Monday, March 8th, 2010 
scott
Harrington excited about St Andrews challenge
Just a few short months before the 150th anniversary of the Open, three-time major winner Padraig Harrington talks about why he can't wait for a return to St Andrews
Padraig, what is so special about St Andrews as a stage for golf?
The first time I saw it, like a lot of the guys, my hair good up on the back of my neck. Then you get out and play the golf course, and what really happens with St Andrews is you grow to love it, because it changes every day. That's what's impressive about it. It's St Andrews and you love the whole feeling and the heritage, as I said, the hair stands up on the back of your neck, it's all so exciting.
Tell us more about playing the Old Course itself, what makes it so fitting for the game's greatest tournament?
Every day you play that golf course, something happens, something new about it, something is thrown up, and you can have one of the easiest holes in the world with a certain pin position. And then the following day... it just could be the toughest hole.
Why do some people not find it so appealing immediately?
I think the more you play St Andrews, the more you appreciate it. It might give you something one day or some holes might give you something, but there's an awful lot of holes that are there that can catch you out if they want to and I think that's what's fascinating about it is the variability of the golf course; the fact that every day, there's a new challenge and it very rarely plays the same.
You can get some absolutely manicured beautiful golf courses, and you know, you'll hit the same drive and 7-iron into the 14th every day. Just doesn't happen at St Andrews. It just doesn't happen.
And what about it makes the course so difficult given that little has changed in it over centuries?
With the size of the greens, the different pin positions, the changing winds, getting a good bounce or a bad bounce, every hole has something about it. I think some players like the idea of a golf course that is never changing. And you know guys can go out in the morning and have one downwind and turn around and the second nine is downwind, as well, and other players will get it into the wind both times. Some guy will say he drove one par-4 and the next guy will say, 'I was hitting 6-iron in there'.
Can you remember your first round there?
First time I played there was at the St Andrews Trophy, which is a tournament run by the Links Trust there about every June. Amateur event, two-round event, you played the New Course and the Old Course.
Why do you think that some US golfers don't really appreciate the UK links style of golf?
There are players who don't appreciate it and prefer the professional model of playing golf... which is the guy that swings the golf club and hits the ball the best should win every week and should get flat lies and good lies and should never get a bad lie, he should never get a bad bounce, and you know, should hit it on every green and should, you know, roll it up beside the hole.
That's the orderly way. I think professional golf tends to go down that line; that every week, they want everything so perfect so that it will lead to the best player winning. Whereas, traditional golf was testing your mental strength and being able to handle good and bad bounces and throwing a little bit of the vagaries of, I don't know of golf, of life, into it. Links golf and St Andrews is very much about that.
So what kind of player will it favour when the Open comes around in July?
You've got to hit the ball well, but you've got to get your breaks and you've got to work with your breaks and you've got to accept your bad ones. If you're brought up playing a lot of amateur match play as I would have been growing up, you learn to live with that and deal with that, and I suppose learn to love it.
But if you were brought up playing a lot of strokeplay and then golf courses without too much wind, nice conditions, you know, you get drawn into the fact that the guy who should win the tournament is the guy who hits all 14 fairways, 18 greens, two putts them all and it's all very nice, but that's not the way golf was designed. It was designed to be an unjust game and it was an ability to handle that.
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