HE'D been home for eight days, spending the time shuffling around the country, visiting friends and family, doing odd-jobs at his home in Kells. He'd hardly lifted a club or spared a thought for the game that consumed him for so much of the year. But it was drifting into Sunday afternoon now. The Spanish Open would be entering its final, critical phase. How was his friend doing? Damien McGrane had to know.

He switched on the television and there he was: not just having a good tournament or staging another strong finish as Peter Lawrie so often did, but in the thick of things, fighting for the victory that would herald his arrival as a top player, a contender. Two weeks earlier McGrane had led from the front in Beijing and raced clear. Lawrie, though, was engaged in a dogfight. "It was completely different," McGrane says. "By God he had to work hard for it, but he got it done."

They'd spoken in Shanghai the previous week during the BMW Asian Open where, as usual, they'd shared a room. They talked about McGrane's win in Beijing. McGrane insisted there was no reason Lawrie couldn't do it too. In Bejing Lawrie had missed the cut by two shots but, as McGrane saw it, he hadn't been playing bad golf. As much as he sensed a change in his own attitude, he could sense something stirring in Lawrie too.

"I definitely could see it before I left," McGrane says. "Peter looks at my game and he knows what sort of player I am. He probably realises that if I can win then, bloody hell, he can win too. That's what he'd have got out of my win. I think there was just a winning mentality there. Darren had won too. In a small way I think that helped his focus. Suddenly winning a tournament became a real possibility."

Over the years they'd travelled together on tour, played practise rounds in each other's company, shared hotel rooms and talked about the moment one of them would finally cross the line, never imagining they would both do so in the space of two glorious weeks. The Dub and the Meathman sharing so warmly in each other's triumphs. Yes, it would be quite a story.

In the end neither was present to witness the other's coronation. On the morning of the final round of the China Open Lawrie had asked McGrane if he'd like him to stay around for the likely celebrations. McGrane told him not to bother. Afterwards they joked about it. "I told him I was thinking about coming behind the 18th green with a pint of Guinness," Lawrie says. "He said 'I'd have thumped you if you did'."

As he sat and watched Ignacio Garrido's approach on the second play-off hole spin left into the water, gifting Lawrie the title, McGrane's mind raced into action. He knew Lawrie had missed his intended flight from Faro, but from experience he knew there was a late Sunday flight from Malaga that would arrive in Dublin around half past one in the morning. He was desperate to know how his friend felt in his moment of victory.

A simple text would not do. He would have to be there.

* * * * *

IF there was a spark that brought them together, a clear beginning to their friendship, they can't say. It just seemed to evolve through circumstance and the shared knowledge that they had come from roughly the same place and were headed towards the same destination. "I turned pro in '92 and he was a bit later," says McGrane, "but our careers have been very similar. They've followed the same trajectory."

They both graduated to the Tour in 2003; Lawrie after an impressively consistent year on the Challenge Tour, McGrane only after another tense visit to Tour School at the end of 2002. There was no glut of Irish golfers there to greet them. The big three of Harrington, Clarke and McGinley loomed ahead of them like giants. Graeme McDowell had arrived the previous year. McGrane and Lawrie eased themselves into the vacuum that existed at the level below them.

Did it ever occur to them that they didn't belong? Not to McGrane anyway. As an amateur Lawrie had played on Irish teams alongside Richie Coughlan and Keith Nolan and watched as they earned their Tour cards while he chipped away on the Asian and Challenge Tours. At 17 McGrane beat Harrington in the final of the Irish Boys' Championship in Birr. Yet 20 years later Harrington was a Major winner while McGrane still chased his first success on the European Tour.

For McGrane there was never a sense of panic. If Coughlan and Nolan shone brighter, their flames extinguished more quickly too. Between the hard roads of the Challenge Tour and Q-School they served their apprenticeship and inched their way forward. McGrane speaks about Lawrie but it is clear that the words could just as easily serve as a self-portrait.

"Once Peter got onto the European Tour he's been a solid member of it. Not on Tour, off Tour, on Tour, off it again. That was down to his experience and the apprenticeship he served. It might have taken him slightly longer than he would have liked but he definitely became a fully-fledged member of the Tour. He proved it week-in, week-out and now his win has proved to everybody that he's a great player."

In his own resolute way, McGrane would never accept that they weren't moving forward. If the statistics suggested otherwise, then damn the statistics. It didn't matter that neither of them could manage to break the top 50 barrier in the Order of Merit. They were playing well, McGrane would always insist, just not getting the results. If that made them journeymen golfers in the eyes of the world, then it was a tag they would have to accept.

"The thing about it is we're all here to learn and the game will teach you as you go along. And if someone wants to call you a journeyman because you're on a learning curve then so be it. As long as your career is progressing and you're going forward well then you can't be a journeyman because you're getting some place. If every year you're hovering around 100 on the Order of Merit and there's no improvement then fair enough. So I think with myself and Peter we've progressed as players since we started out."

