Simon Lewis, Hazeltine

If you see a bunch of former US PGA champions Riverdancing (yes, it's a verb) down the fairways at Hazeltine National this morning you can blame Padraig Harrington.

The US PGA Championship gets under way on Thursday in Chaska, Minnesota, with Harrington defending the title he won so brilliantly from Sergio Garcia and Ben Curtis at Oakland Hills near Detroit 12 months ago.

One of the perks of victory, aside from the lifetime exemption into the final major of the year, is the opportunity to host the annual Champions' Dinner on the Tuesday before the tournament begins.

At the Masters, the defending champion gets to choose the menu but at the PGA, Harrington had to come bearing gifts as his penance for becoming the first European golfer since Tommy Armour in 1930 to win the PGA of America's most prestigious prize, the Wanamaker Trophy.

And so at the banquet in Minneapolis on Tuesday night, in the city that gave the world Prince, Harrington presented 13 former PGA champions with... bodhrans.

One wonders what Harrington, a keen student and devote believer in the powers of sports psychology, will have made of Lee Westwood's emphatic dismissal of the science.

The world number 13 has got by quite nicely without a shrink so far in his career and he sees no reason to change now, although the Englishman's reasoning was not exactly scientific itself.

“Look at them all,” he said yesterday during a moment of hilarity in his press conference. “They all look a bit odd, like they need to see somebody.

“ I find it a bit hard to take anybody like that serious.”

As the assembled journalists fell about laughing Westwood realised the need to explain further.
“Well, they do. I'm sorry. That's the way I see it. I've always felt mentally quite stable. Don't feel like I need it.”