17-05-2025
'F**k this place'- How Quail Hollow became so frustrating for McIlroy, Lowry and Harrington
YOUR GUIDE TO the Irish challenge at Quail Hollow here is Michael Kartrude.
By way of introduction. Kartrude is the assistant club pro at the Bear's Club in Jupiter, Florida, of which Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry are members.
Each year, the PGA of America run a championship from which 20 club pros can earn a spot at the PGA Championship, and Kartrude battled his way into the 2025 field by enduring a four-man, five-hole play-off.
Once Kartrude was in the field, Lowry invited him to a Tuesday practice round with he, McIlroy, and Pádraig Harrington.
We tracked down Kartrude on Thursday evening to ask for him his impressions of his practice partners.
Rory: 'He gives the people what they want'
Kartrude knew he couldn't miss his practice opportunity this week and McIlroy generously granted the wish.
McIlroy bounced into his press conference a day after the practice round, wearing a hat a shade deeper than his green jacket and the weightlessness of a man suddenly without burden.
He's playing with house money now, he says, having finally sloughed off the Grand Slam pressure that clung to him like skin. What's more, his record around this course Quail Hollow this week gave him effective home field advantage.
Which all begged a question. Is McIlroy now going to waltz through these major championships as he does regular tour events? And if so, where's the fun in that?
McIlroy's brilliance attracted an audience, but it was his torturous struggles that built that audience into the biggest seen since Tiger Woods'.
Sure, people admired McIlroy's shot-making and the runaway victories, but people loved him for the sheer humanity of his epic longing, and all of its lurches between brilliance and baffling error.
The good news from the opening two days of Quail Hollow: the Rory McIlroy Experience abides. It's impervious even to the Grand Slam. All that stuff you read about him gliding frictionlessly about the place now? Nah.
Playing with Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele, McIlroy rocked up on Thursday once again wearing green, before then blasting drives all over the property en route to a three-over round of 74, leaving us all wondering if he had once again started a major championship by playing himself out of contention right away.
He declined to speak to the media on Thursday as he wanted to go straight to the driving range. It emerged on Friday that he has been forced this week to play without his favoured driver, as its wear and tear left rendered it illegal under the gnomic, pernickety rules. That neither player, tournament, or governing body thought they needed to come out and explain this to the world was bizarre.
McIlroy made a strong start to Friday, getting himself back to one-under for the tournament and stirring hopes he was ready to make his charge for the tournament. Then came an inexplicable error on the 17th green: he watched Scottie Scheffler lip out from three feet and then proceeded to do precisely the same thing to make bogey.
Suddenly he was battling to stay inside the cutline. The one thing he needed to do was to find the fairway on the brutally difficult 18th. The one thing he did was to blow his drive so far left it hit the roof of a grandstand and dropped down to the bank of the creek. He managed to scramble another bogey to make the cut on the number: a relief but a let-down, given he had stood on the previous green with an eye on the leaders.
McIlroy again swerved the press arced about the scoring room afterwards, with his manager giving a half-apologetic shake of his head as McIlroy bounded up the steps to race home and get some sleep before returning to a crack-of-dawn tee time.
He arrived for an 8.25am start, had his warm-up briefly interrupted by a weather warning, and was then walking from the range to the first tee when the claxon sounded again to halt play, turning to Harry Diamond and letting out a hearty, Fuck. Off.
He went back inside to be told he'd now be playing in a group of three off the 10th tee, and not starting for another five hours.
It's not what he nor anyone envisaged for this return to Quail Hollow. The Rorycoaster rides on.
Shane: 'He's fiery – I like it'
'You see him frustrated,' says Kartrude of Lowry. 'He just wants to fix it.'
Lowry arrived off the back of an agonising near-miss at the Truist Championship on Sunday, his devastation such that the media waiting to speak with him were treated to an Irish goodbye.
The Monday deluge at Quail Hollow forced him into a rest day, doing a bit of gym and recovery work and catching up on The Sunday Game. By the time he spoke to the Irish media on Wednesday, he was trying to talk himself into a challenge.
'I've no record around here at all. Bad. Not played well,' was his Joycean summary of his previous with Quail Hollow. He was among the many pros frustrated that the tournament organisers did not allow players to clean the mud from their ball after landing in the sodden fairways, which played havoc with their ball flight.
