DUBAI // This week’s beginning was not at all like last week’s ending.
Which, for Shane Lowry, represented a perfect Dubai double.
After holding a share of the lead on the final day of the Turkish Open, the Irishman stumbled in mid-round, plummeted 17 spots and finished in a tie for 25th.
“The last few holes,” he said, “I could not wait to get here.”
The reset button worked perfectly.
Lowry, 27, lit up the back nine on Thursday at Jumeirah Golf Estates, making birdies on four of the last six holes to finish with a 6-under 66 to claim a share of the first-round lead with boyhood pal Rory McIlroy at the DP World Championship, the tour’s season finale.
Lowry, who at No 52 in the world can secure spots in all four majors if he can move up two places by the year’s end, shot 73 last Sunday. He said that it ate at him during the plane trip to Dubai and for much of Monday. But the 66 was his lowest round at Jumeirah by two strokes.
“It was one of those things,” he said of his meltdown in Turkey. “At least I gave myself a chance to win.”
Making this third trip to the Dubai season finale, Lowry’s best finish was joint-eighth in 2011.
Clearly, he was not the golfer from the Emerald Isle that most would have picked as the front-runner.
McIlroy, a teammate on the Golfing Union of Ireland teams in their amateur days, is a cumulative 80 under in his 21 rounds at Jumeirah and won the event in 2012.
McIlroy and Lowry, who will be paired on Friday, have already traded blows as competitors this year, finishing first and second, respectively, at the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, the tour’s other cornerstone event. It was the catalyst of their seasons. Lowry posted four more top-10 finishes thereafter and McIlroy collected the last two major titles of the season.
“It’s going to be good,” said McIlroy, 25. “He’s in a good bit of form. It’s good to see him up there.”
The two have a long, congenial history. When Lowry won his first European Tour event, which came at the Irish Open while still an amateur, McIlroy watched from the edge of the final green and hosed him down with bubbly during the celebration.
Early last year in Abu Dhabi, when Ireland’s Paul McGinley was holed up in his hotel awaiting word on whether he had been picked as the Ryder Cup captain, Lowry and McIlroy knocked on his door with a plate of cookies and helped keep him from getting stressed out.
Do not assume the outcome is assured, either. Last year, Lowry knocked off McIlroy in the first round of the Accenture Match Play Championship.
“It’ll be fun,” McIlroy said. “He’s been playing well, basically since I started to play well, at Wentworth.”
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