Guru’s gadgetry helps Padraig Harrington prepare for Augusta

April 6th, 2009 | Padraig Harrington, Putting Biomechanics

by Peter Dixon
The Times - Monday 6th April 2009

You could call it the appliance of science. One reason why Padraig Harrington is the possessor of three major championships and one of the few players comfortable going head-to-head with Tiger Woods.

And it is why Dr Paul Hurrion, Harrington’s putting coach, thinks the Irishman is every bit as good as Woods on the greens and why he believes his man has every chance of winning the Masters that gets under way at Augusta on Thursday.

“There’s no question that he is in Tiger’s class,” Hurrion said. “And the tougher the test, the better it is for him because some of the others tend to give up.” As everybody knows, there is no test tougher than the ice-fast, sloping greens of Augusta. But it is Hurrion - a biomechanist by profession - whose scientific approach to the game within a game has helped to turn Harrington from a very good putter into a great one.

Who, for instance, could forget the way in which the Irishman took the USPGA Championship from under the nose of Sergio García last year with a putting display from out of this world? In his final round he took only 26 putts and had single putts on eight of the last nine greens, every one of them like a blow to the Spaniard’s solar plexus. “It was when all the hard work paid off,” Hurrion said. “It was perfect, the moment when everything came together.”

We are talking at Hurrion’s base, more like laboratory, in a small village in the Midlands, part of an annexe to a house within its own grounds. The only clue that a player with two Opens and one USPGA Championship to his name has been there are the framed and signed flags from each of the majors Harrington has won.

Hurrion, at 37 the same age as the Open champion, describes biomechanics as the science of human movement. He has worked with Jonny Wilkinson, Steve Backley, and the Great Britain bobsleigh team. He is on the International Cricket Council panel that assesses the action of bowlers suspected of throwing.

He has been with Harrington since 2002 and uses all the technology at his disposal to analyse every aspect of the player’s putting. He has high-speed cameras and specially-designed computer software that gives instant feedback on such things as head, shoulder and body movement. The aim, he explains, is to create an efficient, repeatable stroke that works every time.

His cameras record up to 2,000 frames per second and show in the minutest detail how the ball comes off the face of the putter. What the naked eye cannot pick up, the cameras certainly will. If, say, the putter cuts across the ball at impact it will impart side spin that will affect the direction in which it moves.

There are four cameras in all, one to the side, one straight on to show the path the putter takes, one at shoulder height to show how the shoulders move and one above the head. There is also a pressure pad under the feet that indicates how the weight shifts through the stroke. The more the body moves, the more manipulation of the putter head will be needed - and that is the path to inconsistency. “We are looking for perfect symmetry and control, aiming to hit it out of the middle every time,” Hurrion said.

Some of the key areas on which he works with Harrington are posture, stance, balance and stability. The aim is to create a pendulum motion that keeps the putter head as close to the ground as possible. The higher off the ground, Hurrion explains, the greater the margin for error.

Harrington’s unquenchable thirst for improvement means that he knows exactly where to look if things start to go awry. “If you have an eight-foot putt for birdie and it misses left edge, you need to know why,” Hurrion said. “What you need to ask is: Did it miss left edge because I aimed there? Have I pulled it? Have I hit it not quite quick enough and not taken the break out of the putt? Have I just misread it? Did it hit a spike mark or has the wind blown it off course? All of a sudden there are half a dozen variables and unless you can tell the difference, you’re stuck.”

All of which brings to mind García, who had just such a putt for victory in the Open Championship at Carnoustie in 2007 and who stood agog when the ball “lipped” out. It opened the door for Harrington, who went on to claim his first major in the four-hole play-off that ensued.

Watching García on the practice green at the CA Championship in Miami, Florida, recently, it looked as if he has learnt nothing in the interim. It was not so much that he missed the vast majority of the putts he took from about nine feet but the way in which he missed them, with half of them going to the left and half going to the right.

With good technique comes mental toughness. “It’s tough to be positive if you know that your technique is not really good enough to deal with what you are about to face,” Hurrion said. “Is your technique good enough to repeatedly hit the ball on the lines you have read? If you do it wrong, the record books will show you are not as good as you think you are.”

In Harrington, Hurrion has found a hard taskmaster. “After each session you come away with more questions than you have answered,” Hurrion said. “I lie awake in bed at night thinking about it. Then I’ll text him an answer if he’s travelling and he’ll send one back saying, ‘Yep, I’ll try that.’

“The sessions could easily last all day and there are times when you think, ‘Geez I need a break.’ But that’s what makes a major champion. And that’s why our work is done for the Masters.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/golf/article6040490.ece

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