With a respectful raise of the pint to Padraig Harrington, the two most popular players in the field at the 153rd Open Championship had the place to themselves on Monday.
We don’t mean the golf course; that was, of course, available to all 156 competitors. We speak of the press center at Royal Portrush, where Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry were, on the opening day of Open week, the only players who the Royal & Ancient formally invited to speak with the media. Favorable treatment? No doubt. All good, though. Home games should come with perks.
McIlroy grew up a little more than an hour’s drive south of Portrush, in the town of Holywood. At 16, all curls and talent, he signed for a 61 on Portrush’s Open-host Dunluce course, a mark that still stands. (“I don’t remember a lot of it,” McIlroy said Monday before adding, “It was certainly the first time I’d ever felt, like, in the zone or that flow state or whatever you want to call it.”)
Lowry was raised a bit further south, across the border, in Clara, in the geographic heart of Ireland. He holds a different kind of Portrush record: Six summers ago, Lowry became only the second golfer to win an Open Championship on this beloved links, a victory that since has been commemorated by way of a two-story mural painted on the wall of a house just outside the Portrush gates. One hundred years from now they’ll still be hailing Lowry in the Portrush pubs, and probably another hundred years after that, too, assuming this rumpled patch of paradise hasn’t washed away into the sea.
So, yeah, the McIlroy and Lowry vibes are strong this week, just as they were in 2019, when Portrush welcomed back the Open for the first time in 68 years. For McIlroy and Lowry, the support has to be comforting. But it also can be overwhelming, crushing even. “I reckon that first tee that morning was the most nervous I’ve ever been on the first tee of a tournament,” Lowry said Monday. “All you want to do is get the ball down the fairway.”
When McIlroy stepped onto the first tee in the first round, the butterflies in his stomach felt more like raptors. He admitted Monday to “not being ready for how I was going to feel or what I was going to feel.” No need to revisit the horrors of the next 5 or so hours, but they weren’t pretty. McIlroy hit his opening tee shot out of bounds and went on to shoot 79. He rebounded admirably in the second round but still missed the cut.
McIlroy has spoken at length of the challenges and heartbreak of that 2019 homecoming. But on Monday, Lowry added some new perspective, saying, “I remember at the time everyone thought, this is the end of the world. Rory is out there missing the cut, he’s out there making 8 on the 1st. Golf will never be the same.”
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But thing is, Lowry said, it’s all part of the gig. As a world-class golfer, “you move on, and you forget.” He added: “I think you realize that what you do today — it’s not the end of the world. It really is not. Just apply yourself as well as you can and then go out and give it 100 percent. That’s all you can do.”
And who knows, maybe six years later you’ll win your first green jacket and the career Grand Slam.
It’s fascinating to hear Lowry dissect the mental game, because, by his own admission, he’s not exactly Roger Federer when it comes to competitive composure. In fact, Lowry is known for going full Hulk when things don’t go his way. After playing a wedge shot from a bad-luck lie at the PGA Championship earlier this year, Lowry hammered his club into the fairway and bellowed an expletive not suitable for family programming. “I’ve had a couple of episodes this year, but golf is hard at this level,” Lowry said Monday. “And there’s been times where, yes, I’ve been not at my best. But I feel like I’m pretty good at going out there and competing against the best in the world week in and week out and giving myself the best shot.”
Lowry has worked at thinking more positively. Assisting on that front have been his coach, Neil Manchip, and also a newer addition to Lowry’s stable: mental-game whiz, Bob Rotella, who also works with McIlroy among a slew of other Tour pros. Lowry first connected with Rotella by happenstance, when Rotella was in attendance at Padraig Harrington’s World Golf Hall of Fame induction at the Pinehurst U.S. Open last summer.
As it happened, Lowry was coming off a dispiriting fourth-round 85 at the Memorial and in such a gloomy state that he was mulling withdrawing from the U.S. Open. That was before a quick but impactful chat with Rotella set Lowry straight. “He just told me I need to forgive myself and allow yourself to do that,” Lowry said later that week at Pinehurst. “The one thing you can’t do is dwell on it, and you just have to forget about it and move on.”
On Monday, Lowry said something else interesting: that he’s often at his best when he’s not at his best. That sounds like something Yogi Berra might have said, but Lowry explained it in a way that makes perfect sense.
“Sometimes when everything is going really well, I get complacent,” he began. “Then all of a sudden before I know it, I’m like three over through five and you start to panic because you feel like you’re going to do well.
“I feel like when things are not going well is when I’m at my best, or when I don’t feel like things are going well.”
Lowry cited the 2019 Open. He said he’d been playing “some of the best golf of my life” heading into that week but at the same time was “quite antsy and quite uptight about the whole thing.” On Wednesday of that week, he had what he described as a “meltdown,” because he had convinced himself that he was going to quickly eject from the tournament.
Instead, the opposite happened.
Lowry opened with a pair of 67s before posting a third-round score that won him the Open: a dazzling 63. “If I can keep my complacency away and my expectation down, that’s when I’m at my best,” he said Monday.
As for his mood this week?
“I’m feeling great the last two days, so that’s not great,” he said, laughing.
“No, honestly, I’ve had a great week,” he said. “I’ve had a great week of practice. I just need to play s*** for the next couple of days, and I’ll be all right.”