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Lowry asked Harrington to try and convince the organisers to play the lift, clean and place rule. Given Harrington has previously persuaded the PGA of America to nearly double the size of the replica trophy given to champions, it was worth a shot on Lowry's part.
No dice. Lowry struggled his way to a two-over round of 73 on Thursday morning, before his Friday turned into a scene from the Book of Job. He smacked a dive down the eighth fairway but found his ball embedded in a pitch mark. Had it been his own, he'd have been allowed to take a drop, but a referee ruled it was a separate mark so, unfortunately, he'd have to play it as it lay.
Lowry was aggrieved by an on-course commentator for ESPN, who raced over to stress the ball wasn't in Lowry's pitch mark before it could be trashed out with the referee.
Gouging the ball out of the ground, Lowry sent his ball forward with a blizzard of f-bombs, grunting, 'Fuck this place.' He flipped his ball a middle finger after making his putt.
He missed the cut by a single shot, with the cutline moving as Lowry walked back to the clubhouse. Lowry's chosen a testing life for himself.
The result of his impressive consistency in the last two years is more attention, under which Lowry appears to be chafing. He mentioned earlier in the week of how the American golf media liked to talk so much about his solo tournament victory drought, and he wouldn't have had to deal with the ESPN commentator had he not been put in a featured group with Brooks Koepka and Rickie Fowler.
'I just said to the rules official, 'What happens the guy who's at 7.10 and not on ESPN live?' I guarantee he's down there arguing it's his pitch mark,' said Lowry.
Lowry has no filter, and he's now playing beneath a great spotlight in the world's most maddening sport.
Pádraig Harrington. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
Pádraig: 'He's intense, man.'
Kartrude hadn't met Harrington before. Safe to say that's an Experience Like No Other.
'He's hitting three balls off the tee to make sure he gets it right,' says Kartrude. 'He takes it very seriously and he wants to perfect his craft.'
As a past winner, Harrington has an exemption to play this championship, and chose to be here rather than compete at the clashing major on the champions' tour, scheduling he dismissed as silly.
He played this week primarily to get in tune for his next two months of competition on the champions tour and the Open at Portrush. Hence he had his sports psychologist Bob Rotella on site this week to help get his mental game in the right place, as he said he is having no technical or physical issues.
Rotella is also working with McIlroy and Lowry – the man has spent so long working his way through the kinks and quiddities of the Irish psyche he should qualify for membership of Aosdána – and he walked the course for that practice round alongside Kartrude and his trio of clients. Harrington said they would get Rotella for three holes each.
Harrington was also here to create a bit of content, with Paddy's Golf Tips making him the second most popular golf influencer on the course outside of Bryson DeChambeau.
Hence he was one of the handful of players on the course beneath biblical rain on Monday, as he wanted to capture a photo of flooded greens so as to read their breaks more easily.
We're not sure whether he would appreciate the comparison, but DeChambeau has also something of Harrington's sheer pig-headedness in the face of consensus and conventional wisdom.
With everyone complaining on Thursday about the mudballs, Harrington dismissed the topic and told he hadn't even heard the word growing up in Ireland.
Scheffler and Schauffele both caught mud as they and McIlroy all made double bogey on the par-four 16th hole, which was playing as the most difficult hole for most of Thursday. We asked Harrington what made it so difficult. 'A drive and a five iron? Not an issue at all.'
But what about the length of the course, Pádraig? Is this not a bombers' paradise?
'I didn't find this course a bit long. I hit three-wood off a number of par fours today, it didn't play long. I just need less stress and tension in my putting.'
Like Lowry, he opened with a two-over par on Thursday, but started on Friday with three-straight bogeys. The Harrington Fight was present and willing, though, and he wrestled his round back under control and with three holes remaining he stood on the seventh tee and told himself to do a Rory McIlroy: play the final three holes in three-under to make the cut on the number before going on to win, as McIlroy did in his debut at Quail Hollow in 2010.
Harrington played them in two-under, birdieing seven and eight but making par on nine. He thought his two-over par might just be enough to make the weekend, and so he walked off to the clubhouse, saying to nobody in particular as to what the rest of his day would look like: sitting inside and wishing people badly.
His afternoon didn't work out as it needed to, and he wasn't alone.
Michael Kartrude shot a pair of 76s to finish at 10-over and miss the cut. When Lowry and McIlroy are next down at the Bear's Club, he won't hear them trading many warm memories of the 2025 PGA Championship.
