Global Golf Post - February 15, 2010

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LEWINE MAIR
Irish Twins Twice
As Talented
They are as similar as two spanking new golf balls,
right down to the dimples. Ireland’s 15-year-old twins,
Lisa and Leona Maguire, are set to create much the same
wow at this summer’s Curtis Cup as did Michelle Wie in
the match of 2004.
The Great Britain & Ireland team for Boston – the
match is to be played at historic Essex Country Club June
11-13 — will not be finalized until after the Helen Holm
Stroke Play at the end of April. But if it were chosen to-
morrow, the two would be at the top of most lists.
Mary McKenna, captain of GB&I and herself an Irish-
woman, chuckles delightedly when she talks of her young
compatriots. “They’re remarkable,” she says. “They’re
just a couple of normal kids, but when they’re out on the
course, they’re like a couple of wily seniors.”
Roddy Carr, son of that legendary Walker Cup man Joe
Carr, confirms as much. “They’re the real deal.”
The twins were 9-year-old swimming champions when
Lisa broke her elbow and the specialist advised that she
should try a racket sport by way of helping to restore the
joint’s original flexibility. The twins’ parents — primary
school teachers Declan and Breda — drove them to an
appropriate sports club where the pair took absolutely no
interest in racket sports. They preferred golf.
“Nothing surprised me more than the fact that they
got good so quickly,” said Declan. By way of illustrating
his point, he told how the girls had only been playing a
couple of seasons when Lisa won the 12-and-under World
Juniors at Pinehurst. On an admittedly shortened course,
she was as many as 10-under par for one round as she
followed Rory McIlroy in making an impact on America’s
pee-wee brigade.
Twin sisters Leona (left) and Lisa Maguire are Irish junior golf’s brightest hopes.
No less uncanny than the degree to which the twins look
alike is the extent to which they have assembled a virtu-
ally matched set of results. Take 2008, when they were still
only 13. Where Leona won the Irish Women’s Close cham-
pionship and Lisa was runner-up, Lisa won the Irish Girls’
championship and Leona was the runner-up.
Last year, Lisa won the Irish Closed and the Irish
Stroke Play as her sister came out on top in the European
Girls’ individual championship and the French Under 21s.
On the team front, it was Leona who holed the winning
putt as Ireland defeated Sweden to seal Ireland’s first
triumph in the European Junior Team championships.
Paired together in the foursomes, as they might well be in
Boston, the two won every match.
When Wie played her part in the ’04 U.S. victory at
Formby, she was already six-feet tall — and six-feet-four
by the time she had donned the high heels she wore to the
closing ceremony. The twins, on the other hand, are still
growing and have yet to reach their potential in terms of
driving distance. But already, as McKenna says, they are
long enough.
Their swings are alike in that they are so utterly simple
as to make the actions of others look slightly unwieldy.
Lisa, of the two, maybe swings the faster and is margin-
ally the longer. Leona, meanwhile, is reckoned to have a
tad more touch on and around the greens.
At a time when all too many teenagers in the U.K.
would seem to be under the impression that one good
result is the signal to drop everything and join the pro-
fessionals, the pair are serving as the best possible role
models. Both go along with their parents’ belief that
education has to come first and both are out to collect the
best possible haul of exam results.
Neither likes to take time off from school, though, in
the case of this Curtis Cup, they have sought — and been
granted — permission from the Irish Education Board to
play “if selected.” To be honest, there is no “if” about it.
Those who like to see golfers bursting with joie de vivre
on the golf course might be disappointed when they see
the twins holing 20-footers with much the same noncha-
lance as another might post a letter.
However, the fact that they are not remotely extrovert-
ed maybe goes a long toward explaining how they have
managed to stay on the right side of their golfing elders
— and that though they spent their first few years clear-
ing local prize tables of all the Waterford glass and china
casserole dishes.
With golf itself mostly more about seniors than
juniors, it goes without saying that people have wor-
ried lest the twins could have missed out on something
of their childhoods. Indeed, Anne Wallace, the former
president of the Irish Ladies’ Golf Union, fell into that
category as she watched the pair playing in the Irish
Closed at Lahinch in ’07.
She was still pondering on the matter as she walked
back to the car park where she heard a variety of squeaks
and squeals coming from the sand dunes. It was the soon-
to-be crowned Irish Ladies’ champion and her runner-up
cascading down the sandy slopes on their backsides.
That was the moment when Wallace stopped worrying. l
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