The Irish reputation for loquacity is well-founded. Even when Padraig Harrington produced one of his less tortured rounds, a 63 in Phoenix two years back, his answer to a prosaic inquiry about his swing was 1,850 words long. It was almost baroque in its prolixity, encompassing everything from the interviews of Arnold Palmer to his visions of how good a golfer he might be at age 70. To listen to this sweetly tormented soul is to understand how James Joyce, Harrington’s fellow Dubliner, sat down one day to compose Ulysses and wound up stretching a day in the life of … Continue reading