SHANE LOWRY PRESUMABLY won’t end the day by doing a kind of Kieran Donaghy, and look down a camera lens in Butler Cabin yelling, ‘Well IBM’s Predictive AI Technology, whaddya think of that!?’
The Masters app and website this year features tech from IBM which forecasted each player’s first-round score, and the gnomic algorithm predicted Lowry would open with a tournament-wrecking 78.
Instead he shot a four-under 68 that sets him up as a live contender this week, even moreso given the course is set to be battered by rain on Saturday. On a day of benign skies and good scoring, Lowry finished three shots off the early clubhouse leader Viktor Hovland.
This was the steady laying of foundations from Lowry: he steered his way around Augusta National with little drama today, and only a slow-to-heat putter cost him a score that would have made it a truly eye-catching performance.
“It was pretty good”, said Lowry. “Felt like I was in control of my ball out there today. It was nice. I said to Darren [Reynolds, caddie], I hit my second shot on 18 and I was like, that was a pretty good round of golf. And obviously it’s nice to go up and roll in that putt on the last as well. I’m pretty happy with myself.
“You’re never comfortable on this place. There’s always, even though I was playing good golf, there’s always, you’ve got – especially when you go on to the back nine there’s, most holes are chances to make birdie and chances to trip you up. So you just have to stay patient and stay on your game and in your routine. And that’s what I did.”
His compatriot Seamus Power can attest to the truth of Lowry’s opening statement. Having gone bogey-eagle on the opening two holes and then played Amen Corner in two-under before adding another birdie on the par-five 15th, Power derailed himself with back-to-back double bogeys on the final two holes. He finished with a one-over, 73.
“It was a bit of a struggle all day, but obviously kind of caught up with me there on the last two”, said Power. “But besides that it was some good stuff. But I didn’t drive it well all day and just kind of made some mistakes.”
Lowry’s first cheers around Augusta were overheard: standing on the third fairway, his head twitched to the right when the crowd roared to acclaim Power’s eagle putt on the second green. To that point the most discernible sound Lowry had elicited was a loud gasp from a patron by the first green, after he left a simple birdie putt to the left of the hole.
The sun burned off the early-morning mist wreathing Augusta National and virtually all that it hadn’t heated was Lowry’s putter. His approach game was tight and controlled, but he left another birdie opportunity behind him on the fourth green, again steering the ball to the left of the hole.
A wry smile followed after he struck an iron onto the undulating fifth green, believing the ball had stuck only for it to creep agonisingly back. His two-putt to save par was typical of his steely start, mind: with the contours of that green, he might as well have been putting across the Drumlin Belt.
And then things started cooking. Lowry drained a 30-foot putt for birdie on seven and then saw an eagle putt roll narrowly left on eight, which made all the more impressive by the painful delay in playing the stroke. Lowry’s playing partner, LIV’s Tomas Pieters, went wildly left off the tee and then hit his iron shot off the back of the giant scoreboard, the loud clang sending nearby patrons scuttling. Lowry made it three birdies in a row on the ninth hole but then dropped a shot down Amen corner, again seeing a putt on the eleventh hole drift to the left of the hole.
His first errant drive of the day came on the newly-lengthened, par-five 13th, ending up in the pine straw to the right-hand side. He laid up to the front of the pond but another fabulous iron gave him a look at birdie. This time the ball swerved right and Lowry dropped to his hunkers and clenched his teeth.
He was grimacing again as he watched his ball drop too far from the hole on the par-five 15th but was quickly pumping his right fist, having sent a gorgeous, arcing putt scuttling into the hole. Lowry added another birdie on the final hole to nudge himself further into the middle of a crowded leaderboard.
Where Lowry’s start was steady, Power’s was baroque. He bogeyed the first hole but more than salvaged it with his long eagle putt on the second, and from there he scrambled to make the turn at one-under thanks to impressive up and downs at three and five.
Having gone to the right of the hole on 10, Power was asked to match Viktor Hovland’s shot of the day contender from above the bunker but couldn’t quite do so, leaving with a two-putt for bogey. What followed next was superb: a lengthy, snaking uphill putt from the front-right edge of the 11th green, historically the toughest hole on the course.
Power might have made birdie on 12 but he did so on 13. Like Lowry he went slightly right off the tee, but instead he took on the hole, leaving himself an easy birdie putt. He saw an eagle putt slip agonisingly by on the 15th…and he then took a couple of concussive blows from Augusta National.
The original sin was a drive hooked to the left off the 17th tee: he quickly found himself in the front-right bunker from which a chip shot slithered cruelly off the green. A three-putt for a deflating double-bogey followed.
Power was even further left off the narrow 18th tee, knocked the ball square onto the fairway, and then took a brutal kick off the edge of the green and saw the ball skip among the patrons. Yesterday Power hit consecutive holes-in-one at the par-three contest: he walked off from his opening round with back-to-back sixes.
“I got a bad lie on the face of the bunker and it didn’t come out far enough and it came back off the right side of the green”, said Power of 17. “And, yeah, just kind of misread a bogey putt in the end, actually. But I hit a good recovery shot actually from the left and then just got a bad lie up in the face of the bunker. 18, I hit it left again and then I had to chip out kind of sideways and backwards. Then, yeah, I thought I actually hit a really cool pitch across the green, I thought it was going to come back down. But it got stuck in the first fringe and just stayed there.”
Earlier this morning and before Power and Lowry teed off, Belfast amateur Matthew McClean led the Masters. McClean is playing here as he won the US Mid-Amateur Championship last year, and funds his golf by working full-time as an optometrist in the off-season. You can write your own gags about his patients assessing the quality of his work when they saw his name at the top of the leaderboard.
McClean birdied the first and the fourth before Augusta National flexed its indifference: he bogeyed five and was then unceremoniously removed from the manually-operated scoreboards around the course when he hit a double-bogey six on the seventh hole. Nonetheless, to birdie your first hole at the Masters is pretty good going, especially considering he hit his first practice tee shot on Monday 50 yards to the right.
McClean played Amen Corner in one-over, bogeying 11 and 12, the latter after he flighted his tee-shot over the green and into the back-right bunker. His chip-out didn’t make the green.
Birdie followed on 13 with another bogey on 16 and a double on 17 and eventually signed for a five-over 77.
“I probably deep down would have been happy with the start I had”, McClean reflected afterwards. “I was flying there. But to be to disappointed with five-over in the first round is probably the sign of I actually played pretty well.
“I was joking, I was saying after four, I would take a screenshot of the leaderboard there, leading the Masters. It’s more positives probably than negatives. The five-over probably looks worse than how I feel about it.”
