On a week when thunderstorms and torrential rain in Charlotte had saturated the golf course at Quail Hollow for the US PGA, Shane Lowry ran foul of an horrendous lie with his tee shot on the 8th hole in his second round. At least a third of his ball seemed to be below the surface of the fairway, after it had rolled into a pitch mark.
Lowry looked for relief from a rules official but that could only have been granted if it had been his own pitch mark. An ESPN on-course reporter quickly intervened to point out that it was a different pitch mark and, ultimately, Lowry was denied relief.
“You hit a lovely tee shot and you’re not expecting that,” Lowry said. “I was just very annoyed with that obviously. I felt I had quite a bit of momentum going around and I felt standing there with 50 yards to that pin, it’s an easy shot for me. Then I walk away making bogey.”
After a 292-yard tee shot had put him in a perfect position on one of the easiest holes on the course, Lowry was just 57 yards from the green with a birdie on his mind. From that lie, though, there was no way of making a satisfactory contact with the ball and his second shot crash-landed in a greenside bunker.
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In a fit of rage, Lowry shouted “F**k this place,” and hammered the spot where his ball had been buried. On Thursday, Lowry was one of many players who thought that preferred lies should have been in play.
“The ESPN guy was a bit too involved when he didn’t have to be, and that’s what annoyed me. A lot. I was just asking the referee and the ESPN guy comes straight over saying, ‘That’s not your pitch mark.’
“I’m like, that’s not for you to talk about, that’s for me to call a rules official and decide what happens. I just said to the rules official, ‘What happens to the guy at 7.10 and not on ESPN live?’ I guarantee you he’s down there arguing it’s his pitch mark.
“I don’t want a drop because it’s not my pitch mark. I’m just saying. And it goes back to a lot of mudballs again today. It looked like a fresh pitch mark I was in but it also looked like a fresh one beside it. I wasn’t arguing it was my pitch mark, I was trying to be 100 per cent sure.”
Lowry’s frustration would have been exacerbated by his parlous position in the tournament. He had started the day at two over par, which was just on or just above the projected cut, but he birdied the first and he had just come off a birdie on the 7th when the events of the 8th interrupted his momentum.
He recovered his composure to play the next seven holes in one under, but he bogeyed 16, and could only manage a par on the last, to finish at two over. Ultimately Lowry was one shot outside the cut line.
