Patience, they say, is a virtue, and Shane Lowry showed such rectitude in an opening round of the Texas Children’s Houston Open at the municipal Memorial Park layout where a closing birdie, from 23 feet, finally got the Ryder Cup star to sign for a sub-par round, a one-under 69.
Lowry’s round featured three birdies and two bogeys, but he’d gone five straight pars on walking to the par-3 ninth hole tee box for the conclusion to his day’s work. There he hit his approach to 23 feet and closed out with a birdie two to bring a smile to his face.
With the Masters looming on the horizon, Lowry, who’d missed the cut at both the Arnold Palmer Invitational and The Players in his last two tournaments, added the Houston Open to his schedule to regain some confidence with scorecard in hand. He moved inside the top-40 with his closing birdie to strengthen his aim to survive the cut and make upward moves into the weekend.
Lowry started on the 10th and chipped in for his opening birdie from off the green on the 12th, adding further birdies on the third and ninth. But he dropped shots on the 13th, where he missed the green with his approach, and second, when he found a bunker off the tee on the par-3, in a round where his driving accuracy was only 62 per cent and he found only 11 of 18 greens in regulation.
READ MORE
To his credit, he stuck to the task and was rewarded with that closing birdie which could yet prove important in his efforts to make the cut, especially with the Masters in mind.
American Sam Burns, a five-time winner on the PGA Tour, who has blown hot and cold so far this season with three missed cuts and a best finish of tied-sixth in the Pebble Beach pro-am, shot an opening round 65 to join Michael Brennan and Tom Hoag from the early wave on that five-under mark.
“I think for me right now, just trying to get healthy. My body hadn’t really co-operated so far this year, so try to make sure my body’s feeling good and trying to kind of build on that,” explained Burns of his up-and-down season to date.
