We like to think professional golfers are battling the course and the field, when the truth is they are usually battling themselves.
Shane Lowry teed off at the Open Championship on Thursday trying to find a way out of a slump with a very precise origin: the fifth hole at Augusta National on Sunday, April 12th, where a double-bogey railroaded his Masters challenge. He carded a closing 80 and hasn’t had a top-20 finish since, missing the cut in three of nine starts.
Unable to change his mood, Lowry has changed his caddie: Darren Reynolds is gone and Dermot Byrne has returned.
Lowry does not carry his frustrations lightly and has a forgivable habit of allowing his mind to race too far ahead of his hands. After he blew up with three holes to go at the Cognizant Classic earlier this year, he admitted he had started to picture his daughters bounding on to meet him on the green before he had sealed the deal. This can also cause him to compound errors and fritter away shots, a tendency he tries to address by stressing ahead of events the need to be kind to himself.
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He also insisted ahead of this week that his poor form hasn’t smothered his desire, instead saying he has to avoid “wanting it too much”. This is the eternal paradox of the elite sportsperson – they have to find the goal to drive their ascetic daily grind and then ignore that goal whenever it hovers into close view.
Lowry’s recent hangdog form strikes us as that of a man fed up with the meagre yield from years of hard work in his Florida exile. For all of his consistency in the last few years, he has unwrapped too many prizes that share the same copper and bronze colours of Royal Birkdale’s baked fairways.
He appeared on the first tee on Thursday wearing white and powder blue. Argentina colours. The people of Offaly might call it Albirrceleste.
The roar that greeted Lowry was significantly louder than that reserved for his playing partners. Brooks Koepka sauntered onto the first tee as if he had stepped straight out of a Richard Linklater movie with his aloof, varsity cool. Next came PGA champion Aaron Rai, whose commitment to wearing black gloves in the stifling heat gave him the look of a UPS driver.
Lowry’s slough of form did not make him timid. He took driver on the first couple of holes where his playing partners clubbed down, with the rough withered by the sun and made much less penal. The greens were slow – playing at 11 on the stimp – which allowed Lowry to be aggressive with his putter too, salvaging par on the first hole from 12 feet and then rattling in a birdie putt from 35 feet on the third. The crowd roared with approval when he unsheathed driver on the risk-reward par-four fifth, but he couldn’t convert for birdie from eight feet. He dropped a shot on the brutally difficult sixth but picked it back up as he made the turn.
Despite the difficult winds, Lowry looked in control, dialling back his aggression by laying up to the front of a bunker on the tenth hole, giving him an angle to leave his ball to within seven feet. He missed the putt, but then made birdie on 12 to get to two-under.
It was at this point the competing battalions of dissuasion and persuasion exchanged lengthier assaults. Lowry stumbled over-par by making three straight bogeys on holes 13 through 15. He swore when he went right off the 13th tee and into the far-flung postcode made infamous by Jordan Spieth’s wild miss in 2017, and despite making the par-five 14th in two, he followed it with a galling four-putt.
And yet, somehow, Lowry summoned a steely response. He made birdie on 16 after a sweet approach to four feet and then gave himself a look at eagle with two textbook swings to 17. A birdie and an up-and-down par from the sand on 18 proved worthwhile consolation. A one-under round of 69 in the afternoon’s blustery conditions was an admirable score that crucially gives him reason to look forward to Friday.
“I felt I did a great job of staying in control of myself and my game and my thoughts, I am happy and proud of myself with how I finished,” said Lowry after his round. “What happened on 13, 14, and 15 was like a sucker punch, but how you respond to that is what makes a tournament.”
