Lowry explains show of frustration at Quail Hollow
Shane Lowry reacts angrily to ending up in a pitch mark at Quail Hollow
Shane Lowry’s dislike for Quail Hollow slipped to a new low after a round where he lost his temper over a bad break and an interfering on-course TV reporter and ended up missing the cut by a shot in the PGA Championship.
The world number 10 began the day on two-over par and needed to break par to make what turned out to be the one-over par cut.
But he shot a level par 71 to join Padraig Harrington (two-over) and Seamus Power (four-over) in missing the weekend and explained his four-lettered rant on the eighth hole stemmed from his annoyance with a TV reporter and not the rules official.
The Offaly man was one-under for his round through seven holes when his drive rolled into another player’s pitch mark at the 353-yard eighth.
Unaware of what had happened, he asked for a ruling but was denied relief by the official and proceeded to hack his 57-yard pitch into a bunker en route to a bogey.
Furious, he thrashed the offending pitch mark and his huge divot with his club, shouting “f**k this place” before going on to miss a 20-footer for par.
He went on to birdie the 12th to get back to one-over for the championship but after failing to take advantage of the driveable 14th or the par-five 15th, he bogeyed the 16th and parred the last two holes to signed for a 71 that eventually left him a shot outside the cut line.
“I just got nothing today,” Lowry lamented. “I felt like I played alright. But that's like every day I play this golf course. It's probably one of the only venues that I've never played well at that we play on tour every year.
“So what can I say? I felt like I played good golf, then I shot level par. It's hard out there. So yeah, it is what it is. I just hope for a weekend tee time. But it's not looking good at the minute.”
A large media scrum was waiting to hear Lowry’s explanation for his fit of temper after his unlucky break at the eighth .“You hit a lovely tee-shot and you're not expecting that,” he said of his ball ending up in another player’s pitch mark. “I was just obviously very annoyed with that because I felt like I had quite a bit of momentum going in the round.
“Standing there with 40 or 50 yards to that pin off the fairway, it’s an easy pitch shot for me. Then I walk away making bogey….”
He went on to explain that his annoyance was with an inside ropes reporter from ESPN Live, who was covering his round shot for shot.
“It was just that the ESPN guy was a bit too in there involved when he wasn't asked to be and that's what annoyed me a lot,” Lowry said. “I was just asking the referee and the ESPN guy comes straight over and he's like, ‘That’s not your pitch mark’. And I'm like, ‘That's not for you to talk about’. That's for me to call a rules official and decide what happens. “I just said, the rules official, what happens to the guy at 7:10 who's not on ESPN Live?
“I guarantee you he's down there arguing that’s his pith mark. I don't want a drop because it's not my pitch mark. But I'm just saying. And it goes back to (the fact that) I had a lot of mud balls again today.”
Lowry was initially unsure about whether or not it was his pitch mark and might be entitled to embedded ball relief.
“It looks like a fresh pitch mark that I was in, but it also looked like there's a fresh one beside it,” he said. “So look, I wasn't arguing that it was my pitch mark. I was trying to be 100pc sure. because imagine if I had to come in and all of a sudden somebody told me that was your pitch mark and there's this one guy whose producers tell him it isn’t?…
“So you need to be just careful about what you're doing, because there's so much at stake.”
