LOWRY'S HUNGER GAMES

WHAT MAY HAVE BEEN Disappointment for Shane Lowry last weekend and (below) delight at Ryder Cup win

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FRANK Haffey, perhaps enjoying a premonition of his future life as a cabaret artist in the Antipodes, famously broke into song in a Wembley bathtub after England had defeated Scotland 9-3 back in 1961.

What made Haffey’s musical interlude so noteworthy was that he had been Scotland's goalkeeper for the previous 90 minutes as Caledonia’s finest were pulverised and pulped in the original Operation Epic Fury.

At a grim threshold in his life - the Celtic doorman would never be capped for Scotland again - Frank turned to music as a means of detangling himself from his grisly circumstance.

Effectively, he sang as the last rites were read.

Jimmy Greaves and Johnny Haynes had brutalised poor Haffey in one of the more pitiless public dismemberings of a Highlands prince since Edward Longshanks did for William Wallace 600 years earlier.

For the record, Wallace was strangled by hanging, released while still alive, emasculated, eviscerated (with his bowels burned before him), beheaded, cut into four parts, with his head then dipped in tar and placed on a spike atop London Bridge.

Something, similar, in other words, to the fate that befell Shane Lowry in Florida last Sunday.

Shane has gifted those of us with a passion for Irish sport some of the finest memories of our lives, the human frailty we glimpsed last week as vital as the days of cloudless skies in allowing us to feel kinship.

What overtook the Irishman was the sort of catastrophic tailspin and fatal loss of altitude that ordinarily ends up being reenacted in the National Geographic series, Air Crash Investigation.

Three up with three holes to play in the $9.6m Cognizant Classic, cruising to his first solo victory since 2022's BMW Championship, it was as if the tendons in the Ryder Cup hero's mind snapped like overstretched elastic.

Fate opened its jaws like a ravenous alligator and swallowed him whole.