The Trib (57 page)

‘At the end of the day, the players know the game is theirs because they play it. Everything that happens is a decision. When to go, when to stay, when to risk it, when to tighten it up. Those decisions are all made on the field and they're made by the players. And I really do think that the coach's role is overrated. I'm not just saying that. We give them what guidance we can. But I've never won a game as a coach – the teams have won them.'

The future is his to do with what he pleases. A couple more years at Leinster and then home, you'd have thought. And it's not especially difficult to see him in charge of an international side some day. Then again, he could ditch it all and take over the world with his fashion empire. With Cheika, he rarely knows himself what's next, so there's no chance of you knowing either.

12 July 2009

Larne Harbour, Co Antrim

Conditions: Calm, mild, slightly overcast

M
idday Monday at Larne Port and the breakfast rush is over at Pinky Moon's Pitstop. Which, of course, doesn't for a minute mean that breakfast is over. Not bloody likely, hi. This part of the north Antrim coast was built on the Ulster fry (£6.95) and the filled soda (£3.75) and the tea (£1.40) and the buttered bread (£0.90) and nobody checks their watch before ordering. But the lunchtime sailing to Cairnryan doesn't have the footfall of the early morning crossings so the place is quieter now and the chap selling the plastic leprechauns and Irish coffee mugs in the newsagents across the hall doesn't have to look up from his
Telegraph
very often.

Graeme McDowell does this every year in early July. Not the fry bit, just the ferry bit. The week of the Scottish Open, he loads up the Range Rover on the Monday, drives the hour from Portrush to Larne, rolls onto P&O's finest for an hour and hey presto – he has his own car in the drive for a fortnight. He has his clubs in the boot so he doesn't have to spend an hour and a couple of hundred quid dragging them through an airport – even twenty-nine-year-old multi-millionaires resent lining the anti-golfer pockets of Ryanair and Easyjet at this point – and better yet, he can live out the next two weeks without being a slave to the rhythms of the tour. Logistics become a whole lot simpler when you're not relying on a courtesy car timetable.

Today, he has Ricky Elliott riding shotgun. Now, Ricky Elliott has a lot to answer for. He and McDowell more or less grew up together and were by a distance the two best young golfers in Portrush. When McDowell won the Ulster Boys' title in 1996, it was Elliott's title from the previous year that he assumed. When McDowell ignored the advice of the GUI and set about chasing golf scholarships at American colleges in 1999, it was because Elliott was emailing him from the University of Toldeo in Ohio, telling him to get on a plane. And when McDowell was looking for an American base in which to settle down for the half the year every year, it was Elliott who fixed him up with contacts in Lake Nona in Florida, home now to more pro golfers than a Learjet sales convention.

But most of all and worst of all, McDowell blames Elliott for the accent. The tortured Lough Neagh/South Beach/All Points In Between hybrid that he long ago gave up trying to shake. Meanwhile Elliott, who's lived in the US for over a decade now, still sounds like he should be racing in the North West 200. McDowell reckons his mate cheated because he spent the first few years over there living in a house with Irish lads while McDowell got stuck down in Alabama and found himself crashing face first into a language barrier.

‘I remember the first day I was there,' he says, ‘I just couldn't get over the accent. It was so Deep South, real ‘Y'awll come back now, y'hear?' stuff. The very first day, I went into Subway and tried to order a sandwich from this old coloured lady, a real southerner. And she just didn't have a clue what I was saying. So I basically said to myself that something was going to have to change or else I'd be repeating myself for the rest of my life. I guess that's what happened and it's stuck ever since. I came home after my first year there with a mid-Atlantic twang. It's terrible, absolutely terrible. I get a lot of abuse for it and rightly so. But you know, if that's the worst thing I get abuse about I can live with it.'

Elliott didn't manage as stellar a college career as his young friend – then again, nobody else in America did either as, in his final year at UAB, McDowell beat Lucas Glover, Camillo Villegas, Oliver Wilson and Hunter Mahan to the Golfer of the Year award – but he makes a very respectable living now at the golf facility out in Lake Nona. Come summertime though, it's too hot to play golf in Florida so for the next three weeks he'll caddie for the Dutch player Maarten LaFaber. Once we reach Cairnryan, he and McDowell are off up the road to Turnberry on a recce. Buddies hitting balls, friends on a mission.

Irish Sea, Larne to Cairnryan shipping lane

Conditions: Perfect, still, sunny

If this all seems very loose and free and easy, it's only because McDowell has worked so diligently to make it so. He tells the story of his first ever British Open now just to hear out loud how absurd it all was. It was 2004 and it was Troon and as they say up around where he's from, he didn't know what end of him was up. He didn't want to leave anything to chance so he had his whole team there. Swing coach, mind coach, fitness coach, agent, girlfriend, family, girlfriend's family, mates, mates of mates and caddie. So many people, he forgot himself. Rented a three-bedroomed house and had eight people living in it for the week.

‘I was running around like an eejit. It was just chaos. Missed the cut comfortably. I remember walking away from that week just kicking myself for getting so caught up in everything. I didn't get my head around it at all.'

Bet you don't regret it now though?

