Golf

Shane Lowry ready to change gear as season enters fast lane

Golfer will play in 11 tournaments in 15 weeks as he seeks to arrest slide down rankings

Shane Lowry in action during the 2017 RBC Heritage at Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, last week. Photograph: Jared C Tilton/Getty Images

Philip Reid's face
Philip Reid
Wed Apr 26 2017 - 06:00

“I have to go and pay for Pampers!” quips Shane Lowry, aware of those newly acquired fatherly duties. It all means that the 30-year-old Offaly man is ready to move up some gears, from being lightly raced – only seven tournaments played so far this season – into what he calls a “fairly manic” period as he seeks to turn his season around.

In fact, Lowry is set to play 11 of the next 15 weeks up to the US PGA at Quail Hollow, a stretch bookended by tournaments in North Carolina that starts with next week’s Wells Fargo up to the season’s final Major. “It’s fairly full-on until the end of the summer,” he says of that transatlantic schedule that features the three remaining Majors of the season: the US Open at Erin Hills in June, the British Open at Royal Birkdale in July and the US PGA.

But it’s more than just about the Majors. It’s about arresting a slide down the world rankings. It’s about getting FedEx Cup points on the board. It’s about banking some Race to Dubai points. And, in effect, every tournament is huge with the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth and the DDF Irish Open now part of the European Tour’s megabucks Rolex Series. And The Players, golf’s unofficial fifth major.

Play and perform

For Lowry, it’s about finding consistency, a bit like getting off a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs and finding a clear road ahead to play and perform.

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“I’m just trying to be very patient at the minute. It has been very frustrating. I’m not going to try and force it . . . I’m just going to try and go out next week and try and play my way into the tournament and see what happens after that.

“I know in the past this is the time of season where I start to play well so I’m just hoping it’s the same this year. My good weeks have always been in the middle of the season, so I need to just keep my head down and keep doing what I’m doing.

“I feel like I’m doing the right things. I don’t think there are any drastic changes that need to be made or anything that needs to be done,” says Lowry, of a season that so far has featured two top-20s and two missed cuts in his seven appearances.

One of those missed cuts came at the Masters, where he played with Sergio Garcia for the first two rounds. That cameo effectively showed the thin line that golfers walk. For much of those 36 holes, Lowry looked the part and played the better golf. But he wasn’t around for the weekend, and Garcia finally walked away with a breakthrough Major title.

Overanalyse

“I’m out there trying my best. It’s not happening for me now but I know it will, I know all I need to do is keep going. I know I’m good enough and my golf is good enough and that at some stage it’ll turn around. You only have to look back, after I missed the cut at the Open in 2015, I went away from that and if you were to start to think what went wrong that week and overanalyse it too much, I wouldn’t have won the following week [the WGC-Bridgestone] in Akron. You just have to wait for good weeks to come.”

If one area of his game has waited for that light-switch moment, it is probably his putting. Frustrated? A little perhaps; but he’s on top of it.

“For me personally, I feel quite happy with where I am. Sometimes people around you can get quite anxious; people think there’s a need for change when you’re not playing great. I almost feel like you need to go back to basics and back to what you did when you were playing your best and maybe that’s what I’ve done on the greens. I’ve struggled on the greens for the last eight months and tried to change too much, I think. I’ve just gone back to basics, what I know best, and I’m hoping that that’s the answer.”

* Shane Lowry was speaking at the launch of the “One for Ireland” campaign, which takes place from Friday April 28th to Monday May 1st. Coordinated by the Irish Youth Foundation, it will benefit Jigsaw, MyMind, Exchange House Ireland, ISPCC Childline, Aware, Youth Work Ireland and Samaritans.