On Thursday, Howard will begin his tournament at 10:42 BST alongside New Zealand’s Kazuma Kobori and England’s Tom Sloman.<\/p>\n
“It’s surreal. I’ve been busy playing inter-pros for Munster and playing for my home club Fota Island, I haven’t had much time to think, but I’m happy to be here,” said Howard, who is 1,441st in the world amateur rankings.<\/p>\n
“I’ve only been to an Irish Open years ago to watch, so first time playing. I’ve watched a small bit on TV over the years, so it’ll be a good test and a great week. <\/p>\n
“I can’t wait. I’m going to try my best to enjoy the week. But at the same time, I’m not here to make up the numbers. I really want to do my best and see where it takes me.”<\/p>\n
Regardless of how he fares this week, Howard says his Open debut will be worthwhile if it inspires other people with cystic fibrosis to chase their dreams.<\/p>\n
“I’ve had a few people with CF kids reach out to me,” he said.<\/p>\n
“This is why I do all this stuff for CF Ireland and advocacy, to show them that it’s not the end of the world. <\/p>\n
“Keep pushing on, keep fighting and you can follow your dreams too.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Thursday, Howard will begin his tournament at 10:42 BST alongside New Zealand’s Kazuma Kobori and England’s Tom…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691262,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-691261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}