Leona Maguire has made the long trip home from the west coast of the US for a family break in these difficult times. On returning to the LPGA Tour, a busy schedule awaits her over the coming months, yet this has been her destiny from almost as far back as the Millennium.
t’s a refreshing change to be following the career of an Irish woman in tournament golf, especially one based on the other side of the pond. Unlike their male counterparts, who have been trading strokes with the game’s elite for more than a century, playing for pay has traditionally held little appeal for our gifted women.
“Professional golf was essentially an alien concept for my generation,” said five-time Irish champion, Claire Dowling. “If you were even thinking about it, as some of the girls did, you had to do everything on the quiet.”
Which has left her with only vague recollections of the occasion when this island actually played host to an official event from the LPGA schedule. This, in fact, was the status accorded the Smirnoff Irish Open at Clandeboye in October 1984.
As a consequence, for a prize fund of £120,000, it attracted most of the world’s top players, including Pat Bradley, Betsy King, Juli Inkster, Jan Stephenson, Donna Caponi and the winner, Kathy Whitworth. The line-up also had Japan’s Ayako Okamoto, who captured the British Women’s Open by a crushing 11 strokes at Woburn the previous weekend and about whom I wrote in these pages a few weeks ago.
A reflection of our women’s golf at the time was that the five Irish invitees were all amateurs, namely Mary McKenna. Lilian Starrett, Sheena O’Brien-Kenney, Elizabeth Lynn and Dowling (or Hourihane as she was then), the reigning national champion. Maureen Madill, winner of both the British Women’s Matchplay and Strokeplay amateur titles in 1979 and 1980, was a notable absentee who turned professional in April 1986. Interestingly, like Maguire, she was a product of the American college system, based in Texas.
As things turned out, Americans filled the top eight places. Indeed their dominance of the final leaderboard was broken only by Australia’s Stephenson in a share of ninth place. And remarkably, Whitworth’s triumph with a three-under-par aggregate of 285, was the 87th of her professional career, stretching back to 1958.
Clandeboye proved to be a searching test, especially in the hostile weather of the final day. McKenna said of the earlier challenge: “Some of the par fours were so difficult that I hit a drive and three-wood uphill and into the wind on the 400-yard 18th, and was still about 30 yards short of the green.”
As the only Irish player to survive the half-way cut, Dowling had already secured the amateur award entering the weekend. In the event, she carded a closing 77 to claim a share of 27th place in the elite field. Had she been playing for money, this would have brought her £1,040. Whitworth received £18,145, which contrasts sharply with Maguire’s $125,834 for a share of second place behind Lydia Ko in the Lotte Championship in Hawaii two weeks ago.
Though the country’s male professionals of the 1980s and ’90s could complain with some justification about relatively modest prize-funds compared to current awards, they still made a comfortable living. This certainly didn’t apply to their female contemporaries. Madill, for instance, was considered to have had quite a productive season in 1987, yet her tournament earnings amounted to a modest £16,648 for 13th in the money list.
For the same position in the men’s rankings in 1987, Sweden’s Anders Forsbrand earned £113,113. As it happened, the prize fund for Clandeboye was something of an aberration in a year when the Carrolls Irish Open at Royal Dublin had a total fund of £110,728. Support for the women’s tour slipped dramatically over the following years to the extent that by 1993, the best Ireland could muster for the Ford Ladies Challenge at Woodbrook was a prize fund of £25,000. And this only 12 months after a sensational Solheim Cup triumph at Dalmahoy.
Maguire, on the other hand, can have had no financial concerns since making her LPGA Tour debut in Boca Raton in January of last year. A mere month later, her first top-five finish of fourth place in the ISPS Handa Vic Open, delivered $52,000. By September last, she had the confidence to record her strongest performance in a Major, finishing 18th in the ANA Inspiration at Rancho Mirage, California for $39,726.
Most promising of all, however, was ending 2020 at the top of the LPGA putting averages. With 28.69 putts per round, she became not only the first Irish golfer to achieve this distinction, but the first graduate of Duke University in North Carolina to do so. A further measure of the achievement was being placed ahead of Inbee Park, the former world number one and seven-time Major winner. Meanwhile, the bonus of securing her tour card for this year made it possible to plan the 2021 season.
So, after a two-week break at home, she will return to the US on May 15, preparatory to re-joining the Tour in the Pure Silk Kingsmill event in Williamsburg, Virginia from May 20 to 23. Then, having missed the US Women’s Open at Olympic Club, San Francisco, for which she failed to qualify last week, she heads for the Mediheal Championship at Lake Merced on June 10 to 13.
This will be followed by the Meijer Classic in Michigan, the KPMG PGA Championship in Atlanta, the Marathon Classic in Ohio and the DOW Great Lakes Bay Invitational back in Michigan on July 14 to 17. An indication of the beckoning rewards is that the PGA carries a fund of $4.3m.
After four years in paid ranks, Madill formed fairly clear views of the demands of life on tour. “Claire (Dowling) had the game to be a successful professional, but I don’t think the travelling appealed to her,” she said. “It’s a very demanding life. I reckon that I have played more over the last four seasons as a professional than I did during the previous 10 years as an amateur.”
Galway-born Yvonne McQuillan turned professional after representing Ireland in the 1986 Home Internationals, but never really adjusted to life on tour. This was especially true of the hugely talented Lillian Behan, who captured the British Women’s Amateur Championship at Ganton in 1985. I always thought of her as the most naturally gifted of all our women exponents, capable of moving the ball in both directions at will, simply by using her hands.
For her, however, golf was meant to be fun. And she enjoyed nothing better than whacking the ball prodigious distances against male opponents around Royal Curragh. The strictures imposed by marking a card, weren’t for her. Dowling, on the other hand, could apply herself to the discipline of compiling a score, as she proved when capturing the 1986 British Women’s Strokeplay title at Blairgowrie, but the extensive travel which Maguire is currently experiencing, wasn’t for her.
By a coincidence, she was 26 when she competed at Clandeboye, the same age as Maguire is now, and she agrees with Madill’s assessment of life on tour. “The prospect of living out of a suitcase, away from home, didn’t appeal to me,” she acknowledged from her home in Devon last week. “I was fortunate at that time to have a reasonable job working for National Catering who gave me three weeks’ paid holidays and six weeks’ unpaid leave of absence every year, so that I could play golf.
“I had a lovely life, playing for fun, though I probably would have turned pro if the current structure had applied then. The whole progression of the game now leads that way.”
So, what of Maguire? “I’ve seen Leona playing in the Curtis Cup at Nairn in 2012 and at Dun Laoghaire in 2016 and as an amateur in a few British Women’s Opens,” she replied. “I think she’s tremendously talented, by any standards. What should also stand to her as a professional is that she’s wonderfully consistent; very focused. It seems to me that the whole purpose of going to an American college these days is to turn pro. That’s what she’s done.”
But can she win at the highest level? “I remember my father (Bill) saying to me many, many years ago ‘If you can take the step from being a player to being a winner, you will always be able to win,’” she replied. “Leona has already shown us that she knows how to win.” Indeed.
