It’s an age-old sports bromide rooted in sexism and nonsense: Spend too much time with the girlfriend and your game will suffer. For much of the 2012 season, Rory McIlroy heard both the whispers and the roars that the time he spent traveling with his girlfriend, tennis star Caroline Wozniacki, was somehow eroding his on-course performance. Never mind that he won the Honda Classic in March and that he reached the No. 1 slot in the golfing world for the first time in his brief but starry career. Critics contended that she was the reason that the young Northern Irishman had missed four cuts in five tournaments and had not notched another major.

His answer? Suffice it to say that once again, a golfer from the Emerald Isle has captured a major in five of the last six PGA seasons. McIlroy did not just win the 2012 PGA Championship; he crushed the rest of the field, his only real foe the course at Kiawah Island. At the end of the final round, his eight-shot win made every other star irrelevant on the leaderboard. It was not lost on observers that the 23-year-old McIlroy wore a red shirt for his clinching round in a performance that evoked comparisons to that other player who has worn red on his way to dominant victories.

Speaking of that other man in red – Tiger Woods – McIlroy’s dazzling triumph made the Northern Irish lad the youngest player since the great Spaniard Seve Ballesteros to win two majors. Tiger? His second came when he was four months older than McIlroy.

For naysayers still grumbling that McIlroy has a long way to go to prove himself, those who foolishly signed on to the cliché that “wine, woman, and song” were undoing him, the wine and song never much entered into the equation. A young man raised by working-class parents who gave up much to help their son reach his dreams, McIlroy is not a “hard-living” sort. When asked how he celebrated his PGA victory, he responded, “Two Diet Cokes and a cookie.”

While McIlroy’s feat brought comparisons to Ballesteros, Padraig Harrington’s name was mentioned in another manner to Spaniard Jose Maria Olazabal, this year’s European Ryder Cup captain. Harrington has been on every Ryder Cup squad since 1999, when he proved a fan favorite at The Country Club in Brookline. This season has been, by Harrington’s own standards, lackluster, but hardly a disaster with an eighth-place finish in the Masters, fourth in the US Open, and seventh in the Irish Open. Given his overall track record, though, many players, fans, and media types believed that Harrington merited selection to the European team as a captain’s pick.

Olazabal rounded out his twelve-man squad by selecting Ian Poulter, of England, and Nicolas Colsaerts, of Belgium, to compete in the Cup competition that opens September 28 at Medinah Country Club in Illinois. In Ireland and elsewhere, some have suggested that the mission of Harrington is a snub driven by a “grudge” that arose during singles play in a 2003 tourney when Olzabal took exception at the match to what he thought was a slam against his integrity by Harrington. Chalk this one up to golf’s version of conspiracy theorists. Harrington not only roundly dismisses any charge that Olazabal was acting out of spite, but also notes that he [Harrington] did not have a banner season and that the Spaniard has put together a stellar team.

On that team are a pair of Northern Irishmen – McIlroy and 2010 U.S. Open champion Graeme McDowell. No one can argue that the Emerald Isle looms large in the upcoming Ryder Cup or that 2012 has provided more “Major Magic” for golf-mad Northern Ireland.