Inside story maguire girls living the american dream

INSIDE STORY: Twins Lisa and Leona Maguire have embraced a new challenge in the USA - and with the pro ranks calling, that’s where their future lies, PAUL FITZPATRICK discovers...

 

These are the dog days in Duke. Summer time and the crickets are playing their tune. It’s 30 degrees in the shade and school’s out, the lecture halls and frat houses have emptied; thousands of college kids just pouring out the gate and away.
Stranded behind, like super-fit survivors in a ghost town, are the athletes. The gyms, halls, pools and pitches around K-Ville – the sports village named after legendary basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, or ‘Coach K’ – are still buzzing.
And, down at the driving range, among golfers from India, France, Australia and all over the States, are two 20-year-old sisters from Ballyconnell, working on a dream.
“At the end of the year, we were still there when most people were gone home. Even around Thanksgiving, the athletes don’t always get away, even if school is off,” says Leona Maguire.
She and twin sister Lisa first registered on the national consciousness when they were in primary school. There were whispers about twin prodigies shooting insanely low scores, the odd despatch in the press about their precocious achievements.
The tempo has quickened since. Since enrolling in their North Carolina university last August, they have begun to soar up the rankings. Leona is currently the no 1-ranked amateur on the planet; their feet keep time to a new beat now.
The tremor of leaving home and pitching up in a scene straight from a movie has subsided, but when they stop to reflect, some after-shocks still resonate.
“You always have the novelty of it, being Irish in the States,” smiles Lisa. “You get the random questions, they still think Ireland is in the stone age. ‘Do you have internet?’ was one.
“Or they have no concept of where Ireland is, they think it’s off the coast of Mexico and you’re like ‘noooo..., it’s not’.
“And microwaves!” laughs Leona, “just some of our words... they don’t know what jumpers are, or bins. You just have to adapt.”
They’ve managed that. Loreto College must seem a distant memory when they get stopped in restaurants and airports by well-wishers who pause to wish them well. And then there are those who just shout from a distance, “Go Duke!” - pronounced ‘Dook’ in the local accent – when they spy an athlete bearing their colours.
Not that they are hard to miss. Duke’s sporting reputation is built on hoops but there is an 80,000-seater American football stadium on campus and Olympians in several other disciplines.
A friend, Leah Goldwyn, recent qualified for Rio in the 200m Butterfly. Another, Megan Clarke, is a pole vaulter and very close to Team USA for Brazil.
And last year, a classmate of of Leona’s, Jahlil Okafor, was the third pick in the NBA draft. He now earns $2.5m a year with the Philadelphia 76ers.
These are the circles the girls move in, this is the place where golf has brought them.
“We get team rucksacks and they all have your sport and your name, that’s one clue for an athlete and we all have these Gatorade bottles so you can kinda spot us. And then the basketball guys are up in the clouds...” says Lisa.
“And the athletes tend to stick together,” says Leona.
“In our dorm we’re sharing with soccer players, field hockey, lacrosse and tennis. They are ones who have played in the Olympics or are in the process of qualifying. None of them can be professional athletes but they’re maybe on the verge of playing pro.”
Members of the various ‘Blue Devils’ squads breathe rare air; such is the interest that the college has its own TV channel and a journalist assigned solely to the female teams.
Lisa: “We’ve done a bit of it [media] but college sports are huge. We probably didn’t realise how big it is, they treat them pretty much like professional sports. The whole resources and facilities that they put into all the teams is serious.”
When the Duke basketball team play ULC, their major rivals, students camp out for six weeks, taking shifts at it, for tickets.
“In the middle of November, and temperatures can go close to freezing. Just your ordinary tent. Twelve people in a tent!”
Another world? For two kids from west Cavan, it’s another universe.

Par for the course
Routine. We’re at the Slieve Russell Golf Club’s 10th tee-box on a warm Wednesday morning. The birds are singing. Practice time.
Leona cranks back her PING driver and rips the ball down the fairway. Lisa follows, landing exactly 10 feet to the left.
“How far do you reckon those drives were?” you ask.
“I’ll check...” says Leona, scanning on a little pair of binoculars which read the distance to the pin. “They’re around 245,” she says matter-of-factly.
“Would you know what club to use already when you’re playing here?”
“You hitting six?” she asks her sister. “Yeah, we’d know more or less, we use that to check it but we’d know every little tree around here.”
And then, swoosh! Both balls land on the green. The girls show no emotion – a 175-yard approach shot to within a few feet is nothing out of the ordinary.
How do they do it? Repetition, routine – practice swing, check the wind, pick the club, hit. Practice swing, check the wind, pick the club, hit. And repeat...
Lisa’s swing, says Leona, is slower. Lisa agrees.
“Is slower better? It depends on the person, I guess. It’s when it changes under pressure, that’s when you’re in trouble. You need a steady tempo. So long as you repeat it under pressure, it doesn’t really matter, so long as you can repeat it and repeat it.”
That’s the essence of it. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at Duke – where there is an 18-hole course on campus, a course so expensive for ordinary punters to play that it’s rarely booked up – the Maguires play an 18-hole competition with their team-mates.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, they’re on the range or the practice green by 8am and will clock up another three and a half hours before ‘school’.
“This year we took psychology classes, we took chemistry, we took maths,” explains Leona. You can take a bit of everything, especially in the first two years.”
Whatever it can throw at you – take it, move on.

