Bags of clubs are lined up like sentries outside Carton House in Co Kildare where golfers from all over the world are preparing for the KPMG Irish Women’s Open. I’m here to talk to Leona Maguire, a trailblazing pioneer of Irish women’s golf. Inside the clubhouse, some of the golfers, athletic-looking types in pristine sportswear, are helping themselves from a protein-forward buffet. One woman walks past carrying an abstemious looking plate loaded with three boiled eggs and a lump of brown soda bread.
Maguire, it turns out, is also fond of an egg. I find this out during the quick-fire round of our interview. I’ve only been given half an hour with the Irish golfing legend so I figure I better get as many questions in as possible and hope a few rapid inquiries towards the end of our chat will prove an efficient use of the time. When I ask about her favourite post-round snack or meal she says she loves breakfast. “I’d have breakfast for any meal.”
The Cavan woman is picky about her eggs, though. “We grew up with chickens and hens at home, so I’m very particular about my eggs. They have to be real eggs; they can’t be any of the powdered stuff sometimes you get in some hotels. They have to have yolks with almost an orangey tint to them.” I tell her about the woman I saw earlier with the boiled eggs. “Yeah,” she says, confirming the eating habits of her fellow golfers, “there’s a lot of ham and cheese and boiled eggs.”
The hens and chickens she grew up around were in Ballyconnell, Co Cavan, where she and her twin sister Lisa were golfing child prodigies with two schoolteacher parents. Does she remember her first experiences with golf? “Dad got us three clubs and we started off at the par-three course down at the Slieve Russell” (the golf and country club formerly owned by businessman Sean Quinn).
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They soon went further afield, “playing with the boys, four-hole competitions. It was a Mars bar for the winner kind of thing.” Were they beating the boys? “Probably not in the beginning … eventually we graduated to nine holes and 14 holes and then we were playing with the boys more regularly … they quite enjoyed having the help and there was slagging if they lost, but they were always very good about it.”
There seemed to be no other girls playing at the time; the Maguire twins were a golfing anomaly. She remembers there was the attitude of “ah, girls playing golf – when they get to be teenagers, they’ll give it up. But Dad saw past that. He saw there were opportunities out there for women in sport.”
It helped to have a twin also in the game. “There were two of us. That was a nice thing. We always had each other.” They were only 11 when they were asked to carry the Ryder Cup trophy into the K Club for the presentation ceremony in 2006, the year Europe beat the US in a decisive victory. The pictures show two grinning girls, ponytails swinging, wearing matching red trousers as they hold the cup high.
I met her twin Lisa earlier, while Leona was getting photos taken. Lisa turned professional in 2018, the same year as her sister, but retired a year later. She’s now a newly graduated dentist, starting a job in Cork later this year. Were they competitive growing up? “Oh, definitely,” she tells me. They’re still close. Lisa spent the past few weeks with her sister in Detroit, while Leona played the Dow Championships as part of a duo called the Irish Goodbyes.
“We were very close, but also I wanted to beat her as well,” Leona smiles when asked about rivalry with her twin. “We were competitive from a young age. It didn’t matter what it was. My mam always said we’d fight over snakes and ladders. I wanted to beat Lisa. She wanted to beat me, but if I didn’t win, I wanted to see her win as well. So we’d fall out and fall in just as quickly. It never lasted very long, but I think that brought us both on without realising it.”
Was she disappointed when Lisa made the decision to retire? “I mean, it’d be nice to have her out on tour but at the same time it’s nice to see her happy and doing well and excelling in something that she’s good at. I think she deserves a lot of credit for choosing her own path.”
Long before turning professional Maguire, who is now 30, made her mark on golf. She was ranked best in the world for a record 135 weeks as an amateur, winning the Mark H McCormack Medal three times for being the top-ranked woman amateur globally. On a scholarship at Duke University in the US, where she studied psychology and marketing management, she won several college titles and awards for outstanding play.
The wins kept coming when she turned professional in 2018. The following year she won two tournaments on the Symetra Tour. In 2022, she became the first Irish woman to win on the LPGA (Ladies Professional Golfing Association) tour landing the historic victory in the Drive On Championship. She played a starring role in Europe’s Solheim Cup victories in 2021 and 2023.
Last year was a big one: she became the only Irish woman to win on the LGPA European Tour, won the Aramco Team Series event in London and was inducted into the Women’s Golf Coaches Association Hall of Fame. If you go on the LGPA website and search for her name, you learn that since turning professional seven years ago she’s racked up just over $5 million (around €4.2 million) in prize money.
What does she spend it on? “We came from a modest background. I don’t need a lot of money to keep me happy. I’m not big into material things. I don’t have a big handbag or watch collection.” She tells me she’s building a home in Cavan which will make a fair dent in her savings and, as a keen cook and baker, she likes going to fancy restaurants when she travels. There is a lot of travel. She’s been competing in China and Singapore in the past year – the golf season is long, beginning in January and not ending until November.
When I tell people I am going to interview Maguire, inevitably some golfing enthusiasts look for tips. One of my brothers has a more existential question: “Will you ask her why I play so well some weeks and so badly other times?” Maguire laughs, feeling my brother’s pain. “Time, it’s just time,” she says. “We always joke with people in the pro ams that if they are very good at golf they are probably not spending enough time in the office. It’s one of those annoyingly frustrating sports … even for us at our level there are things you’ll be great at one day and not so good the next. But you always hit one shot that keeps you coming back the next day”.
In this, the psychology degree comes in handy, especially when experiencing a dip in form: “Golf is one of those sports where you lose more times than you win. So you have to take the lows with the highs and you have to be resilient and mentally strong.”
She’s a huge sports fan herself, enthusing about her colleagues in elite Irish sport, listing women such as “Katie Taylor, Kellie Harrington, Rachael Blackmore and Sonia O’Sullivan.” “I’m a huge admirer of theirs and we swap stories”. She’s been to the Olympics three times.
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Golf is traditionally a male-dominated sport – “when we were growing up women weren’t allowed in some clubhouses”. Maguire has seen women’s golf evolve over the past 20 years. How could it be better promoted?
“I think it would be nice to see it on TV more often and in better time slots,” she says. “It used to be just a highlights package at midnight on a Thursday or something like that. It’s starting to get more and more prime-time slots.
“The big thing is getting as many people out to Carton House this week. When people come and watch, they’re very impressed with the standard and even a lot of men would say when they come out to watch us it’s more relatable, and they pick up more things about the rhythm and the timing and the accuracy of it. They’re quite impressed. So I think the biggest thing is getting more eyes on it, and then once the eyes are there, we can retain the fans.”
We have a few minutes left for the quick-fire round. Coffee or Tea? “Tea,” she says quick as a flash. “I don’t drink coffee.” Morning round or afternoon tee-off? “Morning.” Who would win in a putting contest between her and her twin sister Lisa? “Well, probably me now but back in the day, I don’t know,” she says smiling diplomatically. Any golfing superstitions? She tells me about a lucky ball marker she’s carried around in a pouch for 15 years, it has a shamrock on one side and the Slieve Russell on the other.
Golfers typically have long careers, Maguire could have another 30 or 40 years in the sport. “I don’t know about that but I don’t see myself stopping any time soon,” she says. “I enjoy what I do. I always say I’ve one of the best offices in the world. It changes every week. I’m very lucky to have the job I do. It’s brought me to some incredible places.”
