Leona Maguire braced for hectic summer swing and Solheim
BOOKS FOR BIRDIES: Leona Maguire at the launch of KPMG's new Books for Birdies initiative.
Golfers are practised at combining a short and long game and Leona Maguire will be putting that ability to good use in New Jersey this week as she follows the Mizuho Americas Open with an educational spin up the road to Baltusrol.
The latter course will host the season’s second Major, the KPMG PGA Championship, later this month and sits less than a 20-minute spin west of the Liberty National course where she tees off at 6.10pm Eastern Time today.
Baltusrol will be new to her, though not to her caddy Dermot Byrne who was on Shane Lowry’s bag when the USA PGA was played there back in 2016, so the opportunity to do a recce of the place three weeks out has been grasped.
“They've made a few changes to the golf course, by all account,” she explained. “It's a big. beasty golf course, which usually is the case with the PGA event, so we'll have to bring the ‘A’ game there, no doubt, in a few weeks.”
Maguire is practised enough to point out that her focus rests on the here and now but the pro tour is a year-long blaze that requires firewalls at appointed intervals and she isn’t long off a three-week break taken to steel her for events further down the line.
That time out ended last week with an impressively gritty six-round spin at the Bank of Hope LPGA Match-Play in Las Vegas where, without ever finding her best, she made it as far as the semi-final stage where she fell short of Jenny Shin.
She is familiar with the tour’s rhythm’s now but it has, by her own admission, taken time to work out when to press on the accelerator and when to ease off. All the more important given the volume of golf to be played in the coming months.
The PGA will kickstart a seven-week period that contains four of the five Majors with the US Open coming on stream next at Pebble Beach, the Evian following up and then the AIG Women’s Open bringing up the rear at Walton Heath.
The addition of Baltusrol and Pebble, which have hosted five men’s Majors between them this millennium, add even greater lustre to already august events and Maguire has looked to some star power as she preps for these individual and collective challenges.
Byrne’s nine-year stint as bagman for Lowry won’t make for the only homework. Padraig Harrington’s brains have been picked clean for insights while Graeme McDowell, who won his PGA at Pebble, is a familiar face.
“We practice at the same club in Orlando so he had a few insights. It was there that he won in 2010 so he had a few insights and I know Ken (Comboy), his caddy, and Dermot are good friends so they definitely had a few notes to compare as well.”
It’s been a solid rather than spectacular season for the 28-year so far. Three top-ten finishes were banked at the start of the campaign and she has already commuted across the US and over to the Middle East and Far East for events.
The recent hiatus was used as an opportunity to work on her game, her driving in particular. Not the longest of hitters, focus rested on her accuracy. June and July, on some of the world’s most renowned tracks, would be a fine time for that to bear fruit.
“We grew up watching the lads on TV at a lot of these venues so it’s nice to actually go there and see those iconic holes and figure out the best way to play them. The common theme is they are all tough golf courses and you have to make sure that your game is in as sharp a place as possible before you get there.”
The season will be far from over after all that.
Among the dates of note this autumn is the Women’s Irish Open at Dromoland, which gets underway at the back end of August. Three weeks later and she’ll be aiming to tee it up again in the Solheim Cup, in Andalucia.
If her victory at the Drive On Championship 16 months ago was a breakthrough for her, and for women’s golf in Ireland, then it was her heroics for Team Europe at the Solheim four years ago that propelled her into the wider consciousness.
Last week’s matchplay in Nevada lacked the crowds and the sheer energy of that continental classic but it was a good primer all the same and it didn’t escape her attention that she was one of five Europeans to make the last eight.
“That was great to see. It’s a long time to September but that is still a good sign and I got a few messages last week from Suzanne (Pettersen), the captain, wishing me well. I’ve always liked matchplay, it brings out that competitive nature in you.”
This summer should reinforce that.
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