Best of friends, best of rivals, the golfing Maguire twins have high standards, so this week’s tie with the US in the Junior Solheim Cup was a disappointment. But, they say, the world can expect to see plenty more of them
AN HOUR AFTER the closing ceremony at Knightsbrook Hotel in Co Meath on Wednesday, the American visitors are still high-fiving and whooping and cheering. They have just fought their way to a 12-12 tie with Europe in the Junior Solheim Cup, enough for the reigning champions to retain the trophy.
On the lawn the victors are gathered with their families for photos, each snap followed by fresh bouts of hugging and happy hollering, tears of rapture threatening to dilute the stars and stripes painted on the players’ cheeks.
Naturally, there is a somewhat contrasting mood in the European camp. The continent’s finest young female players – from France, Wales, England, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Belgium and Ireland – stand quietly with their families, who are trying, but largely failing, to cheer up the teenagers. Having led 7-5 going into the final day’s play, the draw is hard for them to take.
Of all the parents, Breda and Declan Maguire, from Ballyconnell, Co Cavan, appear to have the hardest task when it comes to raising spirits. Their twin daughters, Leona and Lisa, seem inconsolable. It was a tie, but for the 16-year-olds, so accustomed to winning, it feels like a defeat.
By the time they were 13, just three years after taking up the sport at the Slieve Russell golf club, they had already won more than 50 tournaments between them. More often than not, they were each other’s closest rivals.
When Lisa won the under-12 world championship at Pinehurst in 2006, only the favourite, the American Julie Yang, separated them. The tournament made followers of the game outside Ireland take notice of the sisters.
“Neither likes losing,” said their coach, Shane O’Grady, a few years back, his smile indicating that he had just proffered quite the understatement. It’s what all observers of their progress say drives them on and makes them the competitors they are. First is first, second is nowhere; that kind of thing. But it makes days such as Wednesday tough.
When Leona makes her way back indoors she is stopped by an admirer, a woman who grabs her by the shoulders and says: “Let me guess: Lisa?”
Leona musters a half-smile and points to her Junior Solheim Cup name tag.
“Oh. Leona. I never get it right,” the woman says, laughing.
There must be times when being an identical twin is fun, but not when you’re feeling this dejected. Leona nods and carries on.
Are you both very down, I ask them.
“Well, I won all three of my matches,” says Leona. “So there’s nothing more I could have done. But yeah, it was just disappointing in the end.”
Lisa, who partnered Leona to victory in the opening day’s foursomes, nods in agreement.
“Really disappointing,” she says.
“I think when you’re as competitive as we are, you don’t like losing; nobody likes losing,” says Leona. “But if you weren’t disappointed when you didn’t win, I think there’d be a problem there. But it was a good week for both of us. We played well. That’s golf really. You just have to use it. You learn from every single day. It’ll only make you better in the long run.
“But we enjoyed the week. It was great to play with the girls from Europe who we compete against during the year. It’s nice to come together as a team. It’s different from what you’re used to: you have to work more together, do what’s good for the team rather than what suits yourself. Our team worked well together this week; there were no big egos.
“I think that was quite obvious compared to the Americans. I think the Americans were a team full of egos.”
“Sometimes the sportsmanship wasn’t the best,” Lisa agrees.
“But we kind of expected that,” says Leona. “We expected that they were going to be loud, although they weren’t so loud when we were leading 5-1 on the first day. But, yeah, they got louder as today went on, but I suppose that’s to be expected with the tournament.”
Not the happiest experience, then, but both agree they’ll just learn from it and move on. It was their last major event of the year, but that doesn’t mean their 2011 work is done. In the months ahead they’ll focus on their “strength and conditioning”, according to Leona, “and, weather permitting, our game. We’ll try to get a bit stronger over the winter, get another couple of yards on to our drives. We’ll just work on everything in general and try to come back stronger and better next year.”
It’s a commitment they’re happy to make. Their devotion to the game has been unwavering since they first started playing.
“You have to make a lot of sacrifices to play golf; it’s a very demanding sport,” says Leona. “But we do take time off as well and do stuff that normal people do. But it’s worth it in the end, the sacrifices that you make.”
“We’ve been very lucky with the opportunities we’ve had from playing golf,” says Lisa. “We’ve been to a lot of places that most 16-year-olds haven’t been to. Yeah, we do miss doing some things, but, in other ways, not really. We get to travel a lot more and make a lot of new friends along the way. We travel all around Europe in the summertime; we’ve been to America a good few times, and places like Argentina.”
They hope to be seeing a lot more of the US in the years to come, their ambition being to play professionally on the women’s tour there.
“That’s the goal,” says Leona, who, with Lisa, has just started fifth year at school. “We’ve got offers from colleges such as Stanford, so we’ll either accept one of them and go to college in the States, or turn professional. We’ll just have to see where our games are at come then. We’ve a couple of years yet.”
They’ll travel as a pair too; a life apart is unimaginable. “There’s rivalry between us,” says Leona. “If one wins one week, the other tries to win the next week. We try to get better and better. We practise with each other all the time; it brings both our games on.”
Best of friends? “Yeah,” they both say.
Do you ever fall out? “No, we get on well.”
And with that they return to family and friends. More consoling hugs. There’ll be better days ahead. Their talent is the guarantee of that.
Playing host: Cup could boost golf tourism
Ireland’s first hosting of the Solheim Cup, which began at Killeen Castle yesterday and concludes tomorrow, came a little too early for Leona and Lisa Maguire. The star amateurs are still a month short of their 17th birthdays and were on duty at the junior event at Knightsbrook this week. Their time will come, no doubt, but both twins are hopeful that the 2011 event will have a lasting impact on women’s golf in Ireland, and maybe even produce a few more rivals for them in the long term.
“You’d like to think young girls will get inspiration from it,” says Leona. “It’s the biggest team competition in ladies’ golf, with the best players in the world, so it’s a real boost to have it in Ireland. Hopefully people will come out to support it, and those who can’t will watch it on television. It’d be great to see more girls taking up golf after seeing it.”
The competition, which features the leading professional players in Europe and the US, is the most widely televised women’s golf event in the world. It could produce a timely economic boost, as organisers point to advance ticket sales of 50,000, and say a fifth of attendees will be from outside Ireland. That figure, it is estimated, would be worth up to €35 million to the economy, with the chief beneficiaries being businesses in and around Co Meath.
Longer term, it is hoped that the exposure the event receives will result in an increase in the number of golf tourists visiting this country. The competition is getting extensive coverage on the US Golf Channel as well as on Sky Sports. The Solheim Cup director, Roddy Carr, estimates that the tournament will reach “300 million homes in 140 countries”.
Golf tourism generates in excess of €150 million a year in Ireland, and in 2009 attracted 143,000 overseas visitors. With women’s participation in the sport increasing rapidly (up to 10 million now play it worldwide), the potential economic spin-offs of hosting the Solheim Cup, and the opportunities the tournament presents to showcase golf in Ireland, are obvious.
Carr notes research showing that “women have a 70 per cent influence on the travel spend in the family”, so if this year’s Solheim Cup audience are suitably impressed by Ireland’s landscape and facilities, perhaps they will soon be Googling “Ireland, golf, holidays”.
