Everyone wants to be clutch, but sometimes, like Shane Lowry, we choke
Have you ever “choked” at anything? Whether it’s sports-related or job-related or something else in life?
Did you miss a huge free throw in a high school championship game? Did you strike out with the bases loaded in your team’s last at-bat in a Little League All-Star Game?
Or maybe you dropped the ball in the end zone, turning a game-winning touchdown in the state title game into a horrible memory you’ll carry around the rest of your life.
Everyone wants to be clutch or known as a so-called money player - when the chips are down, you’ve come through time and time again.
Shane Lowry is a professional golfer who choked on Sunday during the final round of the Cognizant Classic in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.
It would be nicer to say that Lowry was unfortunate or unlucky or that eventual champion Nico Echavarria simply played a little better than he did down the stretch.
But it’s more accurate to say that Lowry choked.
With three holes left in the tournament, the 38-year-old Irishman had a three-shot lead. But he put his tee shots at the 16th and 17th holes in the water, leading to a pair of double bogeys that crushed his chances to win.
Lowry didn’t barely find the water. He didn’t get a bad bounce that caused either shot to trickle in. Lowry hit shots that you and I would hit, farther right than a radical Republican.
So far right and so far wrong.
Lowry is the 27th best player in the World Golf Rankings. Even if you don’t follow golf, you would recognize many of the names ahead of him. He is in elite company, a player who has six European Tour and three PGA Tour victories. He also won The Open Championship by six shots in his homeland of Northern Ireland in 2019.
On top of that, Lowry is so darn likable and relatable as a chubby bloke you’d love to have a beer with at a Dublin bar.
If you were watching his meltdown on Sunday like I was, you wanted to go inside your flat screen to encourage him and give him a hug and tell him it’s a tough learning experience, but Shane, my friend, you’ll be OK in time.
You’d say stuff like that to him while thinking maybe he won’t be OK, that maybe this is his destiny, to always be known as a good player who was never truly great because he choked too many times under pressure. Lowry has been the leader or co-leader after the third round in six tournaments and has won only once.
To his credit, Lowry spoke to reporters after his latest collapse, owning up to the unthinkable chain of events at PGA National.
“The hardest thing, I’ve never won in front of my 4-year-old, and she was there waiting for me,” Lowry said. “I only wanted it for her, I didn’t care about anything else. To see her little ginger hair running onto the 18th green would have been the most special thing in the world. I thought I was gonna win.”
The mental aspect of sports, and in golf particularly, has always been fascinating to me. Lowry shot a 63 to take the lead on Saturday, but on the same course the next day, the same guy played the last three holes like a hacker.
Among the most astounding developments, Lowry was the only player in the field who put his ball in the water on the 16th hole in the final round.
We also learned later that Lowry spoke with his highly regarded mental coach, Bob Rotella, on the driving range before he teed off on Sunday. They talked about keeping things simple and staying relaxed.
But the wheels came off anyway as Lowry, in an unusual admission, said he couldn’t feel the club in his hands on the last three holes.
As amateur golfers, we know this feeling - everything can be going pretty well until suddenly you hit one bad shot and your confidence wavers, leading to more bad shots, and all you want to do at that point is crawl in a hole or hope the beverage cart girl shows up soon.
Lowry had nowhere to hide and the hell of it is, he’s getting used to it. In January when he had a share of the lead, Lowry air-mailed a short pitch with his wedge on the last hole, putting it in the water, blowing his hopes of winning the Dubai Invitational.
“I’m obviously extremely disappointed,” Lowry said on Sunday. “I had the tournament in my hands and I threw it away. What more can I say? That’s twice this year so far. I’m getting good at it.”
On the list of all-time chokes in golf history, this isn’t Jean Van de Velde taking a triple bogey on the final hole in 1999 to lose The Open Championship. It isn’t Greg Norman blowing a six-stroke lead and losing by five shots to Nick Faldo in the 1996 Masters at Augusta. But it’s in the ballpark.
Lowry was amazingly philosophical, essentially shrugging it off, acknowledging that he has “no choice but to move on.”
He offered the best description of what happened, and it certainly resonated with those of us who play this crazy sport.
“Golf does strange things to us at times, and it did it to me today,” Lowry said.
I prefer a lager or a pilsner to a darker beer, but in his honor, the next time I’m in a Bend bar, I’m ordering a Guinness and raising a toast to Shane Lowry.
“The next time you’re in contention, mate, may you conquer those demons and come through like the champion that you are.”
Jim Moore has covered Washington’s sports scene from every angle for multiple news outlets. He appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10 a.m. on Jason Puckett’s podcast at PuckSports.com. He writes a Substack blog at jimmoorethego2guy.substack.com. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter) @cougsgo.