On a tough and bruising opening day at the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, Shane Lowry and Rory McIlroy, playing together in the afternoon wave, looked destined to end the day looking down on the rest of the field.
With a pair of birdie putts on 17 to come, they were first and tied for second respectively at -4 and -3, but 15 minutes later, both those putts had been missed, as were par putts at the last and it was Wyndham Clark, with two birdies in his last three holes, who stole in to take the first round leader honours.
But, despite those closing bogeys where a pair of pushed tee shots were to blame, both Lowry and McIlroy can be happy with their days’ work and are very much in contention heading into round two.
It was a rather scrappy start, however, with Lowry making a good par save on the first after a pulled tee shot that forced him to layup, while McIlroy, who found the bunker off the tee, semi-duffed a chip and opened with a bogey.
McIlroy banished the memories of that duffed chip with a deft touch from short of the par-5 fourth and the resulting birdie drew him back alongside Lowry at level-par, and then both birdied the par-5 sixth, with Lowry draining a 15-footer while Rory, having hit a towering iron approach, watched his seven-footer for eagle dip low.
McIlroy traded a bogey on eight with a birdie on nine, while Lowry parred the remaining holes on the front and they were locked together at -1 at the turn.
Lowry’s first slip of the day came on 10, when a heavy-handed birdie putt drifted 15 feet past, but then rediscovered his groove with a nifty wedge to the par-5 12th and then followed with one of the shots of the day on 13, taking on the water and leaving himself a tap-in for his third birdie of the day.
This got him back to within one of McIlroy, who’d found his touch with the putter and rolled in a 17-footer on 11 and got up-and-down from the greenside bunker for another birdie on 12.
But just when it looked as though Rory was ready to put his foot down and take sole possession of the lead, a sloppy three-putt on the par-3 14th slammed on the brakes, and the pair were back level again at -2.
If Lowry’s approach on 13 was one of the shots of the day, his approach to the par-5 16th was even better. From 195 yards in the intermediate rough, he landed it in the perfect position on the shaved incline short of the green and his ball came to rest six feet below the hole and in went the eagle to lift him to -4 and into the solo lead.
McIlroy’s two-putt birdie on the same hole had him breathing down Lowry’s neck, but the disappointing finish, coupled with Clark’s impressive one, means both Irishmen will be in catchup mode when they take to the course in the early wave on Friday.
Despite the closing bogey, however, Lowry was satisfied with his day’s work, particularly when he’d seen how tough the golf course was playing for the early starters.
“Yeah, like I turned on the TV and watched some golf this morning and it didn’t look much fun out there,” he said. “I wasn’t particularly looking forward to my round, but I think we got favorable conditions. Even though it wasn’t easy, I felt like did I a good job of making my way around the golf course. I was pretty happy with my result.”
It’s been a busy week for Lowry, who played all four rounds at last week’s Cognizant Classic, played the Seminole Member-Pro event on Monday and a TGL match that night, but he still fancied his chances coming into a golf course and a tournament that he knows plays to his strengths.
“No, my expectations are never low,” he admitted. “I feel like I played pretty good at the Cognizant last week. I’ve been tinkering a little bit with drivers. I think there’s something wrong with the driver I was using last week for a few days. I used something different on Sunday and I used something different again today. So I don’t have a hundred percent trust in that yet, but I did hit some really nice drives there towards the end, apart from 18. I’m pretty happy with what I have in the bag, I just need to be able to stand up on holes like 18 and trust myself to start it down the left and commit to that shot. As the week goes on hopefully I’ll do that and, yeah, you never know where it will leave me.”
McIlroy too felt that the conditions for the late starters on day one had been a little easier than those faced by the early wave, and he too was happy with his opening effort.
“Yeah, good start,” he said. “I think the guys that teed off a little later got a little bit of a reprieve. It was still breezy, but not quite as tough as the guys got it this morning. Yeah, couple under was a good start.”
McIlroy and Lowry were paired together – along with Sepp Straka – in the final round of the Pebble Beach Pro-Am where McIlroy won and Lowry finished second, but despite the comfort of playing in the company of a close friend, he feels that you need to take care to remain fully focused on the job at hand.
“Yeah, I think we both have to make a conscious effort to not make it too comfortable as well,” he explained. “It’s like if you’re too relaxed and you’re too — that’s not a good thing either. So we try to treat it as if it’s just any other round. I certainly talk to him more than I talk to some other guys out there, but you still have to try to concentrate, and especially on a day like today when it was so tough.”
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