competition days, Harrington noted.

“Everything that we’ve tried to do over the years, they’re doing right down to, you know, like even with the stats,” he added. “They always try to play their weakest team against our best team so they’re trying to get their 1, 2, and 3 against our 2, 3 and 4, which is the smart way of getting the most results out of the format.”

"“Everything that we’ve tried to do over the years, they’re doing…” — Padraig Harrington"

Of course, since the pairings are not announced live, one team and then the other, as is done in the Presidents Cup, it’s a matter of guessing who will play first and who will play last. All the US had to do, though, was to look at who was sent out for Europe in recent Ryder Cups and then compare it to whoever the US sent out. Were they front-loading their best? Were they back-loading? Did they mix it up? Who was supposedly the closer?

While the European loss was hard on the entire team, most easily seen in Rory McIlroy’s tearful Sunday post round interview, it has often been the other way around in the last 30 years.

Harrington has seen the transformation first-hand since his rookie days in Europe and then the US, starting in 1996, the year that Tiger Woods won his first tournament, the Las Vegas Invitational, now the Shriners Children’s Open.

When Harrington turned professional Ernie Els, Retief Goosen, Tiger Woods and Colin Montgomerie were winning regularly.

“How could I compete against them? I watched them on TV,” he said he wondered. But he did. Not only that, he played through the career of Tiger Woods.

“During those years, I outscored him in the rounds that I actually played with him, which I don’t think anybody else did that in a tournament,” Harrington said about the stiff competition at the time.

“People will never understand how good Tiger was,” Harrington said. “It was really impressive when somebody pushed him because all of a sudden he lifted.”

Harrington said when he went head-to-head with Woods, he had a strategy.

“You wanted to take the lead with two holes to go, and maybe he didn’t have enough time to catch you back,” he explained. “Just us hang in there and just hopefully you’ll just get an opportunity right at the end, and there will be no chance ( for Woods to catch up).”

He did not want to take the lead with five holes to go because that gave Woods too many holes. He called it a don’t poke the bear philosophy.

As good as Woods was in his prime, for Harrington, things really changed again, mentally and physically, when Rory McIlroy came along and dominated in June of 2011 winning the U.S. Open by 12 strokes.

“How could you beat him at Congressional? How could you compete against that? It was such a leap from what we had been seeing,” he explained.

He compared the difference to playing on the PGA Tour where competition is stiff, versus playing an Irish Club Pro event, where he is confident that he could be in the hunt in the final round.

“Against the better players, you don’t feel like you can make any errors, any mistakes,” he added.

That transformation in the McIlroy period put his golf game under stress because he couldn’t hope to beat McIlroy unless every part of his game was perfect, and that’s just too hard to do. It’s an unrealistic expectation.

“The game jumped a lot with Rory, and it was hard to follow,” Harrington admitted.

Now Harrington is stepping into another unknown, dipping his toe into the PGA Tour Champions circuit at the Constellation Furyk & Friends tournament. He is wondering if it will make him sharper, making him better at PGA Tour events, or convince him that he can’t go back to play against the younger guys.

Next. 2021 Ryder Cup: Winners and Losers from Whistling Straits. dark

“Obviously going back and playing against a substantially tougher golf course setup, that could be difficult once you’ve gone here,” he added. “Maybe you can never go back, I’m just not sure. It’s still something I’m exploring.”

Regardless of which tour he plays, Harrington will continue to have fans in the U.S. because there are so many Irish-Americans sprinkled across the country. The current count is about 32 million, just under 10 percent of the population.

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