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Though most eyes were on 50-year-old Phil Mickelson and the calculated way he beat Old Father Time in the PGA Championship at Kiawah Island, another pairing on that sunny, windy afternoon was worthy of close examination. Just a few groups ahead of Mickelson and Brooks Koepka were two Irishmen, Pádraig Harrington and Shane Lowry. They talked their way around the fearsome course in the last round of the year’s second major championship laughing and joking at times, as if they were Sunday-afternoon golfing partners. When one hit a good shot the other called out “well done.” When they walked off after playing one of the difficult holes on the inward nine, one said to the other, “Well, that’s that hole out of the way.” And they’d have a laugh about it.
“I grew up admiring Pádraig Harrington and I watched him in the 2007 and 2008 Opens,” Lowry said. “To be there in the final round of a major playing with him, one of my golfing idols, was pretty cool. When I look back on it it’ll be one of those rounds that we’ll remember, that we’ll talk about. It was just pretty cool to be there with him. It was quite satisfying to play good on that type of a golf course with him.”
This though was more than an enjoyable round for two old friends from the same country, who have known each other for years, a friendship that flourishes despite a 15-year age difference. It was an opportunity for Harrington, 49, captain of the Europe Ryder Cup team, to assess the current form of Lowry’s game under the strict examination conditions of a major championship the Irishman had an outside chance of winning. A major championship moreover on a links course designed by Pete Dye, just as Whistling Straits will be in the biennial match in September.
“ ... I just love major championships. I love big weeks. I love the atmosphere. I feel like I’m maturing as a golfer and as a person so when I get to those big weeks I kind of know what is going to happen.”
shane LOWRY
It was the perfect place for Lowry, the Open champion and a man with an eye on making his debut for Europe, to demonstrate that he has a game, an attitude and a maturity that are tailor-made for the big arena. Lowry is one of those who rises to the occasion. The sterner the test the better; the worse the weather the more he likes it. In 2009, he had won the 3 Irish Open in a rainstorm. “I think when I get to major championship golf courses like this (Kiawah) it is going to be different to other weeks,” he said in South Carolina. “I accept that I am going to make bogeys and I accept that I am going to hit bad shots. I just love major championships. I love big weeks. I love the atmosphere. I feel like I’m maturing as a golfer and as a person so when I get to those big weeks I kind of know what is going to happen.”
With three top-10 finishes in his past seven events, including an eighth at the Players Championship and a tied fourth at the PGA Championship, Lowry is running nicely into the form he needs to stand a chance of retaining the Open title he won at Royal Portrush 22 months ago. “(At Kiawah) I led the field in driving stats last week, which is quite satisfying,” he said. “Around the greens I was quite good. My chipping was pretty good. My approach play wasn’t as good as it normally is so that kind of let me down a little bit. I had a good day on the greens on Friday but other than that I didn’t hole much. So, to have a top-five finish without putting well is quite satisfying.”
Monday 12 July marks the start of the week of the 149th Open. On that day Lowry will return the silver Claret Jug to Martin Slumbers, chief executive of the R&A, having held it for longer than anyone since Harrington won it in the successive years of 2007 and 2008.
“We had an amazing time with the trophy,” Lowry said. “I did put a few drinks in it but not that much. We filled it a couple of times and then we had a nice dinner with all my team at Christmas and we drank some nice wine out of it.
“I had it with me at the Race to Dubai in 2019 and was wheeling it through my hotel and this guy stopped me and asked, ‘Is that the Claret Jug?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and we started to talk. Next thing he’s begged me to see it. I opened the box and showed it to him and let him hold it and he started to cry because he was holding the Claret Jug. That’s what that trophy means to people that love their golf.”
“It has been sent back to be straightened once,” Lowry added. “I noticed on the airport scanner that there was a little bend in it. It’s not only me. I talked to Zach Johnson and he told me that he bent it too so it’s not just me.”
Lowry is a worthy addition to the line of successful Irish golfers of recent years. It is astonishing how much golfers from the island of Ireland have contributed to the highest levels of the professional game in recent years. Is there any country of comparable population (less than 7 million in both the Republic and Northern Ireland) that produces golfers with such regularity? Men from Ireland have had five victories in the past 13 Opens: Harrington (2007, 2008) Darren Clarke (2011), Rory McIlroy (2014) and Lowry on that sodden Sunday in 2019. This stream of green success does not include McIlroy winning the 2011 US Open and the PGA Championships of 2012 and 2014 nor Graeme McDowell’s victory in the US Open in 2010.
What is the reason for this? Is it that Ireland has more links courses than any other country and finding a way along a valley between towering sand dunes or avoiding a waving sea of marram grass or playing over rumpled terrain has helped Irish golfers develop real heart and character?
There is little or no history of golf in Lowry’s family. The Lowrys come from County Offaly, in the middle of the Republic of Ireland. They are a Gaelic football family and very good they are at it, too, so when Shane set out for his first attempt at golf it was only natural that his mother would do as she always did and put the appropriate footwear by the door for him to pick up on the way out. Trouble was the footwear in question were Shane’s Gaelic football boots not golf shoes.
Now though, Lowry’s trademark is an extraordinary deftness with short irons. In his hands lies sorcery, enabling him to play a deft stroke from 30 feet with as much ease as he crashes a drive 300 yards. On the (rare) days when his putting was less accurate than usual, Tom Watson used to look at his hands reproachfully and call them his hammer mitts. Lowry’s hands are not hammer mitts. They are magical, God-given.
Put Lowry no more than 10 feet from his target, from a lie as bare as a wooden floor and expect him to aim at a flagstick on a piece of green that is sloping away from him and his hands can spirit the ball with delicacy often to within inches, sometimes into the hole. He makes it seem as easy as switching on a light.
“I loved playing practice rounds with Shane,” McDowell said. “He’d throw a few balls down around the green and let them roll behind a hump or down in a dip and from there he’d get the ball so close to the hole that I’d be scratching my head thinking, ‘How did he do that?’ I’d say to him, ‘How did you do that?’ and he’d look at me puzzled. ‘Haven’t a clue,’ he’d say. ‘I just did it.’ ”
Pete Cowen the renowned coach tells a story of how years ago he took a group of promising young Irish amateurs for a weekend’s coaching. Later an official asked him which ones had shown any promise. “Rory (McIlroy) of course,” Cowen said. “But also the fat kid in glasses.”
That was Lowry who, having won the 3 Irish Open as an amateur in 2009, earned his first professional triumph in 2012, aged 25. He won the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational at Akron, Ohio, in 2015, finished tied second in the US Open at Oakmont the next year and won the 2019 Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship six months before his triumph at Portrush. Now 34, married with a young daughter and having recently bought a house in the US, he is spending more time on the PGA Tour and has become a popular and worthy contender in golf’s biggest events. He is the Open champion, too. Not bad for a fat kid in glasses.
Top: Shane Lowry during the 2021 PGA Championship
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