"As you gain experience, you lose innocence"

Padraig Harrington’s comments yesterday understandably got a lot of attention since we don’t usually hear profound lines from golfers. A couple of Quad subscribers emailed wanting to see the full context after it ran in yesterday’s newsletters, so here is the Ryder Cup captain’s full answer:

Q. You just talked about Kiawah being a good test and you won the World Cup there in '97 with McGinley, but he didn't mention this is your 21st PGA Championship. How much is the accumulation of all this experience you've got and also the experience of playing Kiawah, how comfortable will it make you feel this week?

PADRAIG HARRINGTON: Yeah, look, people often ask in a general term about experience. Well, as you gain experience, you lose innocence. I suppose if you drew a graph, there's a crossing point of equilibrium where you have some experience and a certain amount of innocence and enthusiasm. As you get a little bit older and you get all this experience, on paper people might think you get better with experience, but as I said, you've seen a few things that you know in your game that you probably never wanted to see, so you kind of lose that little bit of, I suppose, innocence.It's not everything it's cracked up to be to have experience. I know I've played 21 times in the PGA, and to be honest, when you come to a great golf course like this and you look back, you realize how many different types of tests we've had at the PGA over the years.

I think when I first came out the PGA was considerably played on probably a pretty typical U.S. golf course, U.S.style golf course. But we've played a great variety now over the years, and it's really matured as a major championship from what I would have had an image of it in the '80s. It really is sitting up there now giving us a good variety of tests. You never know what you're going to get from year to year in terms of style of golf course, and it's -- as all the majors, they're putting it up to each, it's upped its game, it's improved its standing, and coming to places like this for a week where this is going to be a great championship, there's going to be plenty of excitement on this golf course, and whoever wins this week will be a worthy winner.