The boy has grown into a man, a far cry from the time his father Brendan paid a trip to Kenny’s, the local shop in Clara, Co Offaly, where he bought his nine-year-old son a second-hand 9-iron and putter along with some old Commando golf balls and plastic tees so young Shane Lowry could try his hand at pitch-and-putt.
Not quite three decades later, but close, that excitement of first hitting steel clubhead to golf ball is still evident. Only now, in the run up to the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black on Long Island, Lowry – who still wears his emotions on his sleeve – is a man immersed in a team event, that of Team Europe against Team USA, which has become part of his DNA.
Where week-in and week-out professional golfers pursue the selfish pursuit of doing it for themselves, this biennial event – Lowry’s third involvement – is all about team. As the saying goes, “There’s no ‘I’ in team.” And you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone more passionate.
Luke Donald hit the nail on the head when confirming Lowry’s selection as a captain’s pick earlier this month, saying: “[His] passion for the Ryder Cup is second-to-none, his energy infectious. He understands the team above everything else more than most of the guys and it’s just really great to have his energy and his vibe in the team room. But [he’s] one hell of a player as well.”
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Lowry, now 38, has always been a team player. Those black shirts and trousers, which are a characteristic of his normal Sunday final-round appearances, are a nod to the colours of Clara GAA club; before he made the move into the professional ranks he was part of an Ireland team that won back-to-back European Team Championships in 2007 and 2008, the first of those on a team that also included Rory McIlroy.
The Ryder Cup is made for Lowry, in many ways. This is his third time to play – all as captain’s picks, by Pádraig Harrington at Whistling Straits in 2021 (delayed by a year due to Covid) and by Donald in Rome in 2023 – and, if an automatic place was missed out by the narrowest of margins on this occasion, Tyrrell Hatton finishing four points ahead of him (1,279 to 1,274), in effect equivalent to one putt through all of the qualifying campaign, there was never any doubt about his place in New York.
The snapshots from Lowry’s two Ryder Cup appearances tell a lot about the man. Remember his reaction to holing a long putt on the last in his fourballs match with Hatton to beat Tony Finau and Harris English? The absence of European fans meant his roar filled the silence of those US fans that Saturday afternoon, his father – arms raised aloft from his viewpoint in the sandhills – not far behind in matching the bellow of joy.
Or in Rome, his role as pacifier in the car park of Marco Simone Golf Club on the Saturday night when bundling McIlroy into a car after he’d confronted US caddie Jim ‘Bones’ Mackay, an innocent party to an incident on the 18th green when Patrick Cantlay’s bagman Joe LaCava had waved his cap and walked along the line of McIlroy’s putt on the 18th green.
It only emerged later that McIlroy’s anger had been fuelled by a motivational talk from Lowry. “I got back into the team room and Shane Lowry was giving us an incredible, motivational talk and as he’s speaking I’m getting angrier and angrier about what happened [on the 18th] and that riled me up to what occurred in the car park afterwards,” McIlroy said.
All of which goes some way to explaining why Lowry so badly wanted to be part of Team Europe for this latest edition of the Ryder Cup and why it is circled every two years as his one of his main goals.
“The Ryder Cup ... something that I wanted for a long time [on turning professional] was to play in the Ryder Cup and then obviously getting on the team in 2021. Then, it’s funny, I remember that year they gave us numbers and our numbers were the amount of people who have played Ryder Cups and I was 163 which, when you think about it, is not actually that many people,” he says.
“So to do it then and to play the last one [in Rome] and this one obviously is kind of self-fulfilling, but it doesn’t mean much to me any more unless you win. You don’t want to say you played five Ryder Cups and you won one. You want to say I won a certain number of Ryder Cups. I think a lot, for me, has gone into this [team] this year and I’m very excited.
“I feel like, as the years have gone on, mentally I have matured better and just become a pretty solid player. I probably don’t win as much as I would like, but I feel I am consistent at this level and I can go toe-to-toe with the best of them at times and I’m carving out a decent career for myself. I always would like to achieve more, but I am very happy with what I have done so far.”
Lowry’s career has certainly turned out to be special for him, with his Claret Jug success at the 149th Open at Royal Portrush in 2019 providing the highlight along with winning WGCs (the Bridgestone in 2015) and Rolex Series events on the DP World Tour (Abu Dhabi HSBC in 2019 and BMW PGA Championship in 2022).
Yet, the pull of team, of the Ryder Cup, has its own lure, an obsessive desire to play his part. “As I get older, it’s getting even more and more important. I just love to do it.”
This year’s challenge of an away win on US turf – with home advantage for Keegan Bradley’s team – has also only served to increase that desire for victory.
In the recent BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, Lowry was drawn to play in the pro-am with three English rugby players – Marcus Smith, Ben Earl and Jamie George – who naturally enough wanted to talk golf. Lowry, though, had other things on his mind and wanted to know how they prepared for playing away matches and coping with such pressures.
“I was asking them about going playing in New Zealand, going playing in Australia or going playing in Dublin. They’re like, ‘When the game starts, you don’t see the crowd and you just go about your business’; and I feel like that is what we have to do [in Bethpage],” he says.
“As players we will be fine, it is more so the people around us, and as long as everyone is okay, it is golf and we are there to do a job and we are there to win a tournament and these people outside the ropes will not have a negative effect on us or me. If we are good enough, we can use it as something positive and try and use it to our advantage.”
No team has won an away Ryder Cup since what became known as the Miracle at Medinah in 2012, when Europe trailed the USA by 6-10 headed into the final day’s 12 singles and produced the miraculous comeback to win 14½ to 13½.
“It will be difficult [to win], but I think we have got a great opportunity to do something amazing. For me, that’s so exciting as a golfer. This is what I do. This is the reason I wake up in the mornings. Honestly, I love competing at the highest level, playing the Majors, but like this is actually the reason I wake up in the mornings. This is what I want to do,” Lowry says of how the Ryder Cup provides his golfing heartbeat.
“People might not want me to be like that, and I might get some criticism for saying something like that, but that’s just me.”
Of the days building up, he says: “I get myself ready physically and mentally and that’s something I love doing. The week before Augusta and the week before The Open are my two favourite weeks and this is another one as well.
“Once you get to that team room on the Monday morning, it is head down and you are ready to all work together and hopefully achieve the one goal we are looking to achieve.”