Making waves
A motorway outside London. Leona, the passenger in a car being driven hard by a member of Buckingham Golf Club, has a plane to catch. But the phone just won’t stop ringing.
A couple of hours earlier, she has come within a shot of forcing a play-off in the European Masters, her first proper foray into the pro ranks. The ripples are already spreading.
When she scanned the field beforehand, she liked her chances.
“When we first started playing, a lot of the top amateurs that were getting ready to go pro are the top pros now so, seeing that, and knowing I had played with them before, gave me a little bit of confidence that I could compete with the best of them.”
The Masters is a big deal and news that a rookie had come so close almost spun the ladies golf world off its axis. This was big – live on SKY big – and suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of the new gunslinger in town.
“I came off the course and I was flying straight to Denmark for the European Championships that night, it was all pretty hectic. I didn’t think I’d make my flight but it was delayed and I made it in the end. My phone was going, it was pretty hectic. It was all go.
“It wasn’t really till I came home that I got a chance to take it all in.”
The prizemoney for second place was a cool 50 grand but, as an amateur, she couldn’t claim it.
“I had to sign a thing at the start of the week. I could have turned pro and took whatever I got but if I wanted to stay amateur I had to waive that right.
“Yeah, €50,000 would have been nice alright for a weekend’s work! I’m sure mam and dad would have found a right few ways to spend it. I’ve definitely racked up a good bill in the last few years with them chauffeuring us around.”
She knows, though, that the life of a touring pro is not all birdies and bank drafts.
“If you’re not up there in the top 20 week in, week out, you’re going from week to week, struggling. It’s not all glamour. There’s a lot less money in the ladies game, there aren’t million dollar cheques every week. You’d definitely want to be on your A game every week.”
A fortnight ago in England, she bumped into an old amateur opponent from the Czech Republic who had turned over at 17.
“She’s the same age as us and she has already been out there for three or four years and she was saying that she sort of regrets not having finished school and maybe gone to college or whatever.
I guess it depends on the person. If you want to be out and on tour for 20 odd years...”

Playing the long game
The beginning? You probably know the gist of it. Back here at the Russell is a good place to start. The course was opened near to the Maguire family home in 1989 and the girls’ father introduced them to the game when they were seven.
They excelled, taking two places on the podium at the World Under 11 Championships. They were the youngest swingers in town and gate-crashed all the top amateur events by their mid-teens.
Approaching Leaving Cert year, America was calling but it was a risk not many Irish females had taken. The options were to cash in and hit the professional circuit or play the long game.
To stick or to twist? They sought advice.
Stephanie Meadow was one who knew. When she was 14, her parents had sold up, left the Antrim coast to move to Hilton Head, Carolina for an academy run by Tiger Woods’s erstwhile coach Hank Haney. She went through college in Alabama and, last summer, was third in the US Open, her first professional Major.
“Stephanie was one of the main people that convinced us that was the way to go,” says Leona.
Others made the plunge earlier and struggled with the slog before the LPGA introduced a rule whereby golfers under 18 without a high school qualification must petition for a tour card. Lately, those applications have fallen on deaf ears.
So, the collegiate game seemed the right road to take.
“A lot of the top college players in the last few years have gone straight into the pros. It’s definitely a good pathway but a lot of girls who haven’t gone to college start on the European Tour, which is not as ideal.
“America is where you want to be, so going the college route prepares you for playing on those golf courses, getting used to the climate, that sort of thing. It makes the transition easier.”

Star struck
Half an hour in, walking towards the 11th, our chat has been interrupted for the second time.
“Would you consider me awful bold if I asked you for a photo with our group, we’re from Gowran...” begins a bearded man in his mid-50s. Earlier, an elderly gentleman has approached the sisters to ask them to sign his card.
“This could be worth money!” he cracks.
“Ah, I doubt it,” replies Leona politely.
They’re growing used this attention, the Duke fanatics when they’re away, the media when they’re at home. They’ll need to.
“It’s very American,” says Lisa of the university’s hardcore fans, “you wouldn’t get it over here, people coming over to you saying ‘up Cavan’. You’d be wondering if someone came up to you and said it here but over there it’s the biggest compliment you can get. It’s like a big family, everyone seems like they’re nearly connected some way.”
The Duke team coach likes his players to drive, rather than fly, to tournaments, so they load up a bus for 10-hour road trips like any bunch of pals in their early 20s.
Those friendships, and each other, help stave off home sickness.
“It’s not that bad once there’s two of us out there, that definitely helped,” says Lisa.
“A lot of people starting with us were on their first time leaving home too, some of them live five or six hours away. It’s not like here where everyone goes home every weekend from college.
“They come from all over America. They picked their sport, where they wanted to play it, and their degree is sort of secondary. A lot of them are a six or seven-hour flight home, which is the same as us.”
Things change – from rain dripping down the visor of a cap in the west of Ireland to waking up with mosquito bites and raw with sun burn (“we got some roastings, we looked like lobsters coming off the golf course the first few days”) in Florida, but the faces remain the same.
And there was comfort in that for two teenagers a long way from home.
“You tend to play the same people, it’s a circuit. It’s like a mini tour by itself,” says Leona.
Lisa agrees.
“You see the the same people week after week. You’d know when it came to the matchplay in the last event who has a temper, who can deal with pressure, you’d have a fair idea after playing with them for a few years.”
This academic year will be different to last in that the girls won’t have to wait from August to Christmas to see their family. Leona has had an invite to the Evian tournament in France, one of five LPGA Majors, and will attend that in September.

The grand plan
The future, though, for both girls, will be on the other side of the Atlantic, working on that American dream.
“Where do we see ourselves in five years’ time? We’ll be 25, Jesus!” smiles Leona.
“You’d probably be hoping to be on the LPGA, I suppose. Onwards and upwards. Playing a few Majors and maybe be doing well out there would be the goal.
“The European Tour is getting bigger but the LPGA is the big one, that’s where the focus is, to try to get out there and compete with the best of them.
“We’ll be back for events here and there but the States is where it’s at.”
That has always been the plan. So far, so good.