The Offaly native will be having nightmares about that fourth hole.
“What’s possible?” Shane Lowry mused on Saturday evening at Augusta National. “There’s a 65 out there in good conditions, but it just depends what the other guys ahead of me do.”
Before Lowry even teed off, for his final round at the 2022 Masters, the likes of Kevin Na and Jon Rahm had carded -3 rounds of 69. The chasing pack, behind Scottie Scheffler (-9), would have taken encouragement from those early scores.
There would have been greater encouragement when Scheffler was loose off the tee with his opening drives. At one stage, Cam Smith got to within a shot of Scheffler, and Lowry climbed to -3.
And then… that fourth hole. By the time Lowry walked off the green, towards the fifth tee box, he had dropped three shots and his Masters challenge was over.
The 35-year-old went way right off the tee of the 240-yard Par 3. He was then left chipping for par but duffed his shot into the green-side bunker.
Given the sizeable slope of the green, he was forced to chip out to the upper tier and hope it rolled slightly toward the hole.
It duly did, and rested five feet from the hole, but worse was to follow.
Lowry missed his double bogey putt from five feet away, and rolled the ball a further three feet by.
There was an audible gasp from the galleries as the putt sailed by the hole.
He made that triple bogey putt but that ‘6’ dropped him back to even par for the tournament.
Such is the fighting spirit of Shane Lowry that he responded with a birdie on the sixth hole to go back to red figures, on -1. He followed that up with another on the eighth hole, and reached the turn back at -3 after another birdie.
Scheffler, meanwhile, was all over the grid but brilliantly scrambling for pars or birdies.
For Lowry, three closing bogeys on Saturday – over his final 10 holes – and that triple bogey on the final round fourth hole. He will look back ruefully on a Masters week that still had so, so many bright spots.
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