Schupak: Padraig Harrington deserved better, but you can’t keep a good man down

Padraig Harrington won’t be penning a best-selling tell-all book about his Ryder Cup captaincy. That’s the thing with the Ryder Cup – if you win, you’re a legend, but if you lose you’re a goat. Or as Harrington phrased it, “You win, you’re a hero. You lose, you’re a zero. That’s the way it is. You know that going into it, so you have to take responsibility.”

Harrington deserved better than going down as the losing Captain in the most lopsided defeat for the Blue and Gold in the modern era, a 19-9 defeat at Whistling Straits that concluded on Sept. 26. He deserved better than Rory McIlroy not earning a point until Sunday’s singles and needing to sit his first session at a Ryder Cup due to poor form. To hear his players tell it, Harrington did everything to put his 12-man team in the best position to perform; they just didn’t deliver.

“I hope I don’t read the papers and hear a lot of stuff that will upset me,” Ian Poulter said in the aftermath of Europe’s defeat as he waxed rhapsodically about all the good things Harrington had done to create the proper team vibe.

It really is one of sport’s most thankless jobs. Jim Furyk was standing with U.S. Captain Steve Stricker, fellow assistant captain Davis Love and Harrington when word came over their headsets that the U.S. had clinched victory. Harrington turned to Furyk and Love, who both suffered defeats as the captain of the U.S. side (though Love got a second bite at the apple and experienced victory in 2016), and said, “You know how I feel, don’t you?”

Indeed, they do. Furyk didn’t mince words when discussing how being the losing captain in 2018 in France has scarred him.

“It will always eat at me,” he said. “My favorite question is, Would you have done anything different? I laugh. How stupid would I have to be to go, no, I’d do it the same way. Of course, I’d do things differently.”

Enough time has passed for Furyk to reflect on how the loss affected him.

“For the first I’ll say year, year and a half after France, there wasn’t a week or a day that in my mind I wasn’t thinking this is what I would have done, this is what I would have change, how could I have worked it?” he said.

Furyk packed away all that heavy baggage from Paris into the dark recesses of his memory bank, but they all came flooding back at Whistling Straits.

Harrington is just beginning to deal with the disappointment. For now, he’s showing a brave face. He “made sure to get into the swing of it” and enjoyed the after-party at the Ryder Cup on Sunday night.

“There was a family party where we had dueling pianos, which was a very mature party and very nice, people singing and dancing that finished at midnight,” he said. “Then I came back to the player party, which was definitely young people with more mayhem. You could distinctly see the difference between the two age groups.”

Harrington is not one for second-guessing. Unlike Furyk, he said he wouldn’t do anything differently and he’s quick to downplay the trendy belief that the tide has turned in this biennial battle in favor of Team USA.

“The biggest problem we have in Europe is we’ve really innovated over the last 20 years. The U.S. have just copied us. They do everything we do. Until somebody finds the next unknown, at the moment we don’t know what that is, but it’s hard to get an edge,” he said. “The U.S. team was very strong on home ground, but they had everything. They had everything that Europe has done over the years, they’ve learned from it, and Europe should be proud of the fact that, as I said, we pushed the U.S. team to really work hard and explore every avenue to make themself the best team. No longer can they just throw the balls up in the air and go out and play.”

“Can’t second guess our performance,” he added. “Just U.S. did a great job all the way through and they got their stats right, they got everything like that in terms of their picking, you know. Everything they did was spot on what they learned from us.”

But if the U.S. has copied Europe so well and has such a young nucleus of world-beaters to implement it, doesn’t that mean Europe needs to reinvent itself?

“No,” Harrington said. “It needs to accept that there are ebbs and flows. In the three years since the last Cup, the U.S. has come here (holding his right-hand flat and at eye level) and we were on a peak at that stage and we’ve come down. In two years’ time, all it takes is a little bit from us (raising his hand) and a little bit from the U.S. (lowering his hand) and we’re back on level terms. No panicking in Europe; it shouldn’t change a thing. Just keep doing what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years.”

Harrington is going to keep doing what he’s done and chase that little white ball right on to the PGA Tour Champions.