If Paul Dunne was handcuffed, blindfolded and put into a padlocked cage, the suspicion is that he would escape quicker than it takes to snap your fingers. For, in this first round, his feats of escapology – or, in golfing terms, scrambling - were something to behold as he opened with a level par 71 that went some way to negate any pain felt from a cyst in his right hand.
Dunne, in actual fact, has delayed surgery on the cyst until next Monday. Wearing strapping and having taken painkillers pre-round, the 25-year-old Greystones played pain-free and without any obvious discomfort as he drove the ball very well, if not always taking advantage of birdie opportunities that he gave himself, and also scrambled when it mattered over the tough closing holes.
Of the cyst issue, Dunne – with tape around his wrist – explained: “It’s just been the last couple of weeks and I have to get it drained. They told me if I get it drained (it would clear); they could have done it last week but there was a chance of if bruising up and I might have to take a couple of days off.” Rather than taking that risk, Dunne has deferred the medical procedure and got off to a solid start here.
Some of his scrambling was impressive. For instance, on the Par 3 eighth, he got a break of sorts when his tee-shot didn’t kick left beyond the out-of-bounds fence but it came to rest behind a bunker and the only way he could get the ball anywhere near the flagstick was to putt around the trap as if on the wheel of death. He executed it brilliantly, finishing four feet from the hole and then sank the par putt. “Yeah, I think it was breaking right off the slope of the bunker and then left to go back on the green.”
And on the 16th, 17th and 18th he successfully got up-and-down each time to ensure his scorecard wouldn’t fall into an over-par score. On the 18th, where it took a couple of minutes to locate his ball in the left rough, Dunne’s approach plunged into a greenside bunker but his long escape shot was perfectly executed and he salvaged par.
For most of the round, Dunne’s driving was turned from a weakness into a strength. “I could have been three or four under through 15 holes,” he admitted. “But no matter how well you hit it, no one is going to hit every fairway because you can’t, there’s some fairways you just can’t hit when it is this firm, you’re going to have to scramble a bit and that’s my strength. So if everyone has to do that, I have a bit of an advantage.”
Overall, he was a contented man. “I think it is a decent start, the game is a little better than the score it has been getting better each week and each day and I felt like today was a good sign of that,” said Dunne.
The mood wasn't quite so positive from Shane Lowry. Playing in the group behind Dunne, Lowry was frustrated by four lip-outs in his first five holes and ran up a double-bogey from nowhere on the 10th - hitting his approach over the back of the green and taking two putts to get the ball back onto the putting surface - in opening with a 74, three-over-par.
“From 104 yards out, to take a double-bogey (on 10) was a kick in the you-know-what. In a tournament like this, you do that and you can’t compete. I fought hard to get up and down on 15, 16 and to make par with two putts from 40 yards on 17. But I made too many mistakes and you can’t do that,” said an utterly downbeat Lowry, adding:
“I’m not enjoying my golf at the minute, and my golf is not really enjoying me and that’s the way it is and it is hard to take . . . . look, I’m giving it my best, but what can I do?”
