Soft rain started to fall as Shane Lowry, the former Open champion, stepped up to the first tee at Royal Portrush on Thursday morning.
He smiled broadly as the crowd greeted the announcement of his name. The Irishman is loved at Portrush in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. He won the Open here in 2019, an immensely popular and emotional victory for one of golf’s good guys.
Lowry smiled nonstop when he won the 148th Open Championship at Royal Portrush, which the club’s website describes, naturally, as “one of the most memorable. In front of 237,750 spectators, second only to the attendance at the Centenary Open at St Andrews, Ireland’s Shane Lowry justified the wait with an emphatic and emotion-charged victory”.
It was only the second time the Open had been held at Portrush and Lowry’s name was chanted by the punters as he walked through the rain and wind to win at what was described as a “canter”.
There was pressure. There always is and on the 18th tee, “with the wind in his face and the rain on his cap, Lowry puffed out his cheeks, addressed his ball and prepared to take the most important swing of his life. And, on an island that has produced dozens of legendary boxers, perhaps the most important swing of them all”, theOpen.com wrote.
He drilled it down the middle and the celebrations could begin. The party has become folklore.
“I was asked by an American journalist just how big the party would be tonight? I felt I had to put him right. You mean, how big the party would be all week?” he said in 2019.
It was a weeklong party with his tour van filled with friends and family driving to Dublin and then home to County Clara to end the celebrations. He is, it must be said, getting a little tired of being asked about the party and the exhausting stereotype of an Irishman on the drink. It was the first thing asked of him at his press conference this week.
“That’s an interesting first question, isn’t it? We’re here to talk about golf and all anybody wants to talk about is drinking.
“I have always been conscious of that, but I have also always enjoyed myself. I work my nuts off. You can’t play at this level without doing that. If I win another one, I’ll celebrate twice as good. It’s so hard out here, so hard to win big tournaments that when you do, you need to enjoy them.
“Players came to me afterwards... I remember Martin Kaymer’s caddie telling me: ‘Martin regrets not doing what you did because when he was winning Majors, world No 1, he took it for granted a little bit.’ You need to enjoy the moments.”
A mural of Lowry has been painted on a two-storey house on the road to the golf club. He joked: “I was happy I have to drive the other way. I didn’t know what to make of it at the start, and then when they did it, yeah... then people kept sending me pictures.
“Everyone keeps sending me pictures. Everyone that comes up here sends me pictures standing beside it. Some of them I can’t say what they were doing in [the pictures],” he laughed, “but it is very special. I’ve done something special in my life.”
It was special for all of Ireland. As with rugby and cricket, golf in Ireland is governed by one body across the island, both the Republic and Northern Ireland, a rare body of unity in a land divided for so long.
When Portrush hosted the Open for the first time in 1951 it was the first time the Open had been held outside Great Britain. That the Open took so long to return in 2019 after 68 years was, in the main, because of “The Troubles”, the years of paramilitary war, bombings, slaughter, British soldiers and the sectarian violence.
It took the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 for peace to arrive.
And, then, when the Open did return, an Irishman won. How big will the party be if an Irishman wins again? It will be twice as good.
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