It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy

The newspapers were full of the kind of stuff that might make you want to reach for the cyanide. People were being washed out of their homes in parts of England. Saturday afternoon: rain was teeming down at a time when I’d normally be on a football pitch.

We were grappling with the more tortuous travails of getting a magazine onto the streets. And the horrible evidence in the Rachel O’Reilly murder case was being chewed over by every second person you’d meet in the street. Everything seemed a little upside down, as a matter of fact – to bowdlerise the bard – the wheels seemed to be coming off…
Would I want to write about Joe O’Reilly? It’s hard to get something like that out of your head. We read horror stories to beat the band. Murder is a staple element in so much of the fiction that we consume, whether through books, television or movies. Shit, The Sopranos had just finished on Thursday night, after a mini-bloodbath in the last two episodes and you’d have to have been mad not to love it.
But it’s different when it’s the real thing. When it’s a guy you might have known, who’s murdered his wife, in the most cold-blooded and calculating way. One thought that recurred between sub-edits: how could he have been so stupid, to think that he’d get away with it? And anyway, even if he had – how could he ever have lived with the horrible reality, with the memory of the bludgeoning, of the violence, of the agonies he’d inflicted?
Afterwards, the word was that he’d started to come apart at the seams. But he didn’t break. He had behaved in the most bizarre and twisted way, demonstrating to all comers in the house just how the murderer – probably, he said – did it. He acted these scenes out graphically. Got down on his knees and pounched the floor by way of demonstration. Sad. Stupid. Sick. But not so far gone that he wilted under questioning. Maybe he had convinced himself that he didn’t do it. That it was all a dream, and that there had indeed been someone else.
The guilty verdict was announced on Saturday and the Sunday papers were full of the story. They had to be. But the new day brought another current into play. Thinking about what would occupy these column inches I had never considered that golf would figure. But as the day wore on, and I felt less and less like trawling through the murk of Joe O’Reilly’s gruesome crime, I was being reeled in by another, much more pleasurable kind of story.
Who would I write about: Joe O’Reilly or Padraig Harrington?
There was a time when golf might have been considered the antithesis of a rock’n’roll sport, but that was when it was based around exclusive clubs that turned scruffs away rather than accepting their green fees. But in recent years, golf has been democratised hugely by the opening of pay to play courses – first in the US and more recently on this side of the Atlantic. Iggy Pop plays. So does Alice Coopper. Even Bob Dylan is rumoured to have taken up a pitching wedge in anger.
As a kid I used to climb over the back walls into courses around Rathfarnham where I lived and knock up a good score. But nowadays, I don’t have time to indulge. In fact I don’t even have time to follow what happens on the pro tour. But I do know this much: in Paul McGinley and Padraig Harrington, both of whom were also from Rathfarnham, Ireland has produced two of the most unasuming, decent, down-to-earth and likeable professional sportsmen in the world right now. So there was something special about the dawning realisation that – come Sunday afternoon – Harrington was, finally, seriously in contention for the British Open title.
There are times when, even as a spectator, sport can break your heart. As a player, how much more torrid, more draining, must the emotional roller coaster t the highest level be? Padraig Harrington has been there or thereabouts before in pursuit of one of golf’s major titles. But he has always stopped just short of what is considered to be the ultimate golfing glory.
In many ways the British Open is the Holy Grail. It is the oldest of the Majors and is widely regarded as thte biggest and the best. The yanks might well dispute this – but what of it? They can’t win every argument, sporting or otherwise.
Consider what it takes to get to the level of brilliance where you can ping the ball the best part of three hundred yards with one club. A hundred and thirty with the next. And land twenty or thirty feet from a hole of a few inches diameter. Par or a birdie? And then to do that consistently over not just 18 consecutive holes, but 72. Taking the prevailing conditions into account: the wind as it pushes the ball to the left on one hole, to the right on another (you want to hit this shot low, the next one high); the rain as it changes the nature of the spin required or the amount of carry in the ball (you want ot avoid the water); the layout of the course that demands a right fade in one tight spot, a left in another – and so on. It is an extraordinary skill, requiring fantastic precision and consistency.
Coming into those final holes, as Sergio Garcia and Padraig Harrington – although playing in different pairs – effectively went head to head, the pressure on both golfers was immense. Watching the drama unfold – in the way that the great sporting occasions so often do – offered its own remarkable insight into what it is to be human. How must Harrington have felt when his second shot on the 18th bounced across the bridge only to scutter into the Barry Burn, as the legendary water trap in Carnoustie is named?
And then when he did it again, it must have seemed like the Gods were against him – if any Gods existed (which of course at that moment he must have known they don’t)! To the observer, it became clear in that extraordinary moment that it is possible to be both great and fallible. But the drama was not done. Harrrington put it up to his opponent when he got up and down in two after that second near catastrophic error. And, as it transpired, Garcia too had a mistake left in him.
And then to the play-off, Harrington beginning with a birdie at the first of the four holes against a bogey for Garcia. Two up. It would have been easy to blow that lead but his nerve held. After a magnificent second shot, he missed an easy birdie putt on the penultimate hole that would have sealed it. Then he took the risk of playing the 18th conservatively, accepting a safe bogey – and with Garcia just failing to make the birdie, the cup was his.
The thing was this: when you saw the smile on his face, and his kid run to him on the green, and the sheer sense of joy that enveloped the place, well, you had to feel – it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. That was what I wanted to write about: the triumph of someone genuinely good against the odds. The making of a sporting legend. An occasion to lift the human spirit. A moment of uncomplicated light, against the prevailing…
Shit, I’d better get started…