They were nervous at the 1st, and so was he. The ovation they gave Shane Lowry when he stepped out to begin the final round of the 148th Open soon settled down into an uneasy silence. Lowry is an anxious man. He has said it himself. Back in 2016 he got so stressed about organising the guest list for his wedding that he and his fiancée decided they were better off eloping to New York instead. It was later that same year he blew a four-shot lead in the last round of the US Open at Oakmont. Everyone remembered that one and, even if they had tried to forget it, Brooks Koepka, seven shots back, had made a point of reminding them what happened “the last time Shane had the lead” on Saturday night.

Tommy Fleetwood rides the storm but fails to capsize Shane Lowry at Open | Kevin Mitchell Read more

And then Lowry flared his opening drive wide left into the ugly rough while his partner, and good pal, Tommy Fleetwood, whistled his straight down the middle. Fleetwood’s second was even better, and set up a 12ft putt for birdie. Lowry, on the other hand, lumped his into the cavernous front bunker, so deep that he disappeared into it. His escape shot looked, for a second, as though it would run on right up to the pin, but it caught on a ridge in the middle of the green and spun right back down the way it came. It left him needing to make a long putt for par, which he missed, and then a shorter one, from 8ft, just to make his bogey.

The night before, in the moments after his magical 63, Lowry had tried to explain how his game had changed in the months since he missed the cut in the Open last year. It wasn’t what he was doing, he said, but the way he was doing it. “I play golf now like there’s no consequences,” he explained, “like, what’s the worst thing that can happen? If I swing the club here and hit the ball, no matter where it goes, what is the worst thing that can happen to you?” Well, as he stood over that bogey putt, facing up to the prospect of a two-shot swing, it felt like he was about to find out.

Lowry needed this one. And when he got it, the crowd erupted around him. There can’t have been a bogey‑five that has ever been celebrated quite like it. In that moment Lowry had confronted the worst, come close enough to it to get a good look, and now he had faced it down. With that, everything began to turn around. He would not play so badly again all day – and Fleetwood would not get so close to his lead again, either.

So four hours later, Lowry arrived on the 18th six shots clear, followed by the raucous thousands, who came in pell-mell behind him as the stewards dropped the ropes and let them flood on to the fairway to watch the big finish. It was not the largest crowd the Open has ever had – there was one bigger, at St Andrews in 2000 – but it was surely the loudest. But then they have been waiting for this a long time. This was the first time they have had the Open here in 68 years. It would have come sooner, but for the Troubles. And without stretching the point, it felt significant that the Open ended with all those Northern Irish fans cheering on a golfer from Offaly, the son of an All-Ireland title-winning Gaelic footballer, no less.

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They were generous to Fleetwood, too. They had been cheering them both on all day long, like it was a Ryder Cup tie. Fleetwood and Lowry are good friends, and they had been looking out for each other. They started the round with a firm hug, and finished it the same way. And when Fleetwood, utterly dejected, made his way on to the 18th green, Lowry’s caddie Bo Martin ordered all the merry Irish fans to pipe down their singing and chanting with a wave of his hand. They fell entirely quiet and let Fleetwood play out the last two strokes of his round, and gave him a loud round of applause when he had.

The miracle was that there was so many of them there to watch, because by the middle of the afternoon the weather was so atrocious you could not necessarily have guessed where they were playing, or which part of the country it was in, since the town all around had disappeared into the low, black rainclouds that had blown in.

All you knew was that it was clearly some place where the locals were so crazy about the game that they thought these were fit conditions in which to be out watching golf. Any place, were they sensible, they would all have been shut up indoors with the curtains drawn, but here there were plenty striding about in shirts and shorts.

A lot of them did not even have tickets but were up on the sand dunes, or along the roads running over the nearby hills – there was, astonishingly, even someone bobbing about in the sea who seemed to be trying to film it all on his mobile phone. They filled every last spot where they could feasibly catch a glimpse of this unlikely victory. It was only last year that Lowry lost his PGA Tour card because he had had such a bad run, six missed cuts, and not so much as a single top‑10 finish. “I failed in America,” he said then. Back here at home, he has succeeded in the most brilliant fashion, and, for this one week at least, brought a lot of people here together to watch him do it.