Shane Lowry waiting for putter to warm up for Augusta

Shane Lowry in action during The Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass, Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Photo: Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

Brian Keogh

March 13 2023 02:30 AM

Shane Lowry is bullish about his Masters chances but admits he urgently needs to find his putting touch before he drives down Magnolia Lane.

The Clara man, who confessed he initially didn’t know what to do after parting company with caddie Brian ‘Bo’ Martin in Dubai, was 10-under for his last 53 holes in The Players Championship, where he closed with a 70 to finish inside the top 40 on four-under.

Proud of how he fought back from an opening 77 and played some of his best golf from tee to green to make the cut and climb the leaderboard over the weekend, he’s just waiting now for his putter to warm up as he takes a week off following a gruelling run of eight events in nine weeks.

“The last three days are as good of golf as I can play, and I need to find something on the greens over the next couple of weeks,” said Lowry. “I hit the ball great. I mean, I shot two-under, and it’s by far the worst score I could have shot today. That’s disappointing because the way I played, I had a five or six or seven-under in me today.”

He was tied third in the Masters last year and while this season has been up and down with a poor run in the Middle East leading to an unplanned split with his caddie of four-and-a-half years, he will feel good heading there again, putter-depending.

“Yeah, I will,” agreed Lowry, who will make a trip to Augusta this week before returning to action in the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play next week.

“I’m disappointed how I putted. I’ve been working so hard on it, and it’s just not coming in. I need to just keep my chin up and keep going, keep working, keep grinding away, and hopefully, it’ll come in about a month’s time.”

He started working with Irish putting coach Stephen Sweeney two years ago and recently changed to a shorter putter for the Arnold Palmer Invitational with little improvement so far.

“It’s one of those, there’s no drastic changes needed, just a bit of confidence,” said Lowry, who was ranked in the top 10 from tee to green at Sawgrass but outside the top 70 on the greens. “There’s a lot of it between the ears, as well, and I just need to get that right.”

As for his decision to split with long-time caddie Martin and take on Darren Reynolds, he said: “We started in the Middle East, and I had a bad couple of weeks, and we had a chat and things weren’t going as well as I probably thought. It got to me a little bit, and I just needed some fresh – I knew, when it happened, I had no one in mind, no one lined up, so I didn’t know what to do.

“I’ve been on Tour 14 years. I’m not exactly a caddie firer or anything. This is my third caddie. I’ve known Darren for years.

“He had just started with Alex Levy on the European Tour. That’s almost why I didn’t want to ask him because I knew he just got a new job, and I didn’t want to take him away and then it not work out for us.

“But, frankly, he was one of the few options I had, and we just had a chat. He caddied for me during Covid for a few weeks when ‘Bo’ couldn’t, and yeah, it’s been going pretty good.”

On the DP World Tour, Spain’s Jorge Campillo followed in the footsteps of Severiano Ballesteros when he claimed the Magical Kenya Open.

The Spaniard (36) carded a five-under-par 66 to win by two shots from Japan’s Masahiro Kawamura on 18-under par as Holywood’s Tom McKibbin (20) shot 69 – his fourth successive round in the sixties – to tie for 25th on nine-under and clinch his fifth top-25 finish from just ten starts this season.