Leona Maguire is right at home in golf’s upper echelons

It feels kind of silly to state now, today, on the third Monday of April 2021 that Leona Maguire has arrived. She has been such a fixture of the Irish sporting scene for so long that it stops you in your tracks just a touch to realise that this weekend has catapulted her into the running for Rookie of the Year on the LPGA Tour.

Of all the labels you could feasibly attach to her, rookie is the one that makes the least sense.

The average age of the LPGA Rookie of the Year for the past decade has been 22. If Maguire wins it in November, she will become, at 27, the oldest winner of the award in a quarter of a century.

But her age isn’t really the point either. Maguire has always just been such a mature presence, a reliably unflappable beacon of sense, that the idea of her as some kind of naïf finding her way through the shark-infested waters of pro sport basically doesn’t compute.

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And yet, without question, her weekend’s work in Hawaii marks out a huge milestone in her career.

For a start, there’s the not insignificant matter of her biggest cheque so far, the $125,834 €105,000) that came with a four-way tie for second place. That’s a big deal, not just in and of itself, but also in terms of staking out the territory in which she ought to be pegging it up each week.

The No Laying Up podcast guys told a story recently about interviewing Justin Thomas away back when both they and he were only starting out. Thomas had just won his first PGA tournament, a co-sanctioned affair in Malaysia called the CIMB Classic, for which the winner’s cheque had been $500,000.

By PGA Tour standards, it was well down the prizemoney pecking order but still, half a million bucks is half a million bucks.

Never more so than when it’s the first time something that size lands in your bank account.

Unmoved When they asked Thomas what it was like realising that he had just won such a huge amount of money, Thomas was quietly unmoved by it. He said all the right things and did he very best not to sound like he was minimising that side of it but nobody likes talking about money, even (or maybe especially) those who have a lot of it. You could tell he felt a bit awkward talking about it but didn’t want to brush it off either.

Inadvertently or otherwise, his answer was ultimately interesting more for what it said about his golf career about his attitude to money. He wasn’t being brash about it but he did make the point that if he was going to go on and have the career he was working towards, then by default he was going to be making cheques that would be bigger than half a million. Five years and upwards of €43million in prizemoney later, he was right on all counts.

So the point here isn’t really that Leona Maguire pocketed her first six-figure cheque over the weekend. It’s more that the past month has established her as the sort of player who plays for six-figure cheques. At the ANA Inspirational, she led the first major of the year in her second round before slipping back into the pack over the weekend. And now, a fortnight later, she has finished second in a high-class field.

This is where she needs to be. For someone who has always been known here as a prodigy - or at least as one of an outlandishly prodigious set of twins - Maguire’s adult career has been a series of graduated, empirical improvements. She has ticked off every box along the way to this point - best amateur player in the world, best college player in America, three-time Curtis Cup player. She has won on the lower tour of the American professional circuit, she has played in majors, she has been on the leaderboard in them.

Getting into the mix when all the chips were in the middle of the table had to be the next step. Lydia Ko ended up turning the Lotte Championship into a bit of a procession on Saturday, ultimately prevailing by seven shots.

But Maguire was within three of her early in the piece. Ko was ending a three-year drought and was in the kind of mood that wasn’t about to let anyone spoil her revival story. But on another day, with some different bounces here and there, anything could have happened.

Shootouts The key is to be there, to keep that company, to make it an unremarkable thing. Here’s the top five from the weekend. Lydia Ko (21 professional wins, two Majors), Inbee Park (31 wins, seven Majors), Sei-young Kim (17 wins, one Major), Nelly Korda (six wins), Leona Maguire (one Symetra Tour win). Go toe-to-toe with that calibre of player every week and a tournament victory can’t be far away.

Encouraging

It’s probably an encouraging sign, too, that she was a factor at a tournament where the scoring was particularly low. Ko’s winning score was 28-under-par; Maguire won’t often shoot 21-under and lose by seven.

With an eye to pleasing TV audiences, a lot of LPGA set-ups are geared towards shootouts – they figure it’s hard enough to drag viewers away from the men’s tour at the best of times, so they’re reluctant to make the players grind for pars all weekend. Maguire is 14th on tour in birdie stats for the season so far and fourth in the number of eagles. This is all pointing in only one direction.

She has to go and do it now. Winning is the hardest thing, obviously enough - the incline is always the steepest at the end. But to get there at all, you have to establish yourself at base camp. In that, at least, we can safely say she has arrived.

She won’t be alone in looking up from here on out.