Atta Buy, Paddy!

Congrats to distant relative* Padraig Harrington on winning the 2007 British Open, making him the just second Irishman and the first in 60 years to win the Open. He avoided a disastrous replay of the famed Jean Van de Velde collapse of 1999 when he landed in the same water on the same hole (same course) twice but managed to make it into a playoff, where he wisely laid up on his next chance at the hole and was able to hit a bogey putt to clinch the championship. It doesn't matter how you got there, Padraig. You got there in less strokes than everyone else. Well played.



* I was down at The Field a couple months ago trying to sell the painting of Uncle Den and Aunt Maggie and the owner Gerry asked me what "your man's" name is and where it was from. I told him Den and it was from a pub in Castletownbere. He asked what the last name was and his eyes lit up when I said Harrington. He said that he looked like Padraig Harrington, and that Padraig was born in Dublin but his father Patrick Harrington was from Castletownbere. (Gerry's a Cork man and took pride in that - "I'm from Kinsale, but my mother's from Clonakilty") He said he thought we were probably related down the line. He wasn't just "pulling the piss", as Padraig confirms in this interview. According to this article, Paddy Sr. left Castletownbere in 1957 but his brother Tadg still lived on the island in 1999. My mother tells me that he had a farm next to one of our relatives and most Harringtons come from Casteltownbere at some point down the line. So you could say he's a distant relative. Though you'd never know it from my golf game.