Leaving golf aside for the moment, I'd choose Roger Federer as a sporting role model, Muhammad Ali for a sporting and non-sporting role model and Nelson Mandela as a true and lasting inspiration.

I kept telling myself this word, process. Focus on my process, don't care about the result.

As an international sportsman, I am very lucky to be supported by people all over the world, many of who treat me as one of their own, no matter what their nationality, or indeed mine. This is the way sport should be.

You know I need that cockiness, the self-belief, arrogance, swagger, whatever you want to call it, I need that on the golf course to bring the best out of myself. So you know once I leave the golf course, you know that all gets left there.

To be a top-class athlete, you have to train hard, you have to eat right, you have to get enough rest. I feel the way golf is going nowadays, you have to treat yourself as an athlete.

I am a proud product of Irish golf and the Golfing Union of Ireland and am hugely honoured to have come from very rich Irish sporting roots I am also a proud Ulsterman who grew up in Northern Ireland. That is my background and always will be.

In all honesty, I never actually did anything wrong (in my eyes, at least) at school or misbehaved in any big way. If it was anything, it was probably just a lot of clowning around.