SHANE LOWRY has the world on his tee peg after last Sunday's heroics at Baltray.

The Clara youngster certainly has been the talk of Wentworth all week as the contenders for the €4.5m BMW PGA Championship look forward to welcoming Lowry joining them on Tour as a professional.

Thomas Bjorn (38), the great Dane who chairs the all-powerful European Tournament Players Committee, knows better than most the enormity of Lowry's achievement in winning the Irish Open.

As a long-term admirer of the Irish public's passion for golf and a winner of our national championship at Carton House in 2006, Bjorn is ideally placed to put last weekend's remarkable events in their true context.

Yet for all the excitement of Lowry's head-spinning success, Bjorn believes the real hard work will begin for the 22-year-old once he sets out as a professional.

Of course, Lowry will be made welcome, but it'll take more than one victory, albeit sensational, for him to establish himself among the European Tour elite.

"Shane Lowry winning was as good a story as there's been on Tour for a long time," Bjorn enthused. "The Irish have a great way of making their own stars overnight and that's what he became.

patriotic

"There are very few people in the golfing world as patriotic as the Irish so carrying that flag all the way to victory is a very, very, very hard thing to do.

"You end up carrying the whole country on your back and that can be a very big burden. This was a massive achievement. Shane did unbelievably well and good luck to him. I hope he makes decisions now that he can benefit from."

Bjorn twice went to Q-School and was three years a professional before winning his full European credentials in 1995 through the Challenge Tour. Given the opportunity of a two-and-a-half-year exemption, to which Lowry is entitled after Baltray, he said he'd "step straight into professional golf".

Only then will the real battle begin for Lowry, Bjorn adds. "Everybody has to prove themselves out here. I keep saying it, nobody becomes a superstar on tour overnight, even if certain people feel like they should be.

"One tournament win doesn't do it for you. There's a long road ahead at that age and many years in the game. You build a career on the back of what you achieve over time. That's what makes you.

"We tend to try an make people superstars before they are and that's the wrong way of going about it. Look down this range. Most of these guys have won tournaments but a lot of them wouldn't feel like superstars. They feel they can hold their own out here and that's a long way to go."

Bjorn understands the significance of Lowry's win for the new-look Irish Open after it was ravaged by appalling weather for the four days of competition and he supports calls for the event to be moved to a more favourable date in the Tour schedule, if possible.

"To be fair, Shane winning was one of the best things that could happen the tournament. There'd been a lot of worries it wasn't going to get the stature it deserved," he explains.

"In these times, when a sponsor comes in with that kind of money and puts on that kind of event, you've got to go a long way to please them. I'm confident the Tour will do that but the drawing-up of the schedule is like trying to complete a huge puzzle.

"I don't think anybody with a bit of sense would argue against moving the Irish Open to later in the year. I know the players would prefer that but if it can be done is another story. However, the Tour will work very hard to please the new Irish Open sponsors."

Padraig Harrington, who received the inaugural 'Players' Player of the Year' Award for 2008 at the European Tour's annual dinner at Wentworth on Tuesday, has no doubt his decision not to play in this week's showpiece is the right one.

The Dubliner reveals he'll definitely play in next year's BMW PGA Championship, once Wentworth's controversial greens have been upgraded to modern standards this summer.

However, Harrington believes it'd be unwise to disrupt his schedule in the run-up to next month's US Open by playing on the present putting surfaces here, which bamboozle him and many other leading players at this time of year.

When US Masters champion Angel Cabrera, replete in his new Green Jacket, was feted at the dinner for playing this week, the point was abundantly clear.

Yet Harrington neatly sidestepped the issue in his acceptance speech, saying how fantastic it would be for the European Tour if its members held all four Majors at once, which would be the case if he achieved his primary objective right now, and won the US Open.

Though recent PGA Tour-winners Henrik Stenson and Paul Casey are tournament favourites, it'd take a brave man to bet against Cabrera emulating Seve Ballesteros (1983), Nick Faldo (1989), Bernhard Langer (93) and Jose Maria Olazabal (1994) by winning at Augusta and Wentworth in the same year.

Cabrera, Europe's PGA champion in 2005 and twice a runner-up, opens in the same group today as Olazabal and title-holder Miguel Angel Jimenez. Olazabal emotionally described his election yesterday to the World Golf Hall of Fame alongside Ballesteros as "something I'll cherish for the rest of my life".

Though Rory McIlroy missed the cut on his Wentworth debut in 2008, recent form offers him and Graeme McDowell as the most likely of Ireland's nine contenders this week.

McDowell has made a complete recovery from the shin strain which forced him out of the Irish Open the day after his sensational 61 at Baltray last Friday.

Yet don't rule out local residents Darren Clarke and Paul McGinley on a strategic golf course where experience pays big dividends.

BMW PGA Championship

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- Karl MacGinty