As Padraig Harrington gets closer to completing his third season on the PGA Tour Champions — preparing for next week’s Charles Schwab Cup Championship at the Phoenix Country Club from Nov. 7-10 — he seems to recognize the stark contrasts between the senior tour and the PGA Tour.
At 53 years old, Harrington is still spry enough to bomb it off the tee — a major advantage over his senior tour counterparts — yet not quite able to keep up with the young guns on the PGA Tour week in and week out.
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That’s not to say he can’t compete on the PGA Tour anymore, as the three-time major champ proved he could do so with an impressive T22 finish at this year’s Open Championship at Royal Troon. Still, in seven starts on the PGA Tour in 2024, he missed the cut five times.
But Harrington has been nothing short of dominant when it comes to his performances in PGA Tour Champions events.
In 14 starts in 2024 on the senior tour, Harrington hasn’t missed a single cut, has won three tournaments, finished T10 seven times, and has earned over $1.6 million. Those aren’t quite Scottie Scheffler-like numbers, but they’re all impressive nonetheless.
Given his success on the PGA Tour Champions, Harrington joked about getting a sense of false confidence when the game’s so sharp versus the older guys, making him think he can translate it versus the young guys on the PGA Tour.
“When I’m out here on the Champions tour, and you play well, you think ‘this is brilliant,’” Harrington said on a Zoom call ahead of next week’s senior tour event. “But the better you play on the Champions tour, the more you think you can beat the young guys. So it’s kind of a Catch 22 in that sense that if you start winning on the Champions tour you think, ‘Oh maybe I can do it on the regular tour.’”
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While Harrington has competed on both the senior tour and the PGA Tour over the past few years, he hasn’t won a PGA Tour event since the 2015 Honda Classic, with his last T10 occurring at the 2023 Valero Texas Open — so he understands how difficult it is to translate sharp play from one tour to the other.
He admitted that he felt a little overmatched during this year’s Scottish Open, when he missed the cut after finishing at 1-over.
“At the Scottish Open this year [on the regular tour], I was definitely leaning towards playing more on the Champions tour. I felt a little bit out of my depth,” he quipped.
Despite the differences between competition on both tours, Harrington has previously said that the senior tour is “the hardest tour to keep your card,” so he’s certainly not letting any success go to his head.
“This is really cut-throat,” Harrington previously said. “Thirty-six to keep your card is very, very tight. It doesn’t take much for you to drop out of that 36. So that’s why you see the guys out here practicing. And if you’re not one of the guys practicing, somebody else will do it for you. And that means you’ll slip out of your position.
“Guys practice just like they practiced on tour. They actually maybe even work a little bit harder out here.”
