Padraig Harrington still tortured by doubts ahead of Honda Classic

By Oliver Brown Published: 7:55PM GMT 03 March 2010

Thinking things over: Padraig Harrington stays a tortured essence forward of this week"s Honda Classic in south Florida Photo: AP

The rest and decrease that he was ostensible to have enjoyed at home in Dublin has since approach to a informed torture about how majority appropriate to fireproof his diversion for the season"s initial vital test, at subsequent month"s Masters. "It"s tough to close my mind down at the moment," he admitted.

No volume of Irish cajolery can costume the two-time Open champion"s standing as one of the game"s some-more tortured souls, that helps insist because he leans so majority on the recommendation of Bob Rotella, the Virginian sports clergyman well known to his pupils usually as "Doc". Rotella is by his star man"s side in Palm Beach Gardens, it seems, to try to ease him down.

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"At what theatre do you certitude the changes and at what theatre do you keep operative on the changes?" Harrington asked, in the demeanour of one uncertain as to what all his off-season tinkering had achieved. It is an anguished state of mind, that contributed without delay to the year-long unemployment that he endured after winning the US PGA in 2008.

"You will regularly see peaks and troughs," Harrington said. "When I have success I see at that and go and work on my swing." Usually, a tray is the consequence.

He cannot predict, even as a former leader of the Honda at Mirasol five years ago, how his diversion will cope over the drainingly challenging blueprint at PGA National. "There are a lot of severely challenging holes out there. It"s one of the toughest unchanging courses of the year. But if you don"t similar to this course, your diversion isn"t great enough."

It has to be asked how majority of Harrington"s extraordinary mindset, at times alarmingly self-doubting and at others serenely self-assured, owes to Rotella, the writer of such titles as Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect. Golf, indeed, is scandalous for giving the practitioners far as well majority time to think an outcome on that "Doc" has launched an complete industry.

The complaint is that a little of Rotella"s former protgs do not suggest Harrington the majority moving template.

David Duval was one, a man who in his musclebound, shades-wearing resplendence of a decade ago became a critical challenger to Tiger Woods and an essence of his mentor"s truth of "living in the moment". Then, after his initial and usually vital delight at the 2001 Open, he detected that he longed for a family, longed for some-more than golf and his diversion collapsed.

Another was Ian Baker-Finch, the Australian who won the Open in 1991 and 6 years after shot 92 in his initial round.

But Harrington assured: "The some-more rival rounds of golf I fool around the some-more still my mind gets."

Against this week"s challenging competition, led by Lee Westwood, Ian Poulter and Rory McIlroy, he will have to goal that he is right.