Agony and Ecstasy

You see the European Ryder Cup team celebrating another victory — whether it's in Ireland or England or Spain or the United States — and the boys always look like one big happy family, right? There's Sergio Garcia of Spain, singing from a balcony, waving a flag, his arm around one of his mates. There's Padraig Harrington of Ireland taking a swig from a magnum of Moet, then passing the dark-green bottle down the line.

Those chummy Euros. And then came Sunday night at the links of Carnoustie, another Scottish muni that is bleak and severe and oddly inviting, just like the old one in St. Andrews. That's when Harrington, 35, and Garcia, 27 — tied at seven-under-par 277 at the end of regulation — played a four-hole playoff for the most important title in the global village of golf: Open champion.

When Garcia and Harrington gathered on the 1st tee for the playoff, each man looking to win his first major, they exchanged a quick and meager handshake. If there was peace, love and understanding on that tee, you couldn't feel it.

About 40 minutes after the playoff began, the two protagonists were on the 18th tee for the final hole, Harrington up by two shots. As the Dubliner stood over his tee shot, he saw Garcia standing almost on the right tee marker. Crowding the player is a classic Ryder Cup move. Harrington, tense but composed, asked Garcia for some space. Playing like the accountant he once studied to be, he then proceeded to turn the 499-yard par-4 into a three-shotter and with a closing bogey won the playoff, and the championship, by a stroke.

At the awards ceremony afterward, Harrington, a man with a goofy smile and an endearing earnestness, did not praise Garcia for his sustained and excellent play — the Spaniard led after each of the first three rounds and took a three-shot edge into Sunday. The Irishman, who began the final round trailing by six, simply said Garcia's day would come.

"He's a young lad," said Harrington, the first Irish winner of the Open since Fred Daly in 1947. The subdued crowd — Sunday on the Angus coast was cool and gray, and few of the menfolk had been drinking — laughed benignly.

As Harrington lifted the claret jug — and as his wife of 10 years, Caroline, chased their three-year-old son, Patrick, across the 18th green — the reputations of two men rose with it. Harrington, of course, will be looked at with newfound respect, but the other man looking better is the Frenchman Jean Van de Velde, who screwed up so royally at Carnoustie in 1999.

It's not just that we now really understand the curse of Carnoustie's home hole, but we also can now fully appreciate the Gallic charm and poise with which Van de Velde handled his collapse.

Garcia blamed his bogey finish at the 72nd hole on bad luck, slow play and a greater plan. ("It wasn't meant to be," he said.) Eight years ago Van de Velde, who is not playing now because of an undisclosed illness, told reporters, "Don't look so sad."

On Sunday night Garcia sarcastically told the throng, "I'm thrilled." His pain was perhaps understandable. He had been a king for three days.

Phil Mickelson used to have the damn-me-with-faint-praise title as the best golfer never to have won a major, and then he went on a Tigeresque tear, winning three majors in two years. (He missed the cut at Carnoustie, and don't be surprised if he shuts down his season after the PGA Championship next month, skipping the Presidents Cup and all the season — ending FedEx Cup events to fully rest his strained left wrist.)

Going into the playoff, Harrington and Garcia were trying to rid themselves of their claims to the title. Now it's a two-man race, and Colin Montgomerie, 44, probably will never get one of the game's four grand prizes. For Sergio, it's harder to know.

Garcia is a formidable talent, but he's already been through a mild form of the putting disease known as the yips (last week he used a belly putter) and another golfing mental disorder, the regrips (in which you can't begin the backswing). He's not a gifted putter. Of the four majors, the British suits him best because the greens are flatter and slower than at the other majors. Harrington, really, is in another league. He has the game, and the head, to win any of them.

They came to the money game differently. Garcia, after a vaunted amateur career, turned pro at 18, and within a few months he had won the Irish Open and nearly won the PGA Championship.

Harrington turned pro at 24, after earning his accounting degree.

"My goal was to be a journeyman," he said on Sunday night. "I thought I could make a living at the game."

He has succeeded, and then some.

Sergio began the playoff bewildered that his 10-footer to win on the 72nd had slid by the hole and irritated by longish waits as he played his final holes. Harrington began the playoff relieved to be in it. He had butchered the 72nd hole, hitting two balls in the water en route to a double bogey, but he was still breathing.

Both golfers had cornermen. Miguel Angel Jimenez, the Spanish Ryder Cupper, crouched in the wings in support of Garcia.

Thirty feet away stood Paul McGinley, the Irish Ryder Cupper and Harrington's close friend. Aware that no European had won a major since Paul Lawrie won the British in '99, Jimenez said of the last two men standing, "The good thing is, no matter what, a European will win the Open."

He meant it, but only to a point. In the week in which Seve Ballesteros, the brilliant Spanish performance artist, announced his retirement from golf, the fitting thing might have been for one of Seve's golfing progeny to win the Open championship. As Seve did in the '70s and '80s, Sergio plays golf fueled by emotion. But on his 72nd hole, needing par to win, he ditched emotion and tried to win playing, he said, "the right way" — by taking an iron off the tee.

The lesson of Van de Velde, in some way, had to be deep in his head. Van de Velde was true to his golfing self and lost. (He hit driver.) Sergio was not, but he lost too, clubbing his approach into a bunker and making 5.

The hole's too damn hard. How great. Carnoustie's 6th has a strip of land called Hogan's Alley. In his only British Open, Wee Ben won at Carnoustie, in 1953. There's a plaque on the 6th tee honoring Hogan and a quote from him: "I don't like the glamour — I just like the game."

Harrington is cut from the same cloth: Analyze and execute, again and again. If you screw up, just play the next shot. Easy to say, hard to do. Sergio knows that, now more than ever.

Regarding the winner: If Hogan were around, he'd appreciate the guy.