WHEN I AM FINISHED, I WANT TO BE ABLE TO SAY: I GAVE IT EVERYTHING – LOWRY
Shane Lowry returns to action next week, determined to hit the ground running after a three-month coroanvirus lay-off. The Open champion pumped iron, pedalled his Peloton bike in his homemade gym and has most recently been on the course again with world No.1 Rory McIlroy. He’s happier than ever but wants no regrets when he eventually hangs up his spikes
IT’S 3PM on a stormy Palm Beach afternoon and Shane Lowry is back at his Florida base to recharge, his day’s work done before he has to jump on a Zoom call with the PGA Tour for his at-home Covid-19 test and an eagerly awaited return to action. It will be the Open champion’s debut in the Charles Schwab Challenge at Hogan’s Alley, aka Colonial Country Club, and while Lowry would ordinarily be wary of a first appearance at a notoriously tight and tricky venue, he is bursting with enthusiasm to “hit the ground running” alongside Graeme McDowell and Rory McIlroy after a 90-day coronavirus lay-off.
By rights, Lowry should still be basking in the warm glow of a Dubai Duty Free Irish Open return in front of an adoring home crowd as the reigning Open champion – “It would have been unreal down in Mount Juliet last weekend.”
But instead, he’s preparing to head into the unknown in a nation that’s still in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic and reeling following a wave of protests in the wake of the tragic death of unarmed black man George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis last week.
“It’s pretty mad what’s happening,” Lowry says down the phone line. “I watch a lot of news, and I see what’s happening. Generally, I sit on the fence with things like this and my political views are pretty minimal because I wouldn’t consider myself as very qualified to answer stuff like that. It’s just a very strange time with the coronavirus and everything that’s going on.
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“They say where they are coming out of the coronavirus, but we actually are still in the middle of it. It’s just mad to see what’s going on. [My wife] Wendy’s sister lives in the middle of Manhattan, and she has been sending us pictures and videos of the protests and the looting that goes on. It’s just incredibly strange times, and this has just added to it.”
Lowry had planned to head home to Ireland at the start of May before returning to the US but has since extended the lease of his rental home for another 12 months after three months of uncertainty during the US lockdown.
“At the start, I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know when I’d be back playing,” he confesses. “We’d kind of made a plan to go home at the start of May because we didn’t think there was going to be any golf over here. When the golf courses were closed here, I found that difficult, just trying to fill my days.
“At one stage we were thinking we might not play any more tournaments this year. That was probably the most difficult time. But it’s been grand.”
Lowry won’t get a chance to sneak home to Offaly to see his beloved Clara in GAA action unless the Irish Open is rescheduled for the autumn.
“I do miss the simple things about home – going out for a drink, or going for nine holes with the lads, but it is what it is,” he says.
“But I have a decent set-up here. I went out at the start and bought a gym and managed to get a bit fitter and stronger. The little gym kind of kept me going and mentally, it was good for me. I do miss home a little bit, but it is a very small sacrifice to make being over here, especially getting back next week.
“You miss the sport on TV too, the GAA, and the rest. Isn’t it funny? There haven’t been other pandemics, but during the last big recession, back in the late 2000s, the one thing that got people up and out of themselves for a while was sport, and we don’t have that.
“It’s only at times like this that you realise how big a part sport in general plays in your life when you are without it for a while.”
European Tour players will miss the multi-million-euro prize funds as the circuit regresses nearly 20 years in terms of purses and CEO Keith Pelley scrambles to keep the ship afloat following the disaster of the pandemic, starting with a six-event UK Swing behind closed doors. “I think he’s done a good job,” Lowry says. “The only option was to get people in one place and keep them there for a while. It will be tricky times for them with a lot of the bigger players over in America. So it will be interesting to see what kind of fields they get. But if you were a European Tour player, I’d have no problem going over and playing six tournaments in a row.
“Get into your car and drive around the UK, hotels on-site and a few nice venues there like Celtic Manor, the Belfry and the Forest of Arden. It almost feels like old-school European Tour.”
Goal
Lowry’s big goal this year was to make Pádraig Harrington’s European Ryder Cup team, but he will have to wait until the end of the month to discover if the event will happen, with or without fans.
To add to his sense of uncertainty, the European Tour has reportedly decided to freeze the European World Points List until the European Tour returns to action in late July – a move prompted by a furious European Tour reaction to the Official
World Golf Ranking’s decision to restart with next week’s PGA Tour and Korn Ferry Tour events in the US, before the rest of the world’s tours return.
In coordination with the European Tour’s tournament committee and Ryder Cup captain Harrington, Pelley told players in a memo that he has approved the “freezing” of the World Points List until the week of the “first European Tour event back.”
That means that Lowry, McDowell, McIlroy and the rest of Europe’s US-based stars will play as many as seven non-counting PGA Tour events between now and the European Tour’s return on July 22, though Harrington assures them he will be “monitoring the form of all possible Ryder Cup team members as part of his general review of player performances”.
It’s not good news for Lowry, but he insists it will make no difference to him in his quest to make the team.
