One of the good guys
As a youngster, football, rather than golf, was my game. I wasn’t introduced to what I now consider to be the real ‘beautiful game’ until my mid-teens, and although golf rapidly made its way past basketball, rugby and cricket to second place in the pecking order, football still held sway for a long time.
For a number of years, I harboured ambitions to play football for a living. However, when I stopped growing vertically and started to expand width-ways, I knew deep down I needed to adjust my career thinking. If I couldn’t play football for a living, I figured writing about it was the next best thing, and so I dipped my toe in the world of work as a football journalist.
At first it was fun getting to meet and interview famous footballers. However, I quickly began to realise that, save for the odd erudite footballer, professionals’ talents lay in kicking a bag of wind around and not talking about how they did it.
When I later became a golf writer and started to spend time talking to tour pros, I could hardly believe my luck. Here was a group of sportsmen who, given an engaging set of questions, would give you expansive answers and opinions.
The game of golf is blessed with great talkers and arguably the best of them all is Padraig Harrington. It’s a long-standing joke in the Golf Monthly offices that if you get to interview the Irishman, you’d better make sure your first question is your best one as his answer is likely to be so thoughtful, well-rounded and extensive you might not get to ask a second! In this issue we are lucky enough to have not one but two interviews with Harrington.
The two pieces offer a fantastic insight into his forthcoming Ryder Cup captaincy and also his philosophy around strategy and the mental game. The skills, techniques and processes around how to think more effectively on the course are something all elite golfers do well and it’s an area of the game in which I believe ordinary golfers can make the biggest tangible improvements.
Alongside Harrington we have assembled an elite cast to dispense their wisdom on the mental game and strategy, including six-time Major winner Sir Nick Faldo, one of the world’s best caddies, Billy Foster, and revered performance coach Dave Alred.
I hope you enjoy reading these features and putting into play some of the advice within them. If you do, I’d be confident you’ll start to shoot lower scores.