Leona Maguire is certain that but for her twin sister she would not be going into Thursday’s first round of the AIG Women’s Open as one of the favourites – and not just because those winter evenings on the range in Co Cavan would have gone from unappealing to unbearable without Lisa.
“It’s funny the things that happen in life that send you in a different direction,” Leona says. “If Lisa hadn’t broken her elbow, we would never have found golf.”
The nine-year-olds were promising swimmers, but the doctor told their father, Declan, that to strengthen the joint Lisa should perhaps take up a racket sport as well. “The problem was there were no tennis courts near us or anything like that, so our dad, a keen golfer himself, bought us a few clubs each and took us to the course,” says Leona.
“Golf soon overtook swimming – we preferred the outdoors – but there’s no doubt that the discipline of getting up at 5am for two hours in the pool every day before school helped hugely with the golf. And we were lucky to have each other, because there were no other girls at the club. That was important. We’d spur each other on to practise when it was freezing. We always wanted to beat each other, so the environment was there to get better and better.”
Leona, 28, understands the mind. She majored in psychology in college in North Carolina – where she bucked the trend for golfing phenoms by actually completing the four-year degree – and possesses the insight as to how her competitive psyche developed. Fifteen minutes younger than Lisa, she trailed her sister’s prowess for years before emerging as the star.
They had risen as a pair, lauded in the media for their novelty and for their potential to add the female slant to the Irish fever on the male fairways.
Alas, two was soon to become one. Lisa’s game plateaued at Duke University and after 18 months of sizing herself up in the pros’ ranks decided to take a different route in the game. Signed by Modest Golf, the agency owned and founded by One Direction alumni Niall Horan, the marketing student now assists in the overseeing of sister’s career.
“We naturally remain really close,” Leona says. “Still talk most days, wherever we both happen to be in the world. It’s priceless to have someone like that who I can trust.”
Leona also has the Irish major-winners in her corner as she tries to become the first woman from her homeland to contribute to the staggering haul of the last two decades. Padraig Harrington collected the first three, there followed Graeme McDowell’s US Open and Darren Clarke’s Claret Jug, before Rory McIlroy’s quartet thrust him to another level. They have all been supportive, all offered advice, although it is Harrington who has materialised as the sometime mentor.
‘Harrington is a great man with a great mind’
“He’s a great man with a great mind that I’m fortunate to have been able to tap into,” Leona says. She laughs when asked if the complex environs of Harrington’s brain could provide a psychology module of their very own. “I remember bumping into him once at an airport and sitting down in a restaurant there with him and just listening to him talking about the game and everything. He’s a fascinating character.”
On the course, Harrington has helped with Maguire’s short game; off it, he has stressed the sport’s eternal necessity for patience and waiting for the right week to come along. “You can’t force it,” she says. “All you can do is put in the right preparation. I know it’s in there. It’s just a case of it coming out at the right time.”
In this regard, her record-breaking display at the 2021 Solheim Cup was all the validation she required. A pro for three years, Maguire had earned her LPGA Tour playing privileges with a few wins on the feeder circuit and fashioned her passage to the world’s top 50, but it was not happening as many predicted it would for the 26-year-old who had spent more weeks as world No 1 amateur than anyone before.
