In Leona Maguire’s season the Solheim Cup was where the pus rose to the surface of the pimple. It was probably the first time that somebody thought she wasn’t good enough. Or at least had run the delirious risk of holding that opinion in public. In her pairings for the opening two days Europe’s captain Suzann Pettersen omitted Maguire for three sessions out of four. The simple, uncontentious, thing would have been to pick her. Would that have been right?
There was a persuasive case for the prosecution and a powerful case for the defence. In a social media post, shortly after she atomised Ally Ewing 4&3 in the Sunday singles, Maguire wrote that “form was temporary, class was permanent.” But if teams should always be picked on form, which form mattered? Maguire’s imperious form in two Solheim Cups? Or the form that had cast her season in shade?
In her last half a dozen tournaments before the Solheim Cup she had won a European Tour event in London and failed to break par in five others on the LPGA Tour. At the Olympics she had been floored by a bug and finished last. In the Majors she had suffered three missed cuts. On the LPGA Tour she had recorded just one top 10 finish all season. Last year she had six; the year before she had eight.
Dan Brooks, Maguire’s old coach at Duke University, was watching the Solheim Cup from a distance. What happened in the Sunday singles was the only thing that didn’t surprise him. “Somebody like Leona, her best game would come out in a situation like that,” he says. “You don’t tell Leona you don’t think she ought to play [laughs]. You don’t tell Leona that. I never had that job to do. That would be a tough call. If you’re going to make that decision you’d better have some good reasons lined up.”
Pettersen didn’t give any reasons in public. The impression that Maguire gathered was that “I was a little bit short [for the course] and didn’t make enough birdies.” In her singles win she made seven birdies in 15 holes. For driving distance Maguire is ranked 128th on the LPGA Tour this season while Ewing is inside the top 50. Was length a factor? Not that day.
“It was disappointing, all that, the way it happened,” says Shane O’Grady, Maguire’s coach. “I was there. She played great. She played fantastic in practice. But what other people think is out of your control.”
Maguire’s form this season, though, had created room for doubt. A couple of months before last year’s Solheim Cup Pettersen took the unusual, premeditated step of telling Maguire that she would be playing in all five sessions – just as she had done on her staggering debut in 2021. This year there was no such declaration of confidence from the captain. Instead, people made a bed with their assumptions.
Nobody’s career follows a linear path. This year, for the first time, Maguire has struggled.
It is five years ago, last week, since she secured her LPGA playing rights for the first time. Mike Whan, the LPGA Tour commissioner, met the new graduates and greeted Maguire with a smile. “We’ve been waiting for you,” he said. She was ready. She jumped off the cliff and flew.
“None of it was a surprise,” said Brooks. “She already had the ability to endure the highs and lows of golf. She had a very stoic approach to the good and was absolutely unaffected by the bad. With Leona I use the word tough. I can’t come up with a better word than that. She’s tough. I always felt that Leona was going to be able to handle the grind of being a pro. Being on tour, it’s a lonely place. She can withstand the loneliness of golf.”
Maguire is not expressive. On the golf course her emotions hunker down behind her wraparound shades and her game face. In some of her post-round interviews this season, though, she couldn’t hide how she felt. “I probably have been very harsh on myself,” she said at the KPMG in June. “Probably too harsh. I’ve had people around me, family, people on my team going, ‘you need to be kinder to yourself’.”
Three months later, on the week after the Solheim Cup, she elaborated on the same theme. “There hasn’t been a lot of fun in my golf this summer. I’m trying to be kinder to myself and enjoy my golf a little bit more. You put in an awful lot of hard work, and when the results don’t show it is frustrating. I know I have the game to do it, it’s just believing in myself a bit more.”
So, what hasn’t worked? At the beginning of the season Maguire was asked about the parts of her game that drive her performance. “For me,” she said, “the weeks that I putt the best are the usually the weeks that I do well.”
Clutch putting has always been her point of difference. In 2020, her rookie season, she led the LPGA in average putts per round – the first Irish professional, male or female, to lead a putting category on any major tour. This season she has slipped to 57th, a drop of nearly 40 places from last year. The difference between her best stats and now is nearly 1.2 putts per round, which is essentially five shots per tournament. That bites.
“If you delve too much into why it has dropped a little bit all of a sudden you might keep dropping,” says O’Grady. “All you can do is keep doing the same thing and you’ll turn it around. That’s golf.”
Off the tee Maguire and O’Grady have chased more distance. Just like in the men’s game, the longest hitters on tour are getting longer. In response the courses have been stretched out.
“I caddied for her in Mission Hills one year [when Maguire played as an amateur in a Major] and the length of the course was 6,400 yards. I was in Baltusrol last year [for another Major] and they said it was 6,900 but it felt like 7,000 yards. Leona had to evolve and do a lot more strength and conditioning.
“Her club head speed is six or seven miles an hour faster than it was three years ago. On a 6,800 yard golf course, if Nelly Korda is going into the par 4s with a drive and a nine iron, and you’re going in with a drive and a three wood, you can’t compete. She has got longer. She is deceptively long now.”
Halfway through the season, a fortnight after she won in London, Maguire changed her caddie. Dermot Byrne, who had been on her bag for three years, was replaced by Vernon Tess, another Irish caddie and a 20-year veteran on the LPGA Tour. It is not unusual: in a dull run of form professional golfers are inclined to make personnel changes.
“Everything has a lifespan,” says O’Grady. “That’s what happens. Change is a great thing.”
Off the course, however, there is no apparent change in Maguire’s arrangement with Kingspan, the Cavan multinational who, in recent years, had built a portfolio of sponsorship deals. Shane Lowry cut his ties with Kingspan after the report into the Grenfell Tower disaster was published in September.
The report concluded that only about 5 per cent of the insulation of the tower was made up of a Kingspan product and that the company was not responsible for the spread of the fire. However, it also found that Kingspan “had knowingly created a false market” for insulation products and demonstrated “deeply entrenched and persistent dishonesty…in pursuit of commercial gain.”
Grenfell United, the bereaved and survivors’ group, told The Guardian last month that they wrote to Maguire’s management group in September 2023, “urging her to end the deal, but received no response”. This week, a spokesperson for Grenfell United said that “we reached out to her management team again about a month ago and we’ve heard nothing back”.
On the course the grind continues. Last week China, next week Malaysia. Since the Solheim Cup she has enjoyed her best run of form since March. Nothing special. Not threatening to win yet. Steady. More like it. More like her.
Maybe Pettersen cocked up. Or maybe Maguire should have given her no choice.
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