Leona Maguire has become accustomed to fitting the pieces of a puzzle into place, making life on tour work, with this week’s stop in China for the Buick LPGA Championship in Shanghai another example of how adaptability is required to deliver results.
For Maguire, this closing stretch of the LPGA Tour season is one of criss-crossing timelines: for instance, this latest travel log saw her depart Hawaii last Saturday night, fly to Vancouver, Canada, then board a flight to Shanghai for the start of a late-year Asian swing.
Next week it will be South Korea. Then, a few days home in Ireland before travelling to Malaysia. After that, it’s back to Florida for the closing two events of the LPGA Tour, finishing with the megabucks CME Globe Tour Championship – a limited field of the leading 60 players off the order of merit – which has a $4 million (€3.4 million) pot of gold to the winner.
Anyway, there’s a lot of golf to be played between now and then.
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The Buick LPGA is Maguire’s 22nd tournament of a season which, so far, she described as “a mixed bag” but with the glass-half-full approach of positivity.
Indeed, there was a twist recently which may have tested that air of positivity when an opening round 64 in the Walmart championship in Arkansas left Maguire one off the lead after the first round – only for the tournament to be abandoned due to heavy rain.
“We saw videos from the golf course and there was really nothing the tour could do. We saw videos from it the following Wednesday and it was actually worse. I played some really great golf, was sitting pretty after the first day, and that was it. You can just take the positives from it and know I played really well and obviously been playing some nice golf leading into that in the second half of the season,” Maguire said.
So, Shanghai this week where players on the course can hear the planes overhead, but can’t see them because of the layers of cloud cover. “It’s actually no harm it being overcast because it means the temperatures are a bit more manageable,” Maguire said, adding in passing that “two caddies went down” in a practice round suffering from the heat.
Maguire is currently 53rd on the Race to CME Globe order of merit, with the top 60 making it to the season-ending Tour Championship in late November. There is that permanent belief that her game is ready to deliver a third win on the LPGA Tour in an environment that is increasingly competitive, with world No.2 Nelly Korda among those also seeking a first win of the season.
“I have played some really nice golf and it has been close, just a few loose shots here and there. The tour feels stronger this year than probably it has ever been, a lot of new winners. The standard is getting higher and higher, so you can’t afford to be even a little bit off. You have to have your best to even be in with a sniff of the top 20 or to be in contention. I played some really nice golf in patches this year, just maybe the consistency hasn’t been quite as good as I would have liked,” said Maguire, whose best-finish so far is a tied-7th in the Evian Championship, one of five majors on the women’s circuit.
This season’s list of winners on the LPGA Tour have been remarkable in that there are no multiple winners, unlike Korda’s dominance of last year when the American won seven times, with a spread of 11 different nationalities claiming a victory, the most of any being five by Japanese players.
“I think Nelly’s scoring average is lower this year than it was last year, so that’s reflective of the standard and the impact of the Japanese this year. To be fair, a lot of them are top 50 in the world before they even come to the LPGA and they are very established, be that in Japan or Korea, and they hit the ground running when they come over here.
“They have huge teams behind them as well. Coaches, interpreters, whole teams with them, so they take a very different approach to it. I don’t know if that’s the backing they have from where they come from or whatever, you don’t see as many players, Americans or Europeans, with that [support], whereas they are coming with those teams, those entourages, and that is probably the biggest change we have seen on the tour this year and maybe that’s the way it is going. That’s probably what it is more like on the men’s side. They are obviously playing some great golf and raising the standard.”
Maguire’s team is a lot smaller and closer, but modern technology means that her coach Shane O’Grady – who will travel to the season-ending events in Florida – is never too far away when it comes to analysis.
“I’m always chatting away with him. In Hawaii, there was 11 hours [time difference] so he was sitting at home in the dark at nine in the evening and I was on the range at eight [in the morning] our time, so the modern technology is great in that regard. I can send him a video from halfway across the world and he has it within 10 seconds. There is a lot of pieces that go into the puzzle behind the scenes that probably people don’t realise,” Maguire said of that never-ending quest for betterment.
Next year, of course, is a Solheim Cup year when Maguire will be looking to make a fourth appearance in the competition, her debut back in 2021 in Toledo instilling the event into her DNA, where she won four-and-a-half points from five in a player of the match contribution.
Where Shane Lowry talked of watching videos of past Irish players in the Ryder Cup inspiring him for his exploits at Bethpage, Maguire’s highlight reels of Irish players in the Solheim Cup are those of herself.
“The Ryder Cup was incredible, fantastic, [Europe] basically executed a plan to absolute perfection the first two days and obviously Sunday was a bit more dramatic than everyone would have liked, but you couldn’t have asked for a better end than to see Shane holing that putt to retain the whole thing and put it beyond American hands.
“I suppose I was lucky my first one when we were going over to Toledo, not obviously on the same scale as Bethpage, but we knew it was going to be a hostile environment as well, knew with the American crowds and no European fans we’d be severely outnumbered. I talked to Paul McGinley a lot before I went and he was able to give me advice. It was nice to lean on him in that same scenario.
“The Solheim Cup and Ryder Cup are incredibly fun weeks and great camaraderie among the Europeans, out there playing with your friends and you want to win. There is nothing that beats winning with your team-mates and you want to do whatever it takes to hole those putts.”
So it is that making that team in the Netherlands in a year’s time – realistically the Rolex world rankings are her best route, albeit with the fallback of a possible captain’s pick from Anna Nordqvist – is a goal for the future.
For now, it’s about closing out the LPGA Tour season with a couple of months of globetrotting ahead.
“The goal for these last four or five events is to put myself into contention as much as I can and if I get over the line great, if not we will put in some good work over the off-season and try to hit the ground running as quickly as we can next season.”
♦ Leona Maguire has been a Davy Brand Ambassador since 2019. Davy is committed to supporting incredible Irish talent
