An old story. At the British Open in 2007 Padraig Harrington walked towards the 18th green on Sunday, needing to get up and down for an emergency double-bogey six. No Irish player had captured one of golf’s Majors in 60 years, and standing on the last tee, nursing a one-shot lead, Harrington had the tournament in his grasp.
Then he lost control, as if the steering column had just snapped, and he was left holding a wheel from a circus clown routine. The Barry Burn, the stream that snakes up the closing hole at Carnoustie, claimed his ball not once, but twice. As he walked up the fairway in a daze, his caddie Ronan Flood assumed remote access to Harrington’s thoughts. “One shot at a time,” he said to him. “You’re the best chipper and putter in the world.”
He repeated those two phrases over and over, without a response from Harrington, or a deviation in the patter. To stay in the tournament he had to get down in two. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more in the zone in my life than I was for that chip shot,” Harrington said years later.
Just for those couple of minutes the self-talk that Harrington has cultivated for most of his professional life had been outsourced. Flood, though, was only reinforcing what Harrington already believed. He would have been intimate with Harrington’s convictions: he was certain he would win a Major. The long losing record of Irish golfers in the game’s biggest events, or Harrington’s near-misses over the years, were no threat to that belief.
It was like that famous scene from Indiana Jones where, according to the map that was leading him to the Holy Grail, Indiana must cross an invisible bridge; the only way for the bridge to materialise is to step out into what appears to be a void. Before he made that leap Harrington was absolutely convinced about the bridge.
In Irish sport at that time Harrington was still unusual. Generations of talented Irish sports people had been familiar with the void but not the bridge. Failure waited for them at the precipice, not able to take the next step.
That changed. When you look around the wild and varied landscape of Irish sport now, what do you see? Athletes who are not afraid to win.
In the same summer that Harrington made his breakthrough at Carnoustie, the Irish rugby team were trying to convince themselves they could win the World Cup in France. At a training camp in Poland the players were given a day-by-day itinerary for the tournament that didn’t account for their movements beyond the quarter-final. No Irish team had progressed beyond that stage in a World Cup, but that wasn’t the point. The players had already declared to each other that their goal was to win the tournament. Then the itinerary landed. In a team meeting Shane Horgan reared up.
In the event they flopped. Were they good enough to win it? Probably not, but that wasn’t the point either. Were they convinced they could do it? Not all of them. Not enough of them. So, what about now? Could you imagine the current Irish squad being presented with a World Cup itinerary that stopped at the quarter-final? You might harbour doubts that they can win the World Cup next autumn; they don’t.
The change in outlook among Irish athletes has been so fundamental and so profound in the last 15 or 20 years that we are no longer staggered by any outcome, in any field: boxing, rowing, rugby, horse racing, gymnastics, golf, athletics, women’s football, to name just the sports that moved the dial in the last year or so. I may have forgotten something; you’ll remind me.
The old and beloved “give it a lash” mentality in Irish sport is dead. Maybe it worked for Mick Doyle’s Irish rugby team in the mid-1980s and Jack Charlton’s football teams that followed soon after, but if that attitude was empowering it was also limiting. A certain permission to fail was built-in. It was like getting a Covid jab: you might still contract a bout of losing, but with the “give it a lash” vaccine it won’t feel so bad.
So, Seamus Power can climb from 459th in golf’s world rankings to the top of the PGA Tour’s money list in about 18 months, and while everyone can see the scale of his achievement nobody is incredulous at the sight of an Irish sports person doing something astonishing on a world stage.
Rhys McClenaghan is another story. When he won gold at the World Gymnastics Championships last weekend it triggered a memory of something he said in the mixed zone after he bombed out in the Olympic final in Tokyo 15 months ago. He congratulated the athletes who had beaten him to the medals, but that was the extent of his deference.
“I’m not looking at those guys,” he said. “I can’t learn from them either. I know my execution is better, and that’s not said in a bitter way at all. I respect them, they’re on the podium right now, for God’s sake. What I need to do is go back to the gym, work with my coach even closer, and figure out a routine that will put me miles ahead of the rest of the field.
“I’m thinking about being the greatest of all time. I didn’t show that today, but I’m hoping that in the future, that’ll be the case.”
Between Tokyo in the summer of 2021 and Liverpool last weekend, how many times did McClenaghan visualise the performance he would give to win the gold medal? Countless thousands. If he was afraid of failing again how could he have succeeded? In his mind all he saw was the bridge.
A couple of years ago Harrington was interviewed by Tommy Tiernan on his RTÉ chat show, and he said something that cut straight to the heart of his success. “Your subconscious mind has no ability to reason,” he said. “It believes whatever it’s told. If I’m doing a talk to kids the first thing I say is, ‘be careful what you tell yourself’.”
In the history of Irish sport that dialogue has never been more fruitful than it is now.
