Arthur Sullivan
Arthur will be providing regular comment and analysis on GAA and golf in 2009.
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Lowry victory is astonishing
It's hard to put Shane Lowry's win in the Irish Open on Sunday into perspective without seeming like you're going overboard. But it has to be said, it's one of the most incredible debut displays in the history of golf.
Many excellent golfers go through their entire careers without winning a tournament, or perhaps only one or two. Many truly great golfers take years before they register their first victory. Pádraig Harrington won in his second year as a professional, but after taking the 1996 Spanish Open, he took four more years before he registered another win on the European Tour. It's not easy, this winning business.
Players have won on their professional debuts, but it has hardly ever happened that an amateur has won on his first outing at a professional event. Rory McIlroy didn't win as an amateur and after turning professional, he had a few choky misses before his spectacular debut triumph in Dubai.
And yes, Tiger Woods has accumulated a fairly mind-blowing list of achievements and feats in his record-breaking career, but even he didn't do what a 22-year-old Offaly man did at Baltray on Sunday.
Yet even those acknowledgements do not do justice to what the Clara native did. It was his home Open, where Irish winners are famously scarce. The fact that it was on his native island meant that his first professional event and - as it turned out, his first chance at victory - would be conducted in front of massive, roaring galleries with all the attention and pressure that comes with it.