Lowry leaves pining for glory after shooting seven over par
AN HOUR after Shane Lowry realised his Masters was over, a package was collected at the media centre in Augusta National. It had been sent from Dublin by a company who read of lost sliothars in the city; Lowry had explained earlier in the week that he and the family and friends staying with him passed the time hitting a few balls in the street, but having brought three sliothars they had already lost two.
Spotting an opportunity, the company sent a dozen new ones to him.
By the time they were collected, Lowry’s time among the pines was at an end. The consoling power of 12 sliothars must be modest when a man’s latest immersion in a childhood dream has been brutally ended.
He was not the only one leaving Augusta National on Friday night with his head a blizzard of confusion and regret.
The theatre around the Masters is grand and it is often splendid, too. It is one of the few sporting events, like the Super Bowl and the World Series, that works its way into common discourse among the American people. But whereas the other two are climaxes of the most popular sports in the country, the Masters is known for different reasons.
History is the compelling one, but this week also sees America shake itself free of the last of winter’s cold. It is the start of spring. The way the championship heralds an Irish summer, the US associates Masters’ week with warmer weather and longer days.
Golf is not widely popular here, but the affection for the Masters is pervasive.
Shane Lowry and others like him will not have room in their hearts for Augusta and its lore this morning.
When he spoke after his round on Friday night, it had not been confirmed he would miss the cut but he knew. It was only when he got to the clubhouse and saw the scoring he realised he was in 60th place.
‘I’d like a run at the weekend to get a bit more experience around here as well, and another weekend at a major,’ Lowry had said.
Few Saturdays are harder won than the third round at the Masters, and a second round of seven-over-par 79 ruined him.
It is difficult to recall seeing him so disappointed, but he was not the only player talking in the setting sun after the second round and trying to put order on what the hell had just happened.
The difficulty of the course is understood, respected by all of the players.
Its challenge was steepened by the high winds of Thursday and Friday and by the afternoon of the second round, the effects of rain earlier in the week had disappeared.
Greens were hardening, and so there were tests in the air and on the ground. Players that spiralled into a struggle, as Lowry did from the start, could find refuge nowhere.
‘The golf course is set up tough. They didn’t want to see too many low scores out there,’ said defending champion Danny Willett.
A year ago he was the most famous and happiest golfer in the world.
He missed the cut, like Lowry, on seven over and he shared his second-round traumas. Willett’s began early with a quadruplebogey eight on the first. There were no eagles and only three birdies recorded there in the first two rounds, with 86 pars and almost as many bogeys, 80.
Lowry bogeyed it twice and Rory McIlroy dropped shots there on Thursday and Friday as well. It has traditionally been considered one of the most difficult holes on the course. This week, though, the winds have swept over it as malignant as buzzards.
‘That may be one of the hardest starting holes in golf, especially with any kind of west or northwest wind,’ said William McGirt.
Golfers can quickly lose a thread of form and the sight of a man unravelling is, frankly, one of the compelling attractions of the sport. It happened to McIlroy in 2011, Greg Norman in 1996 and Spieth at the 12th a year ago. On Thursday and Friday of this week, there were dozens of players locked into their own psychodramas.
Most of them went unnoticed, but their misery coagulated. The resulting mess thickened the legend of merciless Augusta.
‘It’s a golf course that if you hit it in the right place, it’s scoreable,’ said Ryan Moore. ‘If you start hitting it in the wrong places, and that can even be on the green, you’re going to make bogey. That’s the beauty of this golf course.’
And that is easy for Moore to say. He started yesterday’s third round in a tie for sixth on oneunder. Players that made it through the churning challenges of Thursday and Friday were naturally trying to accentuate the reasonableness of the test.
That’s because they had to face it again yesterday, knowing that while the winds were quietening, the temperature was climbing and so the greens would be at their most difficult.
‘Any time this place firms up, it plays its hardest, just because it’s hard to control your golf ball,’ said Charley Hoffman, who endured to hang on as one of the joint leaders on Friday night.
‘If you hit quality shots in the wind, you can still control your golf ball because it will land soft on the greens, but that being said, it’s hard to putt in the wind on these greens if you’re not in the right position.’
To see 1992 champion Fred Couples high on the leaderboard ahead of the weekend stoked sentiment that burns like a sun.
It was fired, too, by Larry Mize making it across the cut-line 30 years after his victory here.
What was gained in warmhearted stories like theirs came at the cost of young challengers like Lowry.
Only the few are chosen, and the Offaly man believed he could be one of them this time.
At 30 years of age, he will believe his day will come again. It certainly will, but it needs to be as soon as possible.
Lowry thought that on this, his third visit, he arrived understanding better Augusta’s famous challenges.
It turned out that Augusta had kept some of its mystery after all.