Harrington won Dundalk’s Scratch Cup before joining the ranks of paid golf

Pádraig Harrington was 23 when he won the Dundalk Scratch Cup, a competition first contested in 1963. The year was 1995, and by then the Dubliner was well established in the amateur ranks.

Before that it seemed he was destined for a career in Gaelic football, and maybe hurling. He had the pedigree to be good on the football field.

His father, Paddy, played with Cork, and appeared in two All-Ireland finals. The second of them was against Louth in 1957, when he had a young Frank Lynch as his marker. The result was the same as the year before when Galway were in opposition – defeat for the Rebels.

Junior played in Croke Park at schools’ level, but didn’t fare all too well. The Stackstown golf course was close to where he lived, and soon he was concentrating on trying to get a small white ball into the hole rather than a plastic one over the bar.

Harrington had Dan Coyle to contend with when he drove off at Blackrock. Another with a solid sporting background – his grandfather of the same name competed for Ireland at the 1948 London Olympics – Coyle caused a sensation four years earlier, when, as a 16-year-old he became the first local winner of the Scratch Cup, carding a two-round total of 147 to pip Damien McGrane, who, at the time, was one of the longest hitters in the game.

The 1995 renewal developed into a shoot-out between Harrington and the double-seeking Coyle. It ended with the visitor winning by just one stroke, his rounds of 72 and 73, giving him a 145 total.

Harrington had made it on the Walker Cup team before turning professional in 1997. What happened after that is part of Irish sporting folklore.

A first win in the British Open at Carnoustie in 2007 was followed by a second twelve months later, this one at Royal Birkdale, and when in the same year he added the US PGA title, he was firmly established as the country’s greatest.

It’s still vivid in the memory, the look he gave Sergio Garcia as they crossed paths in the dying holes of the 2007 Open. There was no “How’s it going?”, just a Garcia straight face and a Harrington glare, the latter betraying his normal jaunty, smiling self.

They finished level after 72 holes, and Harrington won the four-hole play-off, the first Irishman to win the title in 60 years. There were no further Grand Slam wins after that, just several on the PGA Tour and lots of representative honours.

He played on six Ryder Cup teams, and in 2021 captained the European team at Whistling Straits, an outing that wouldn’t provide him with his happiest of memories.

Harrington is not out of place in golf’s Hall of Fame, to which he was inducted a fortnight ago. He joins other Irishmen, Christy O’Conner, senior, and Joe Carr.

Interestingly, this is not Harrington’s first time to follow Carr. Just under 30 years before Harrington won it, Carr, whose place among the greats of amateur golf can’t be disputed, won Dundalk’s Scratch Cup for the first time, in 1966, and doubled up the following year.