At last, Shane Lowry got a break from the weather gods. The Offaly man completed his final round here at Valhalla Golf Club a little over half an hour before the heavens opened and, although he finished with a fine 67 for an aggregate of 283 (one under par), there remained a lingering regret about how his tournament had been undone by events on Friday.
Remember? Lowry, in the first group off the first tee in that second round, had been forced to play to flooded greens and, then, when a suspension was eventually called after he finished out on the hole with a bogey, he was left out on the course, standing – under an umbrella – for over 45 minutes and then a few minutes on the range, before play resumed. His head was scrambled.
Over the weekend, other players – Henrik Stenson, Sergio Garcia among them – approached him to tell him that such treatment was unfair and basically not right.
“Thinking about it now, I look back on Friday morning as the killer. That was a real momentum-stopper for me. You think what might have been if that hadn’t happened . . . I let it get to me a lot. At the time I was very, very annoyed. I think we shouldn’t have been out there and we shouldn’t have been kept out there. I was standing in one spot for 45 minutes. ‘
Black-balled’
“Fair enough John (Paramour) brought me in and let me hit a couple of balls [on the range] but what good was that? I was already black-balled. It was just disappointing. . . I mean, maybe if it was a few different people on that green it might have been a different story. The fact that it was a few lesser-known guys I think made all the difference.”
The rights or wrongs of the situation may have earned Lowry some sympathy, but it also proved to be an expensive lesson.
“It’s all over now and there’s nothing I can do about it, I just have to get on with things,” he said.
Yesterday at least provided more food for thought for Lowry, as he again finished with some aplomb in shooting a 67 which included seven birdies and that moved him some way off the bottom of the leaderboard. Not enough to influence his Ryder Cup ambitions or to make further inroads on his bid to break into the top-50 in the world rankings, but enough to believe he has the game to achieve greater success.
Lowry, who is now taking a three week break before resuming tournament play in the European Masters in Switzerland, intends to work on his fitness in the interim.
