Scrum of fans gives last push to victory
MIKE DICKSON joins the fans supporting Lowry at rain-lashed Royal Portrush
THe rain was pounding, horizontally, into the hillside overlooking the eighth fairway, one of the most outlying areas of Portrush.
This was when the wind and wet was at its zenith yesterday, but one man’s misery is another’s delight.
‘Isn’t it tremendous?’ remarked the gentleman from Belfast. ‘This has got to be great for Shane. It’s no problem for him, bring it on.’
Personal discomfort was nothing for Shane Lowry’s devotees, not if it meant that nature was assisting an Irishman trying to win the Open on its return to these parts.
To follow the eventual champion around outside the ropes yesterday was to feel what it might be like playing for the Ireland rugby team in the scrum.
A very polite and friendly scrum, it must be said, as they traipsed round en masse to support their hero without ever being disparaging to Tommy Fleetwood, the one player who may have deprived their man of glory.
Portrush’s viewer- friendly undulations have impressively absorbed the 237,000 spectators this week, but were straining at the seams for this final grouping. Lowry was marching his army to the top of the hills and marching them down again.
From north or south, they were full square behind this amiable bear of a man from County Offaly. There were plenty of Irish tricolours and one of them was draped around the shoulders of Catherine Black, from Ballycastle, along the coast.
She had been working earlier in the day as a marshal but, duties finished, had shed her light blue jacket and decided to show her colours while joining the throng trying to find a vantage point.
For her it was irrelevant where in Ireland he was from. ‘The politics of this place are obviously complicated but I don’t think that applies when it comes to golf and it certainly wouldn’t apply this weekend,’ she said.
Jim O’Brien, from Dublin, has been known to travel to America to support Lowry, previously not one of the country’s best-known players. ‘ He is a very natural talent and a very natural person,’ he said. ‘ There are no airs and graces and that’s why so many people warm to him.’
Several followers from the south also pointed to his Gaelic football connections (his father Brendan was a star player for Offaly). Down in the food and beer valley by the third green, a pitstop for the Lowry army, Colin Brown from Galway was prepared to swallow his football allegiances to cheer the home player.
‘My team is Laois and we are the deadly rivals of Offaly. His father was one of their best-known players but I’m forgetting that,’ he said. ‘ People like Shane because he’s a normal fella with a beer belly who likes a pint. He’s not some superfit athlete, so it’s easy to identify with him.’
The first few holes were edgy for the mass support. After Lowry went into the bunker on the first, a Lancashire accent cackled: ‘He’s gone already.’
The tension eased on the third green when the phone of a marshal rang while he was holding up his ‘Quiet please’ sign, much to everyone’s amusement. Then Lowry settled nerves with a birdie.
It all went a bit quiet in the galleries when the weather badly deteriorated on the eighth, and the Irishman’s game along with it, his mini-run of bogies allowing Fleetwood to briefly close in.
The serious volume only returned when the contest was ended by the englishman’s double bogey on the 14th. If there was a sense of
it was hard to detect as the party rolled among the friendly scrum.