‘No, not at all. It was my first major and it was so exciting. The golf course didn't suit me because my technique wasn't very good back then at all. The first nine holes went all the way out to the ocean and were very much left-to-right orientated, with the wind hard off the right. I was definitely a drawer of the golf ball and couldn't spell fade back then, never mind hit one. So it was a very difficult week, along with the circus that surrounded it. But I learned so much from it.'

From there to here in just five years. He's finished in the top twenty at each of the last four majors; Phil Mickelson is the only other player in the world who can say that. He was a revelation at the Ryder Cup last September, a weekend he'd thought about and worked towards every day for the previous eighteen months. He's earned well over €5 million here and in the States, won four times on tour and is long established inside the world's top fifty. The life he's carved out for himself is all he could hope for, lacking only the adornment now of a career week. He'll have the family there alright and the Horizon Sports reps who've made such a difference to him over the past two years but that'll be about it.

‘Tee to green, I know I'm good enough to win a major,' he says. ‘I know that. But my short game needs to constantly improve. My putting has got better and now the short irons have to come along as well. Inside 100 yards, I have to be getting up and down most of the time instead of some of the time. Look at Mickelson, look at Tiger, look at Harrington. Inside 100 yards, bang – down in two. The thing with majors is that most of the time – Bethpage was a bit of an exception because of how soft it became with the rain – but most of the time, the greens are just so hard to hit. The greens are firm and fiddly and you're scrambling all the time.

‘What the majors do is simplify where your weaknesses are. For me over the past few majors, it's been my short game. No question. At Oakmont last year, I was there or thereabouts going into the last two rounds and when I sat down and reflected on Sunday night I knew that my short game just wasn't good enough. As the greens got firmer, faster and tougher, I wasn't able to scramble well enough. Same with Birkdale last year, where I shot an eighty on the Saturday to take myself completely out of the picture after leading on the Thursday night.'

Four top-twenties in a row but not one top-ten. Launchpad or glass ceiling? That is the question.

Cairnryan Port, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland

Conditions: Cloudy, light wind, rain on the way

‘Sorry Graeme, could I trouble you for an autograph?' interjects one of the P&O staff. As he's doing the needful, the chap mentions that Rory McIlroy was on the crossing this morning.

‘Some motor he has, eh?' says P&O guy.

‘Why, which one was he driving? He didn't take the Porsche did he?' asks McDowell with a smile.

‘Nah, the Audi. What are you driving yourself?' asks P&O guy.

‘Ah, just the Range Rover,' says McDowell. P&O guy almost shrugs as he walks away.

He can't remember when he first heard McIlroy's name but he has no trouble pinpointing the first time he did a double take. It would have been this week five years ago and he was in Loch Lomond when somebody told him that this McIlroy kid had shot 61 around Royal Portrush, a course McDowell could draw with his eyes closed. ‘I remember it clearly,' he says. ‘I went, ‘Hang on,
what?
He shot what?''

It was a couple of years before they played together for the first time, in a practice round before the Dunhill Links in 2007. McIlroy had him beaten by the fifteenth. Now they eat together, play together, travel together when they can. They slag each other constantly and rely on each other to find a way to see whatever United match is on, wherever they are in the world. McDowell is fascinated to watch his young friend grow up and even now is constantly amazed at what he can do. It's not a big-brother-little-brother thing though, at least not any more.

‘Maybe a year ago I would have felt a bit like that, a bit protective of him you know? But there's no need any more. He knows the ropes better than me at this stage. I'm ten years older than him but that means nothing. I have nothing to teach him either on or off the golf course. We're very close friends now.

‘He's after going on a bit of a spending spree with property and cars over the past while and yet you just know from talking to him that he's such a well-grounded kid. But I think that's an Irish thing too. Nobody lets you get too carried away with yourself here and it's one of the things I love about home more than anything. We don't lose the run of ourselves. When I'm in Portrush, I get treated the same now as when I was fifteen years old.'

He'll go back there on Tuesday to watch his brother Gary play in the North of Ireland. He'll stick the clubs in the boot and head off across the water again and when he's done, he'll probably fit in nine holes just to keep his eye in. Then he'll be ready for whatever Turnberry has for him, wind, rain, whatever.

‘Patience is a huge part of it when it comes to majors. You have to learn to reset yourself and realise very early on the twenty-under-par isn't going to win, or rather that twenty-under-par will win by fifteen shots if you shoot it. You're back to par being a good score and that's tough to get used to when you're coming off normal tour events where you're expecting to shoot in the mid-sixties a couple of rounds a week. So you have to hit the reset button and not panic when you drop a shot or even when you drop two back-to-back. I think I've learned how to do that now. I know I have.'

And with that, the tannoy tells us we're coming into dock so he and Elliott get up and head below deck. Happy the man whose ship is about to come in.

Eddie O'Sullivan got paid for what he caught in his uncles' fishing business as a kid. How times have changed as he gets a four-year contract as a net gain for his empty World Cup trawl.

7 October 2007

I
n an interview about a year ago, Eddie O'Sullivan told of his youth down in West Cork and the fish business his uncles used to run in that part of the world. There he'd be during the summer holidays, young Eddie, out fishing at all hours of the day and night in order to earn a few bob. ‘You got paid for what you caught,' he stated. ‘If you caught nothing, you got paid nothing.' How times have changed.