Paddy wins by 7

Paddy on the 11th fairway at Rock Hill, hitting 5 iron back to the tee box on 18

Padraig Harrington was here at Rock Hill a few weeks ago for a late-season refresher. After a long, grueling summer, he wanted to be ready to make the final push for the PGA Tour Champions playoffs. We spent a lot of time trying to clean up the way the legs work together and push in the downswing. His speed had dropped, and now it’s back up to where it was. Swing direction is another element of our work, along with getting wedges dialed in.

But the key element to all of this is the player being able to synthesize the information and get it from the practice ground to the course. We’ve gotten it to where we can work intensively for a few days and Padraig can go off on his own and do his own work—with a few reference check-ins—and organize it into full play mode. When he was making six birdies in a row to take control of the TimberTech Championship last weekend, he wasn’t rummaging through a bunch of swing thoughts. He was playing integrated golf.

Michael Jacobs