By his own admission, Shane Lowry is no expert on Gaelic games, but his opinion on certain aspects of football and hurling still carries weight.
The gravitas of his comments come from where he operates in his chosen sport.
The Offaly man is currently ranked number 18 in world golf, he is number four on the European Tour’s Race to Dubai list, recently won the World Golf Championship-Bridgestone Invitational in Ohio, is primed for a Ryder Cup bow, and has his sights set on a place on Ireland's team for the Olympic Games in Rio next year.
When he talks about business at the top end of the sporting world, people listen.
The 28-year-old’s family are steeped in GAA tradition, his father and uncles starred on the Offaly football team that beat the five-in-a-row-chasing Kerry in 1982.
His earliest memory of Croke Park is the Offaly hurlers’ 1995 All-Ireland final loss to Clare, and he was an 11-year-old pitch invader “just doing what I was told” for the famous protest at the premature end of the 1998 semi-final replay against the Banner County.
Those glory days are long gone.
With Dublin’s footballers growing small in the distance as they bound away from all competitors in Leinster and beyond, and all sorts of suggestions about how to close the gap doing the rounds, Lowry is back in HQ at the launch of Offaly GAA’s plans to develop a new training centre of excellence, talking about how he competes with the best golfers in the world.
“If I went on to a practice ground in the morning and Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy were over on a different one that’s better, I’d be like, ‘Well, what’s going on here? Why aren’t I allowed on that one?’" he says.
“If I had nowhere good to practice, if I had nowhere good to go, [I’d wonder] how good might I be?
“If I went on to a practice ground and Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy were over on a different one that’s better, I’d be like, ‘Well, what’s going on here?'"
“If I didn’t do the right things that need to get me where I am, if you don’t do everything right, you don’t know where you’ll be.
“This is obviously a big start if everything goes right and they get it built properly and it comes together well and players can start training there. You hear stories of players having to go out of the county [to train], and it’s not good.
“Preparation is everything, I suppose, in sport. More so in football and sports where you’re at high intensity. [In] golf, you can kind of get away without doing it 100% but you will be found out at a certain stage.
“But in sports like GAA, I think you definitely need every little per cent you can get to try and get to the next level.
“The players deserve to have the same facilities as the Dubs have. You can’t have [exactly] the same as the top counties but something similar."
Lowry is a cousin of former Dublin footballer David Henry. The 2009 Irish Open winner recalls talking to Henry, and the difference between how they went about their preparation and how others do it was laid out in stark terms.
“I spoke to David a couple of times,” he says.
“I remember they won a Leinster final one year. He was heading out to Punchestown the Tuesday after – they were going to run around the race track.
“I remember him going in for all day sessions on a Saturday whereas [most] teams would go training for an hour and a half and go home.
“You’d think to yourself, what are they doing for the whole day Saturday? They’re obviously doing video analysis and all these different things.
“I would meet a lot of the GAA players now and I would ask them how things are going, what are they doing?
“Basically, they’re at something different every night.
“Most of the players I would meet would be from the [stronger] counties and when you’ve somewhere to go to do that every night it makes it a lot easier, whereas if you’re living somewhere in Offaly, where you have to travel an hour to do that every night it makes it a lot harder.”
That’s why Lowry is supporting the Faithful Fields initiative, and it’s clear the fortunes of his county are close to his heart.
Last summer the footballers were on the verge of a first win in the Leinster Championship since 2007.
The Clara man was all set to celebrate the rare occasion with Offaly holding a sizeable lead against Longford in O’Connor Park.
“I remember being at a [function] in Tullamore this year before the Longford match and everyone was so upbeat. ‘We’re finally going to win a championship match’.
“We went seven points up with 20 minutes to go, and lost. I remember I was planning on going for a couple of drinks with the lads after the match and I got into my car and drove back to Dublin.
“That’s how depressed I was, you can imagine how the players were.”
That’s Lowry’s pastime when he has time off from a busy job. He has just planned his schedule and revealed that he won’t play again in Europe until the Irish Open in May.
He’s feeling good about his game and admits that his WGC win and a tied-for-second finish at the British Masters has given him a tremendous boost as he heads into Ryder Cup and Olympics year.
“I’ve definitely kicked on,” he says. “I’m playing with so much confidence now.
“I’d six weeks off and probably enjoyed my six weeks off a little bit too much, hard not to after winning a tournament like that but towards the end of it I kind of refocused myself.
“There’s times when golf comes easy, times where golf comes hard. At the moment it feels like the game is easy.
“I have a goal for the rest of the year that I really want to achieve and I feel like I can, and if I achieve that I think I’ll be quite a way towards making the Ryder Cup team.
“I’m playing in America until the Irish Open, which is my first tournament back in Europe in May and I’m just playing the bigger events in Europe, depending on how I’m doing.
“I would hope to make the Ryder Cup team on world points. If I’m close to it on the other list, I might change my schedule to try and make it on that.
“I definitely have more self-belief in the last few weeks, there’s no point in saying I haven’t. I feel like I’m doing everything I want to do right.
"I feel like I’m preparing myself well. If I keep doing that I could have a good year next year."
He says the Ryder Cup “is a massive goal [but] it’s not the be-all and end-all for next year” and has his eyes on Rio.
“That’s in [the plan]. I’m not definitely on the team yet. It’s going to take some more good golf.
“I know from spending a lot of time with Padraig [Harrington] he’d love to be on that team. We all know with Padraig – he's only one week away from winning a major, he’s never too far away.
“Listen, I want to go to Rio, I think it would be an amazing experience. Everyone knows how Irish I am, how patriotic I am so to go there and to walk out in the opening ceremony with the Irish team would be pretty good.”
Shane Lowry was speaking in Croke Park to announce Offaly GAA’s plans to develop a new centre of excellence. The Faithful Fields project will cost €2.25 million to develop in total with Offaly GAA aiming to raise €750,000 before 30 November.
