Darren Clarke

Darren Clarke is back in love. With the game, with life and with a woman. No doubt he still has a fuse shorter than one of his favourite cigars, but it is an apparently contented Northern Irishman who sits down to talk “after four years of my life being turned upside down”.

As long as he is in the public eye he will field questions about his late wife, Heather, who died from breast cancer in the summer of 2006. He will be asked about the river of tears that flowed after his Ryder Cup singles victory for Europe little more than a month after she passed away.

But he is hoping to write a fresh chapter in his life story, one that features his return as a leading golfer. It may seem a long way off, given that a player once ranked in the world’s top 10 is at No. 234, but Clarke says that he is gathering momentum. The big question is whether he will climb high enough in time for the Ryder Cup in September. It seems a big ask.

“With everything that happened — Heather being diagnosed with breast cancer the first time, then she got over that, then she was diagnosed the second time — it was a very difficult battle,” he says. “It has been four years of a very difficult time, your life turned upside down.

“I am not the only person it is going to happen to, but my job dictates that you have to be very focused and selfish to get where you want to and my mind has not been able to do that for a long time. But it is getting back. It is there now. I’d slipped down the ladder and now I’m coming back, just a little slower than I’d like.”

Clarke, 39, felt the old competitive juices pumping this m onth at the Malaysian Open in Kuala Lumpur. Within a stroke of the lead on the last afternoon, he ended up dropping away, but it felt good just to be back in the hunt.

“I made a couple of mistakes down the stretch, being too aggressive,” he says. “I was going at every flag, the way I used to. Maybe I should be a bit older and a bit wiser and play more percentage, but I hadn’t been up there for a while.

“I am not content just to tick over making the cut, finishing 20th every week. I want to be remembered for victories. I know I keep saying that, but it is true — I am swinging better than ever. I am working away and there are so many good things happening to me.”

Home life is much more settled and he feels that he can embark on a busy tour schedule now that his two young sons, Conor and Tyrone, are in a domestic routine. “I saw a quote that I’d given last year which said that if I was filling out one of those landing cards, my occupation would have been ‘father’. I’d never done as much, I’d never had to do as much,” he says.

“Any parent, not just me, who leaves your kids for work, you feel guilty and I guess mine was multiplied as a single parent. But I have got great people at home helping me out and that makes it a lot easier for me. And the kids are getting older and it is easier to talk and keep in touch. They can watch me on the TV, ring me and say, ‘Well done, Daddy.’ My boys are much happier now, they’re moving on with things as best we can.”

The new woman in Clarke’s life is Kerry Schiller, a striking blonde who works for a London law firm. The pair met through mutual friends and Clarke acknowledges that a steady relationship has played its part in his on-course revival.