“Obviously, I can’t make points now, which isn’t ideal,” he says. “But like I said earlier, it’s strange times, and everything has to happen for a reason. I’ll just have to prove myself by playing well. As I have said over the last few years, I have to go out and try and do the best I can.”
While he is very close to Harrington, he insists they have said little to each other about the Ryder Cup since the Dubliner was appointed captain in January last year.
Course
“You know what, if we’ve talked about the Ryder Cup over the course of the couple of years that he’s been captain, it would be for 10 minutes in total, that would be it,” Lowry insists.
“We don’t talk about it at all. He probably doesn’t want to talk to me about it, and I don’t want really to talk to him about it either.
“I know what I have to do – end of story. I need to try to make the team. Who knows what way it is going to be done in the end. And if I don’t make the team, I just have to try to show a bit of form going into it.
“I am not going to lump too much pressure on myself. Next week I will just be happy to be back out playing some competitive golf and I will try to play my way back into some competitive form and see how that goes.
“There are huge tournaments coming up that aren’t the Ryder Cup – the Majors and the FedEx Cup. I am well outside the mark in the FedEx, so I have to make a few points over the next nine weeks.
“I am just hoping that it all goes off smoothly and we don’t get dragged off again. I just hope we get to play the US Open and the PGA and the Masters and stuff like that and hopefully I can play a bit of good golf along the way.”
He has played golf non-stop since the Florida courses reopened three weeks ago and sounds confident he can pick up where he left off.
“I’ve played a good bit of golf with Rory, which has been good. It’s great to practise playing against the best player in the world. I’ve been losing a few dollars to him, but I think it’s money well spent when you get to mix in those circles.
“I actually feel very sharp, to be honest, I am not as uptight as I would be starting in January, and I am just looking forward to being out there and trying to hit the ground running, get on a bit of a run and see what happens.”
Destined
Lowry’s team has always maintained that he was destined to win a Major, but while the midlander has always had a deeprooted belief in his ability, he has only recently come to realise how much that shines through for others.
“I think I am still the same person I was,” he says. “Over my whole career, I have never been one to get too cocky. But deep down I have that self-belief. In fact, I’ve just read a report [coach] Neil [Manchip] did on a Zoom call I did with the GUI panels the other day.
“Neil wrote about the feedback he got from the players and reading it, what I took away is that I have more self-belief than I feel myself.
“That’s what a lot of people took away from it, the belief I have in myself. And when you look at it, I probably do have a lot of self-belief. If you look at the way I have done things down through the years, I have done things my own way and not let other people tell me what to do.
“So maybe deep down I do have that self-belief, I just need it to come out a little bit more than it does.”
He’s known for some time that his good golf is good enough to compete with anyone in the game. With one Major on the mantelpiece, surely that only bodes well for the future as he looks to add to his haul?
“Yeah, I feel that if you put me out on the back nine against anyone, I can beat them,” he replies. “Some days, if a better player plays better than you, he is going to beat you. Look at the Canadian Open last year. I went out in the final round one shot off the lead, and I was four-under after 13, and the course wasn’t playing easy.
“I thought I had a great chance of winning the tournament, and I looked at the leaderboard and the world No 1, which was Rory, was running away with it because he’s the best player in the world and if he brings his A-game, it’s very hard to beat.
“But I still believe, if you put me against anybody down the stretch, I can beat them.”
Rather than putting himself under pressure to back up his Major win with another, Lowry prefers to rely on the one-day-at-a-time philosophy that has worked so well for him over the past 15 months.
“I wouldn’t say winning a Major was a monkey off my back. It’s not that I wasn’t destined to do it, but who knows in this game. I might win two or three more. Or I might win none.
“The one thing I know is that between now and the end of my career I am going to give it my best to win more. I hope I give myself a couple more chances because the buzz you get out of it and the buzz of being in contention in the big tournaments is what I love.
“You just don’t know in this game so the way I go about it, I don’t take anything for granted, I just do my best and see where it leaves me at the end of the week. Hopefully, I can put a few more trophies on the table over the next few years and maybe one or two of them will hopefully be a Major.”
The 2019 Open was a watershed for Lowry, and he admits he since flipped a mental switch and adhered to a simple homespun philosophy that works for him.
“I really feel I have a great outlook on life and that’s going to improve me as a golfer and as a person over the next few years,” he says. “Everything takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight, and you just have to wait for it.”
If he could write his own obituary, he knows what he’d like it to say.
“When I am finished, and I lay it all out on the table, I want to be able to say: I gave it everything and did everything I could to do as well as I could. I don’t want to have any regrets.
“If I can do that between now and then, I will have had a pretty decent career, and I will be pretty happy with what I have.
“It’s as I was saying on that Zoom call I had with the GUI lads the other day – the only thing you can do is leave your house in the morning and give it your best, there’s literally nothing more you can do.
“You need a little luck along the way to do certain things and see where it leaves you at the end of the day.
“Some days it’s harder than other days. And some days you have a bad day, but that’s the way it is.”