Shane Lowry winning this year’s Open Championship by 6 strokes was certainly noteworthy. He’d missed the cut at this event each of the past four years. This year he basically wired the field and had to contend with very challenging weather conditions during the last day. Additionally, a British Open had not been played in Northern Ireland for 68 years so to have an Irishman win it made it special. But Lowry is no underdog. He’s the 17th ranked player in the world so posting Top 10 finishes and winning tournaments is rather expected.
While we do celebrate remarkable achievements of the game’s top players, we have a particular fondness for those players who are scratching and clawing for table scraps each week. When these types of players manage to break through and announce themselves, as Ashton Turner did on the tournament’s opening day, we take notice, particularly if they are players we’ve never heard of.
Coming into the week, Turner was officially the world’s 2,079 best golfer, which makes sense when you consider that he had recently missed the cut at an (alleged) golf tournament called the Motocaddy Masters (which raises a very good question: how is it that one can qualify for the world’s oldest and most prestigious golf tournament following a missed cut at a horseshit tour event?). Still, Turner’s -2 on his opening round is quite amazing, as was his 68 on the final day (which included an eagle). Going from failure at the Motocaddy Masters to the leaderboard at the British Open illustrates how fickle golf can be. You can also look at JB Holmes’ card for his final round and draw the same conclusion. It looks remarkably like a recent round of golf I played at the West Seattle muni course. Double bogeys every other hole. Or, compare Rory McIlroy’s first and second rounds (79 on day 1 and 65 on day 2). The game is inexplicable and defies reason.