The dad who opened a window onto sport, who taught the son to understand his gift, who dispensed wisdom in telling little packages. The dad who prodded, pushed and gently cajoled from the wings. The dad who was always there.

And then one day who wasn't.

Son is a top golfer, one of the best in the world. Bright, articulate, argumentative, you are expecting him to come out with the word 'perspective'. Hit a bad shot, don't get too down, only a game. Puts golf in perspective. But you should have known better, the son invariably has a different take on the world.

Padraig Harrington is perched on a stool in the kitchen of his home a couple of winding roads off the M50 close to the Dublin-Wicklow border. T-shirt, jeans, shoes off, and not a sponsor's logo in sight, he has been primed to anticipate his season which begins on Thursday. However, he is also prepared to reflect on the year just gone.

So, what's this about perspective?

"My father's death didn't change the way I think about golf at all. I remember someone was saying after I'd won in America last June that I'd won it for my Dad. I've never played a golf tournament for my Dad, he wasn't like that, he would never have wanted me to be out there winning for him. I'd never be trying harder just because my Dad was ill.

That's not the way I was brought up to play."

Paddy Harrington's battle with cancer was neither a crutch, nor an extra motivation. There was the entirely predictable mental and physical stress that rendered Padraig's performances in 2005 so inconsistent, and there was a moment after Paddy died in July when he thought about locking the clubs away, but as for a new perspective?

"No, it hasn't been like that.

Of course I take golf seriously, but I've genuinely never seen it as a life or death thing, and because of my Dad's influence, I've always had a certain perspective on the game anyway. Nothing has changed regarding the way I approach my golf, it's more that I have this massive vacuum in my life now."

He had been reminded a couple of times that he had never won on the regular PGA Tour, and while he has always been one to chart his own course, this gap in his CV rankled. Success in America was high on his list of goals when he set out last season, but there was little he could do about the timing of his two victories.

He shot a 63 in the final round at the Honda Classic in March and then beat Vijay Singh and Joe Ogilvie in a white-knuckle play-off. He travelled home with his caddie, Ronan Flood, from Florida via Paris, scrolling through the blizzard of congratulatory text messages, and even though there were hugs and kisses on arrival in Dublin, he sensed something was wrong.

"Dad had been very sick over the weekend, but for obvious reasons, no one told me. It was only when I got back that I realised how serious it was. I brought him to hospital the next day, and in a way it might've been better if I hadn't won because there wouldn't have been such a big low after such a high."

Then at the Barclays Classic at Westchester in June, having earlier missed the cut at both the US Open and the Masters, he rolled in a 65-foot eagle putt on the final green to see off Jim Furyk. "Things were going better for Dad around that time. He was more stable and there was certainly some hope, but when I arrived home it turned bad again. It was inevitable after that."

Paddy Harrington never sought any glory from his boy's sporting prowess. A Beara Peninsula man, he was a tough half-back on the Cork football team which won a National League title in 1956, but which also suffered the frustration of All Ireland final defeats that same year and the next.

On one occasion, at the end of a fiercely-contested league game against Kildare, he was walking off the pitch when the mother of a Kildare player came up and whacked him with her umbrella. He took the blow, and instead of remonstrating with the woman, turned to one of his teammates with a broad smile.

"Did you see that?" he said.

Along with several Garda colleagues, Paddy Harrington was one of the founders of Stackstown Golf Club in the foothills of the Dublin mountains where Padraig learned the game. "Although we spent hundreds of hours talking about golf, there was very little about the technicalities, more the ups and downs of it.

He wasn't my coach, he was more someone who was always around. He retired from the guards when he was 50, so I spent a lot of time with him over the last 20 or so years. He was more influential in terms of my character, and I've been able to bring that to the golf course."

After he had lost a match against Garth McGimpsey, one of Ireland's finest amateurs at the time, an 18-yearold Harrington was telling his father how he had hit the ball well, how his concentration had been good, and how he hadn't been in the slightest bit intimidated. But why hadn't he won then? Why had he lost when he should have won?

Why? "Experience, " came the reply.

"Now, to a demanding, ambitious 18-year-old, that's just about the worst word you can ever hear, " he remembers. "It's a tough, tough word to take, a word that no kid of that age wants to hear. I realised that I had to think more about my whole approach to the game, and soon I started working with a sports psychologist. Dad was good at that sort of stuff. Very clear, very honest."

Harrington still has to fight the impulse to practise, to practise some more, and then to go out and practise again.

He has a better handle on it now, but in the early days he was manic. In his first European Tour event in Durban in 1996, he was so dehydrated due to all the preparatory work he had done that he began having violent shakes and nearly didn't make it to the start.

A year on, he overdid it again before his first US Open at Congressional where he practised relentlessly for nearly 14 hours a day in the searing heat in an effort to cover every angle. Strung out, he comfortably missed the cut. Later, Paddy took him aside and told him he couldn't seek perfection, only excellence, and even now he reminds himself of that.

His wife Caroline is always there to talk about golf, so is his mother, but the sort of critical analysis his dad provided is missing. "You know fathers, the chances of them picking up a ringing phone are nil, and Dad was no different. Except on golf days, he'd be the first one to answer when I phoned from a tournament. Now that's gone."

Of his customary winter breaks, this one was needed more than any before. Nine weeks away from the tour, but typically, not nine weeks off. He has been in the gym, he has worked on his swing and more recently, he has spent some time sharpening up his short game. "People might think that's not a break, but there's no stress in what I'm doing. If I get up one morning and decide I'm going to watch a movie, then I will. It's not that you stop working, it's just that you have to get away from what you do. The golf isn't the stress for me, it's the competing."

He had no enthusiasm for it a couple of months ago, but after a holiday in Dubai and a short break in Barbados where his coach Bob Torrance was on hand, he feels re-energised. He travels to Malaysia today, then to America for the Accenture Match Play, Doral, the Honda Classic again, the Players Championship, the BellSouth and the Masters.

The wins on the PGA Tour, and nearly $3m in earnings in the US alone, more than saved last season, but his world ranking has fallen from number six to 19, he failed to make the cut in the three majors he played in, and he somehow contrived to shoot an 80 at the American Express in San Francisco.

"A strange year on the golf front. If I'd only played in the US, my standing among my peers would've gone up. Yet, in Europe it has gone down because I didn't play that well and I didn't play that often. I can't dismiss last year, but it was erratic."

And so he heads out once again, not playing for his father. Just missing him.