Lowry looks beyond Mountain

Shane Lowry can forget about his world ranking for a while after realising his ambition to qualify for the WGC-Accenture Match play Championship later this month but the Irish golfer knows he has work to do if he is to achieve his longer-term objectives.

Lowry learned he would be in the field for the first World Golf Championship event of 2013 and making his debut in Tucson, Arizona, when he slipped just one place in the world rankings to No 65 on Sunday night.

The Portugal Masters champion, who last week helped the European Tour launch their ticket sales bid for this year’s Irish Open at Carton House, near Maynooth in Kildare, will travel to Dove Mountain next week courtesy of a 72nd-hole putt by American pro Patrick Reed at the PGA Tour’s AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. Reed’s birdie putt dropped to put him into a tie for seventh place with Swede Freddie Jacobson, who needed to finish alone in that spot to make the Accenture field. Instead he rose to only 66th and Lowry stamped his ticket for Tucson by a mere 0.0002 ranking points behind Lowry.

Even then, Lowry needed the withdrawal of world No 10 Phil Mickelson to reach the 64-man, $8.75million (€6.5m) tournament, and the Offaly golfer admitted that missed cuts in his last two starts had in part been caused by the pressure he had placed himself under in search of ranking points.

“I think that’s part of the reason for my bad play. I stayed in Dubai for a week and I never practised so hard. I was on the range every morning and I didn’t leave until dark most evenings. It felt like my game was good but I just went out on the golf course and put too much pressure on myself. I’ll learn from that and hopefully it will stand to me down the line.

“I didn’t even play a practice round in Portugal [en route to his first win as a professional last October]. That’s the thing about golf… finding out what works for yourself. I was trying to find that happy medium between not trying too hard and not doing enough.”

Still, there will be similar deadlines to meet in terms of world ranking positions, the next of them on February 25 and March 4, when those inside the top 50 will secure a place in the WGC Cadillac Championship at Doral, and again on April 1, when those players in the top 50 will book an invitation to the Masters at Augusta National.

How will he deal with meeting those short-term objectives?

“I don’t know to be honest,” Lowry admitted. “I think I’ll just learn from it. I actually don’t know. Golf is easy when you are playing well and doing the right thing but you can never put your finger on what you’re doing right. It just happens.

“For me it’s more about long-term goals,” he added. “The short-term goals are the World Match Play and the Masters. But two years down the line I want to be in the top 50 and playing competitively all around the world on the kind of global schedule the top players play. If I don’t get into the Match Play or the Masters, it’s not the end of the world. I’ll still be playing golf and going out to win every week. That’s the way it is for me but it’s obviously hard not to focus on the short-term goals at the minute.”

Helping Lowry crack the conundrum of balancing those long and short-term objectives will be sports psychologist Enda McNulty, recently drafted in by Declan Kidney to assist the national rugby team.

“He’s someone I can open up with and speak to about everything so he’s more of a life coach than a pure psychologist,” said Lowry. “I saw him before I won in Portugal. I think that helped me for the rest of the season.”