Hey, the bearded man from Clara is making an impression. The movie moguls may not yet be beating a path to his door but the 'Golf Channel' – mega players in the world of broadcasting – cast Shane Lowry as their man of choice to demonstrate how to play bunker shots from the pearl white sands here at Trump National Doral.
For sure, he’d had plenty of practice in the art in his first round, aided by extra work with his coach Neil Manchip.
Anyway, Lowry rose to the challenge in spreading his bunker player message to the masses before heading to the first tee to get his real work done in the second round of the WGC-Cadillac Championship on the Blue Monster.
That work, as it transpired, proved to be a testing exercise. In a response to the Thursday 62 scored by JB Holmes, pin placements for the second round were downright difficult.
Some flags were perched on slopes, others tucked away behind bunkers, and more set perilously close to water hazards. In short, it was a true challenge.
“You almost needed to have a perfect number to get it close,” he said.
The opening and closing holes of Lowry’s round – a 74 for 145, one over par at the midpoint –typified the demands.
On the first, his tee shot caught a fairway bunker and, seeking to extricate it down the fairway, he only managed to clip the top of the trap’s lip and advance it some 20 yards into the rough. That he managed to save a par was, to say the least, impressive.
Finishing hole
On the finishing hole, the 18th, he got the flipside of the coin. After a lovely drive to the right side of the fairway, Lowry was left with 205 yards to the flag.
“Perfect,” he said, of the five-iron that caddie Dermot Byrne placed in his hands. He fancied the shot. Except Lowry turned the shot over slightly, and the ball didn’t get the requisite spin when hitting the green’s surface and instead bounced onto into clingy rough over the back. His recovery ran through the green, frustratingly, and he finished with a bogey.
Overall, the round wasn’t what Lowry had wanted, even if the conditions were tough and flags placed in positions as if to prevent any recurrence of Holmes’ first day masterclass.
“It wasn’t going to get done by me, the way I played,” quipped Lowry of any prospect of following in Holmes’ shoes.
“It was hard to get the ball close, really hard. With the greens so firm, you have to be precise with your irons.”
Indeed, the two facets of Lowry’s play which disappointed him most of all were his iron play and also his chipping, normally an extremely strong area.
“I don’t think my iron play is that good this week. My chipping? I am not happy with that. I am rolling the ball well, putting lovely. Any time I have a chance to hole one, I will give it a go. I am driving the ball well too. If I can just get my iron play a little bit better, that would help.”
Lowry’s round was a battle early on, with that par save on the first – “something like that gives you a bit more momentum than hitting driver down, iron onto the green and making a par,” he argued – and then responding to a bogey on the third by reeling off six straight pars to turn in 37, one over on the day.
So engrossed was he with the task at hand, of battling for pars and sniffing the occasional birdie chance, that he wouldn’t have noticed the light aircraft overhead with advertising trailers promoting, among other things, his friend Graeme McDowell’s new beer product.
He grabbed his first birdie of the round on the Par five 12th only to suffer back-to-back bogeys on the 13th and 14th before responding by holing a 15-footer for birdie on the 15th. On the 18th, he overshot the green and paid the price.
“I’m disappointed with the finish. On level par (after 36 holes), I would have been going into the weekend thinking, ‘if I can shoot two 69s, hard done but doable, I would give myself a chance come Sunday.
“It would have been nice to be on level. Still, I am up towards the top of the leaderboard, if you take JB Holmes out of it, and I probably wouldn’t be too displeased with where I am lying. I need to play a little bit better . . .”
