LAST UPDATE | 9 Sep 2021
RORY MCILROY HAS four majors, Padraig Harrington three. Shane Lowry, Darren Clarke and Fred Daly have won an Open while Christy O’Connor junior, Paul McGinley, Eamonn Darcy and Philip Walton have nailed key putts to help Europe win a Ryder Cup. Yet in the aftermath of Monday’s heroics in Ohio, there was one face Harrington felt had to be engraved onto Irish golf’s Mount Rushmore.
Leona Maguire may still be world No43 and has yet to win an event on the LPGA tour. It may be even harder to believe that some of her Solheim Cup team-mates didn’t know a huge amount about her prior to last week. Well, now they do. And so does everyone in the golfing world.
To briefly recap, Maguire, the 26-year-old from Cavan, won more points (four and a half) than any other rookie in the history of the competition. She recorded two victories over world No1 Nelly Korda, then humiliated Jennifer Kupcho 5&4 to nail Europe’s opening point of the Singles.
“She is one of Ireland’s greatest golfers,” Harrington said. McGinley, who advised Maguire pre-tournament, went further. “There is nothing to stop Leona winning majors – she has everything in place to do so. She is tough, too, which is the divider more than talent.”
A psychology graduate from Duke University, evidence of Maguire’s toughness was notable long before last weekend’s joust in Inverness. There were her record breaking weeks as the world’s number one amateur; the patience she showed coping with teething troubles on her rookie season as a pro, the realisation she needed to add 25 yards off the tee if she was to become golf’s delivery woman.
She certainly delivered in Ohio. No other player from either team was trusted to play in all five matches; no rookie has ever led a team in Solheim Cup history like Maguire did. “The plan is to take the same confidence from last weekend into Arkansas when I next play,” she said earlier today. “I will try and learn all I can from last week but remember I have been playing well all year.”
She certainly has. She has been second twice on Tour, five times a finisher in the top ten; she shot a 61 at the Evian Championship. Some people never shoot that low in a career. She has won close to $750,000 dollars. To steal one of Frank Sinatra’s quotes, it has been a very good year.
Yet it has just got better. Dottie Pepper, the American TV commentator, referred to her as a “Superstar” while a former major winner, Laura Davies, dubbed Maguire “the silent assassin”.
It’s not hard to fathom the secret of Maguire’s emergence. She is deadly when the green comes into view. Where others lose their nerve, she holds hers. And her putts.
“It is very fine margins and it does not take much for it to go one way or the other. The biggest thing for me this year is confidence, feeling like I belong on the LPGA, that I can compete with the best players in the world week in and week out.”
Did she not feel like she belonged last year? “Look, any time you move up a level, there is always that sense of unfamiliarity and you have to get used to different things, travel, media, the pro ams. Plus last year being the year that it was (with covid), the tour wasn’t really what I imagined it could be.
“But this time around, you get confidence from good results.”
She’s had a few – the best ones coming last weekend, prompting a heartwarming homecoming in Cavan last night where she was paraded through her home town in an open top car. Ohio, venue of last weekend’s Solheim Cup, wasn’t as welcoming, a partisan crowd heckling her as she tore up the course.
And yet it didn’t bother her. After beating Korda for a second time last weekend, she said how satisfying it was to hole putts when the crowd was against her. “It is an Irish thing to be an underdog, to always have to fight for what we deserve, what we believe in. I suppose as well, growing up with a twin sister, it didn’t really matter what we did, we just always competed against one another, whether it was snakes and ladders or a game of soccer in the back garden.
“In matchplay, that competitiveness comes out. I gave it absolutely everything every time I played out there. You couldn’t have written it any better.”
You certainly couldn’t and yet those who know her best weren’t surprised by how the script unfolded. The former High Performance Director of Irish Ladies Golf, David Kearney, pointed out in an interview earlier this week how Maguire has never been afraid of failure.
There are taller golfers out there. There are also stronger ones. Yet are there any who work harder? Any who have the capacity to make the ball spin like Shane Warne? As Pepper stated, this player is a genuine superstar. Yet the humble beginnings, the GAA and soccer backgrounds, certainly helped.
“I grew up in team environments,” she said, explaining how her father, who is coaching a club team in Cavan’s Intermediate Championship, frets so much each time she plays that he ended up repainting the back room in the family home last weekend to take his mind off the events in Inverness.
“Do you know what was special? Being part of a team again. Golf is a very selfish game. It was nice to rally together as a team. We didn’t have the whole bonding trips the Americans had; we didn’t have the whole practice sessions the Americans had. We weren’t in the pod systems like the Americans.
“So,it was very much a case of helping one another out. We dined together, rode the bus together, sang songs together, it was just a really nice environment and that ultimately carried us through.”
The prize was huge, just the second time a European team have won the Cup on US soil. And yet Europe and Maguire also won something bigger than the Solheim Cup, bigger even than golf. She is helping to lift it out of the male-dominant constituency and show young girls that they can go anywhere in the world with a few clubs in their bag and a dream in their head. “To all the little girls with big dreams,” Maguire wrote, “chase them. It won’t be easy – but I promise you it’s worth it.”
Inverness proved that.
* Leona Maguire is a brand ambassador with KPMG who have just launched their latest video in performance series. See KPMG Ireland’s Twitter @KPMG_Ireland
