Shane Lowry admits that his 2024 PGA Tour season has given him a lot of belief that some of his best golf is still ahead of him as he looks to start racking up the wins over the next few years.
Lowry has won just seven times in his professional career with his last individual win coming at Wentworth in 2022 but after enjoying a career best year on the PGA Tour where he made the Tour Championship for the first time, the 37-year-old hopes to turn that consistency into wins going forward.
Before that though, Lowry commented on the termination of his sponsorship with Kingspan and expressed his deepest sympathies for the families of the Grenfell Tower disaster in which 72 people died in 2017.
“Look, I have said all I had to say in my statement yesterday,” Lowry said ahead of the Amgen Irish Open at Royal County Down.
“I said at the end of my statement that I wasn’t going to make any further comment on it, and I am sticking with that.”
“Look, I can’t imagine what those families have gone through the last few years,” Lowry said.
“I am not going to sit here and talk too much about it. It is obviously a touchy subject, and my heart goes out to them. It is what it is now for me and Kingspan.”
The Clara man rounded off an impressive season Stateside with a top-8 finish on his Tour Championship debut. An inauspicious start to the campaign saw Lowry begin without the signature events before falling outside the top-50 but a 3rd place finish at Bay Hill kickstarted his year into gear.
Lowry won the Zurich Classic alongside Rory McIlroy, a win he describes as “crucial” to his season, but also had chances to win the US PGA and Open Championships as he broke back into the top-30 in the world and guaranteed his spot in the signature events for 2025.
“I feel like I could have won more this year but I felt like I gave myself a lot of opportunities,” said the now world number 32. “I felt like I gave myself a lot of opportunities, and I’m pretty happy with the year I had. It’s nice finishing with where I finished on the FedEx but would I probably trade a win for a few places on that, really.
“I think the chances again, especially the chances I gave myself in the majors and a few of the bigger tournaments, Bay Hill and tournaments like that, I feel like certainly it has been like a lot of progress in my career.”
Lowry admitted that he began the season riddled with doubt as to whether his best years were behind him but he has ended the PGA Tour season with a lot of hope that more wins are coming as he gears up for the DP World Tour’s crescendo.
“I sat down at the start of this year and I know I’m not getting any younger. I’m by no means old but the years are creeping on, and you do doubt yourself a little bit. For me to kind of produce one of the most consistent years of my career this year I think is something that has given me a lot of hope going forward for the next few years. I’m going to try to make the most of the next few years and give it everything I have and try to win a few more tournaments and hopefully a few big ones.”
One tournament that Lowry would love to win (again) is this week’s Amgen Irish Open having won in Baltray as an amateur in 2009 having passed up an opportunity to compete an amateur, professional double last year at the K Club.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve fully answered that question for the last 14 years!” laughed Lowry whose last venture up to the north of Ireland saw him come back from Portrush with the Claret Jug in 2019.
“Like it would be cool to have both. What I did in Baltray was something that I’ll remember forever, and I’ll always say it would probably be the greatest thing I ever did; didn’t realize I was going to do what I did in Portrush.
“I would love it. It’s one of the great events on the European Tour. It always has been. It’s on a great golf course they can. This would be a good week to do it. The last time I played a tournament up north, I did all right. You never know.
“The Irish Open is one of the biggest sporting events in Ireland, we are a sporting mad nation. We love our sports people and we love our events and we jump on any bandwagon that’s going. That’s just the way we are. You get the Irish Open every year, it’s always pretty much sold out, huge crowds. We always get a decent field and when myself and Rory and Pádraig and the other Irish players turn up, it does make for a great event.”
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