Shane Lowry fails to take advantage of early start at Players Championship
RISE AND SHINE: Shane Lowry failed to take advantage of his early start at Players Championship on Saturday. Pic: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images.
Saturday morning provided a tantalising opportunity for the first group out on the course at 8:25 am local time.
There was a window of relatively benign breezes on most of the front nine before the heavier wind and gusts would kick up and haunt the field on the perilous TPC Sawgrass for the rest of the day.
Catch it right, and you could make a huge move up the Players Championship leaderboard and then watch the leaders struggle to hang on.
Shane Lowry was in that first pairing on Saturday morning. But instead of the 2019 Open champion taking advantage of the circumstances, it was the first alternate who got in the field at the last minute who caught the winds just right and sailed up the board.
Danny Walker posted a bogey-free 6-under 66 that carried him all the way from barely making the cut to the top 10 while Lowry struggled to a 2-over 74 capped by a watery double bogey on the last.
Walker, a 29-year-old Jacksonville resident who has never been ranked higher than 250th in the world, got a phone call while in a lockerroom bathroom stall on Thursday morning after Jason Day withdrew with an illness.
He reportedly cried in his car when he heard the news, but had the poise to shoot 1-under being thrust into the deep end playing with major champions Jordan Spieth and Wyndham Clark.
“I’ve wanted to play this event my whole life, especially like the last several years living in Jacksonville,” said Walker, who’s played about a hundred rounds on the Stadium Course since moving to Jacksonville in 2019 when he started playing the Korn Ferry Tour.
“This feels like my hometown event in a lot of ways, especially watching some of my friends play (last year), I just wanted to get in this year so much. Then actually getting in, it’s just an accomplishment of a goal. A big goal.”
Access to Sawgrass was what brought him to town after turning pro.
“I’d been out of school for almost a year and had been living at home for a little bit and just wanted to find the best place for me to practice and get better, and this seemed like the place to go, especially with everything being free out here, and playing professional golf early on can be expensive,” he said.
“That was the big draw, just great free practice facilities and a bunch of other pros to play with.”
He’d never even met any pros the caliber of Lowry, Spieth and Clark before playing with them the first three rounds.
“It was a little surreal. I had never met any of those guys, so it was nice just to meet them and get that out of the way. Like, okay, now we can go play golf. But the first hole or so, I was pretty nervous and then was able to find some rhythm after that.”
His familiarity with Sawgrass in all kinds of weather served him well on Saturday as the winds gradually built stronger as the round went all. Walker birdied 2, 3 and 6 before the wind started picking up and held it together to birdie all three remaining par-5s after that while not dropping any strokes.
“Definitely early in the round there wasn’t too much wind so it was a little more scorable,” Walker said. “Probably really started picking up towards the end of the front nine, maybe 7 or 8.
“It’s always a little stressful when you’re right on the cut line, and once you make the weekend it’s easy to free it up because you don’t have anything to lose. I can’t go backwards, you can only move forwards at that point.
"I played really well the last 10 holes or so yesterday to finish the round. I was able to just keep that ball-striking momentum going into today.”
Lowry, on the other hand, couldn’t get into his usual rhythm off the tee, missing eight of 14 fairways and half the greens. He was always in catch-up mode after bogeys on 5 and 6. By the end he’d made four bogeys and four birdies before his downwind driver off the 18th tee couldn’t carry the water and led to a double.
While Lowry will go out fairly early again on Sunday trying to pick up as many OWGR and FedEx Cup points as he can, Walker will be trying to win for the first time since a couple of Canadian Tour events.
He saw his name on the leaderboard at T9 when he played the 17th hole and he should be too far from there if the winds wreak havoc in the afternoon.
Along the way, he’s picking up some fans.
“Thursday, I only heard cheers for the other guys, and then towards the end I started to hear some more for myself, which was kind of cool,” he said.
“I guess people maybe started to figure out who I was a little bit.”
