Golf is a game of fine margins, and as ever in such situations, Lady Luck plays her part. And unfortunately for Shane Lowry, she wasn’t in the mood to smile on the world number 10.
When all was said and done, Lowry had signed for a level-par 71 on day two, leaving him on +2 overall and just inside the cutline when his final putt dropped. But not for long.
Less than five minutes later, the projected number had shifted and it wasn’t in Lowry’s favour. But not much had been in Lowry’s favour, and that was encapsulated by an eighth-hole debacle that was through no fault of Lowry’s own.
After laying up to an ideal number at the short par-4, when he reached his ball he discovered that it was semi-buried in a pitchmark. Ordinarily, a player would be able to get relief from an embedded ball, but that’s only providing that it’s embedded in its own pitchmark. Lowry’s, he was informed, had bounced into somebody else’s.
Five minutes later, he’d walked off with a bogey-five after only being able to advance the ball as far as the bunker short of the green, but by that stage, he’d already taken his frustrations out on the turf at Quail Hollow.
It’s not his favourite venue – not by a long shot – so it was no surprise that he also cursed the North Carolina venue as well.
Shane Lowry wasn’t happy after this shot having not been given relief for an embedded ball 😠 pic.twitter.com/k1BU8wZVIV
— Sky Sports Golf (@SkySportsGolf) May 16, 2025
At that stage, he was one-under for the round and the bogey dropped him back to level, and he played the final 10 in level-par from there, trading a birdie on 13 with a bogey on 16 and parring the rest.
Unfortunately, the cut which drifted into +1, never drifted out again, leaving Lowry packing his bags for an early flight home along with Pádraig Harrington who matched Lowry’s first and second round tallies. Harrington put up a spirited fightback after finding himself on +4 for the tournament with three holes to play.
He proceeded to birdie the seventh and eighth holes – his 16th and 17th – but the breathing space final-hole birdie he required evaded him and he too missed the cut by the minimum.
Séamus Power had taken one stroke less than Lowry and Harrington on day one, but a bogey-double bogey two-hole stretch on the front nine left him behind the 8-ball, and he could only play the final 11 holes in level-par which saw the Waterford man miss out by two.
Leave a comment