That McGrane was first to scale the summit was unsurprising and poetic. Since the start of the year people had been saying it. McGinley had said it as far back as spring last year. Des Smyth said it too. McGrane kept saying it himself. He was ready to win. Every week he felt like a champion in waiting.

In February he'd been drawn to play with Tiger Woods in the third round of the Dubai Desert Classic. It was a good story, the unheralded Meathman and the world's greatest golfer, but McGrane resisted the easy headlines. Playing with Tiger, he insisted, wasn't his life-long dream. In India the following week he said he'd enjoyed the experience but could take or leave the anarchy that prevailed outside the ropes. For McGrane, playing with Woods had changed nothing: the imperative remained winning. Winning was the only deal.

Those who knew him wouldn't have been surprised by such sentiments, McGrane's refusal to go weak-kneed in the presence of greatness. That was the Damien they knew. The guy who did things his way; resolute and self-contained. Sometimes with McGrane they couldn't tell. He could be in the middle of a horrible run and still he would look them in the eye and say he was going to win the following week. He coursed with self-belief.

And Lawrie? Lawrie will look you in the eye and tell you, no, it was never the same for him. He thinks back to 2003 when he was rookie of the year and unable to feel worthy of the award. He'd won it largely on the back of two good finishes and felt he hadn't much to beat. "I made it into a negative," he says. "I kept saying to myself I'd been lucky rather than congratulating myself on winning it."

Two years earlier he'd been dropped by his then manager, Chubby Chandler. He says he didn't like how the business was done but couldn't quibble with the decision. If Chandler didn't believe in him enough to make the breakthrough, he had to accept that perhaps that was just an extension of Lawrie's lack of faith in himself.

"I possibly lacked that little bit of self-belief," he says. "Always have done. Maybe that's what's held me back for quite some time. I wouldn't think I have the self-belief that Damien has. You'd have to get close to him to know what's ticking. Outwardly he wouldn't come across that way but on the golf course he would. He does things his way and that's it. I'd be easier led. Damien is very much -- it's his way."

After Lawrie had beaten off Garrido in last week's play-off, Harrington was asked for his assessment and reasoned that McGrane's win had "pushed" Lawrie over the line, almost as if it was a physical process. Lawrie doesn't entirely disagree. "Possibly so. You can't really say. Damien is one of my best friends. I suppose like any job if it's your best friend and they're doing better than you, then you say to yourself 'Come on. I want to get up there as well. I want to enjoy that moment'."

It is easy to see why they might gel in each other's company. Lawrie is affable and self-deprecating in the way that McGrane is serious and grimly focussed. Before the play-off last Sunday, Lawrie was tipping away on the putting green when a spectator, an Irishman, wished him well. "Well done Paul," he said. "Best of luck in the play-off." Lawrie threw his hands up in mock exasperation and laughed. "What do I have to do?" he wondered.

The best answer he could give was two holes and 30 minutes away. "Sometimes when you're out there you don't think you're going to do it," he says. "Sometimes you run out of patience. Like when's it going to happen for me? I'm putting all this effort in. When is it my turn? Then other times you're playing in front of a large crowd and you're shying away from it a bit. There are a lot of guys on Tour who don't lack self-belief. Some days you think to yourself 'Jesus I'd love a little bit of their self-belief'."

On Sunday it finally came.

ALL of a sudden the entire landscape has changed. Europe is bulging with Irish winners. So far this season there has been four Irish victories on the Tour, as many as there has been in the past three seasons, and only one short of the record total of five in 1989. In the short term the run of success has given this week's Irish Open a shot in the arm the struggling tournament badly required. A world class field will fetch up at Adare with a clutch of home-grown golfers who must now believe they are contenders every week.

"We all have to use it now," McGrane says. "Feed off each other's success. Enjoy it. At the end of the week there'll probably be five players who have a chance of winning the Irish Open. I'm hoping I'll be one of those five and so is Peter. It's a complex game though. It isn't possible for 100 of us to contend every week. The leaderboard only holds 10 names. That's the game."

Because they are winners now and a bigger draw on the bill, McGrane doesn't see that there will be any greater rivalry between himself and Lawrie. That isn't how it is. "I wouldn't think so. Because he is a friend I was always desperate to see Peter win and now that he has I'm overjoyed. When you know a guy that well, you know his wife, his family, his children -- it's difficult to compete against him."

For all the time they've spent together through the years, it never occurred to them to think that instead of Garrido walking alongside Lawrie down the 18th on Sunday, one day it could be McGrane. Right now, McGrane says, they don't need to go there. "That would be a difficult experience. We're mates. If it happens we'll deal with it when the day comes. Right now there are a lot of players vying to win tournaments every week. If it happens we'll deal with it."

A year ago we would have dismissed it as fairytale. Now every week they tee up it seems a plausible scenario. That is how far they have come.