Padraig Harrington
Padraig Harrington (born August 31, 1971, Dublin, Ireland) is an Irish professional golfer who won two British Open championships (2007 and 2008) and a Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) Championship (2008).
(Read Padraig Harrington’s Britannica entry on the PGA Championship.)
Harrington began golfing with his family at age five. As an amateur, he made three appearances (1991, 1993, and 1995) for Great Britain and Ireland’s matches against the United States in the Walker Cup. Harrington completed an accountancy degree before turning professional in 1995 at the relatively late age of 24. He had a quick start, finishing three times in the top 10 in his first eight professional tournaments and winning his ninth start, the Spanish Open in Madrid, at the beginning of the 1996 European Tour season.
Harrington (with partner Paul McGinley) secured victory for Ireland in the World Cup the following year, and he made his Ryder Cup debut in 1999. His success continued into the 21st century; he was part of four Ryder Cup-winning teams (2002, 2004, 2006, and 2010) and had his first two victories on the PGA Tour in 2005. In 2006 Harrington won the Order of Merit as the European Tour’s top money winner for the first time. In May 2007 he became the first home player since 1982 to win the Irish Open, and two months later he won his first British Open, at Carnoustie, Scotland. In so doing, Harrington became the first Irishman to win a major championship since Fred Daly in 1947, and—since Daly was from Northern Ireland—the first major winner from the Republic of Ireland. Harrington was named the 2007 European Tour Golfer of the Year.
Harrington’s impressive play continued in 2008 as he defended his Open title (becoming the first European to do so in more than a century) and won his first PGA Championship. His wins gave him three victories in the six major tournaments leading up to and including the 2008 PGA, an impressive stretch of dominance matched in the previous 35 years only by Tom Watson and Tiger Woods. Harrington was both the PGA Player of the Year and the European Tour Golfer of the Year in 2008.
In the ensuing years, however, Harrington struggled, and he did not claim another official PGA Tour event until 2015, when he won the Honda Classic. The following year he won the Portugal Masters, his first win on the European Tour since 2008. Harrington competed at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where golf made its return after having been absent from the Games for more than a century, but he failed to win a medal.