As the thunder rumbled and the lightning cracked in the doom-laden sky above The Renaissance yesterday, sending Pro-Am competitors scurrying for shelter amid ominous honks of the klaxon, Leona Maguire almost had a glint in her eye.
While nobody wants the footers and plooters that come with weather delays here at the Aberdeen Standard Investments Ladies Scottish Open over the next four days, Maguire won’t be too bothered if those tightly packed isobars and birling deep lows that are predicted have a bit of fun.
“Hopefully the weather is kind but then again it won’t do us any harm to get a bit of wind and rain which lets the course show its teeth a bit,” said the 24-year-old Irish girl with a mischievous smile.
“Shane (Lowry) performed fantastically well at The Open and the worse the weather got, the better he got,” she added of the recent success of her Irish compatriot. “Hopefully I can do something similar this week.”
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The supremely talented Maguire, who won just about everything in the unpaid game and was world amateur No 1 for a record breaking 135 weeks, has enjoyed plenty of success in Scotland and specifically here in East Lothian.
As a 12-year-old, she won the Scottish under-16s Open at Craigielaw, a victory which, in many ways, paved the way for her wider successes.
“That was my first big win outside of Ireland and my first taste of an international field,” said Maguire, who would go to lift the Helen Holm Scottish Women’s Amateur crown at Troon at just 14.
“It made me realise I could go a bit further. It’s lovely to be back in this part of the country and hopefully I get a similar result. Scotland has been good to me.”
Having turned pro last year, after a stellar stint in the US college golf scene, Maguire continues to make terrific strides.
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She earned her Ladies European Tour card at the qualifying school and is set for promotion to the lucrative LPGA Tour having won twice this season on the second-tier Symetra Tour in the USA.
Tipped for great things since her formative years, the canny, composed Maguire is charting a nice, steady course.
“I’ve been lucky, I have the same team around me from my amateur days and the same coach since I was 10 or 11,” she said of those solid foundations.
“While you try to adjust (to turning pro), you want to have that familiarity too. Golf is a very humbling game and it doesn’t take much to win an event one week or miss the cut the next. That’s the nature of it.”
Meanwhile, we’ll see what Mother Nature throws at Maguire this week.
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