Ha man with a mother of a mother says: “Your ass is the windae”, and you would be right to imagine a pair of pale and possibly hairy back cheeks, resting on a windowsill, senselessly exposed to greet the elements. “Your ass is outside the window” means that you are a fool: an idiot, a donkey, a plonker.
Perhaps your first reaction to our cover this month is that Golf Digest publishers have their seats outside a window. Why did they dress Shane Lowry as old Tom Morris, the original green keeper of St. Andrews? Shane is an Irishman, and old Tom was a Scotsman, to cry out loud. Their names are on the same trophy, but one has beaten 155 global professional athletes who descended on Portrush by jet and armed with coaches and agents in 2019. The other won the first of his four championships opened in 1861 by beating gutta-percha around rabbit holes and against only 17 golfers, some of whom competed with aspirations no bigger than the secondary betting winnings to cover some beers and perhaps a piece of charcoal-stained beef from the host.
In addition to the beard and belly, you could say that the connections between Shane and Old Tom stop here. If we wanted to be nice, maybe we would have had to dress Lowry as the 1939 Open winner Dick Burton, who had to wait six years to defend himself because of the Second World War. The cancellation of the Open 2020 at Royal St. George’s due to the coronavirus is the first interruption of the tournament since then.
Lowry stresses his understanding of the enormity of the pandemic and the difficult decisions made by officials. But, he says, “Selfishly, I was disappointed. There were a lot of things I couldn’t wait to see this year, like playing the Irish Open as an Open champion. The course, Mount Juliet, is about an hour from my house, so this is a part of Ireland that I can really relate to. Playing the Masters as an Open champion would have been nice. It looks like we will do it again in November, but it will be different. “
Lowry’s other home is located in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. When Bear’s Club closed in the spring, it didn’t touch a club for nearly six weeks. “It was the longest I’ve ever done without hitting a blow. The first two weeks have not been bad, but then I started to lose the game. Do not compete, but be able to hit a bucket in the evening, or go on a chip for a couple of hours or play nine holes with friends. I really missed the game. When it is taken away, it is different than deciding to take a break. “
The more you know Lowry – as our crew was lucky to do during this photo shoot in a ballroom at the Mirasol Country Club, even in Palm Beach Gardens – the more you feel an old world spirit. Avoid launching monitors and golf gadgets in general. “I would struggle if I saw all those numbers. They are definitely a little different from the other players. The only thing I have is a put mirror, which I have used for maybe 10 putts in the past year. “
Growing up, none of his family played golf. His first show came at the age of 9, when his mother let him wear his soccer shoes to the local pitch-and-putt. “I was very sporty as a kid, so I wanted to play everything.” For two years he brought only a wedge and a putter, learning to control a Commando, which is the exceptionally soft, heavy and thorny ball used for pitch-and-putt. “The technique is actually quite different from golf, in that you put the ball up and sweep from below to create effects,” says Lowry. “The course had these small and grown greens that really encouraged learning many shots.”
Before old Tom Morris was old, he played a game called Sillybodkins up and down the cobblestone streets of St. Andrews. The boys would find a club, an old wine stopper to put a few nails in (to give it weight), then they would choose a target. Wins the least amount of shots to hit that lamppost. You may also have to loft it over a horse-drawn cart.
For this service, we used the same costume company based in London that supplied the clothes for the extremely authentic film “Tommy’s honor”. The tweed pants were a little snug on Lowry and had to be pulled out by our tailor on site. Lowry laughed, sweating despite the air conditioning. “I can’t imagine how they sounded in these things. If I wore it in Memphis, I would lose two stones! “
Soft browns looked good on Lowry, whose contemporary wardrobe is mainly black and white. Old Tom Morris was also a discreet dresser. The photographs of the first professional golfers obscure how many clothes with colored glares. Allan Robertson, mentor to Old Tom, was known for exotic pink hats and purple ties. In fact, when we handed over an old club to Lowry to get it for the camera, a strange and almost ghostly atmosphere settled on the set. Standing before us was an apparition of the grandfather of the modern game.
Shane Lowry manages to keep the claret jug for another year. “I suppose there is a bit of a novelty factor, and it will be nice to have the jug on my Christmas table again, although I would have preferred to be an open champion for two years in a row the right way.”
This cover is also new, but it is not wrong.
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