Solheim Cup Wildcards: Leona Maguire and Mimi Rhodes Are Nordqvist’s Opposite Bets

A wildcard pick is a captain telling you what she actually values, and Anna Nordqvist has just told everyone twice. The two names she reached for to finish Europe’s Solheim Cup side pull against each other on purpose. One player she chose in spite of a scorecard that has been letting her down all year. The other she chose on nothing but a scorecard nobody had heard of a season ago. Read together, they are the same decision hedged in opposite directions.

Leona Maguire is the pick that argues with itself. The form has deserted her — the low weekends, the early flights home, a year in which the results simply stopped arriving. On the strokeplay ledger she does not belong on a plane to the Netherlands. Nordqvist looked past the ledger and into the team room. “After Inverness, we’ve been calling her MVP,” the captain said. “I’d rather play alongside her than against her.” That is not a statistic. That is a captain trusting who a player becomes once the format changes and the crowd tightens the air.

The faith is earned. On her debut Maguire tore through a full slate of matches and came away with an all-but-perfect haul, the closest thing this event has produced to a one-woman wrecking crew. She helped Europe hold the trophy the next time out, and when the team fell she still walked off a singles winner. Matchplay does not read a season-long slump; it reads nerve, and nerve is the one thing Maguire has never mislaid. She wanted no part of the drama, either. “My goal was definitely to qualify automatically and not have to rely on a captain’s pick,” she admitted — the pride of a competitor who would rather earn the seat than be handed it.

Mimi Rhodes is the opposite bet, and just as revealing. She has no Solheim history to lean on because she has never been here. Nordqvist picked her in the pure present tense, on a rookie professional season that detonated out of nowhere: a maiden win claimed in only her fourth start as a full member, a course record torn up along the way, then more titles stacked behind it, up to the trophy she lifted at the Dutch Ladies Open. Where Maguire is picked for who she has been, Rhodes is picked for who she suddenly is.

Her nerve was built a long way from any leaderboard. Raised on a driving range in Sotogrande, fluent in the language of half the locker room, she sharpened her game across four American college years and a national-title run before turning professional and refusing to serve an apprenticeship. Nordqvist is betting that the temperament that carried a debut season straight to the winner’s circle will not blink under a European flag.

That is the thread between the two names. The Solheim Cup is matchplay, and matchplay rewards the pulse in the room over the number beside it — the player who holes the six-footer that means something, not the one whose average told a tidier story in the spring. Nordqvist could have chosen the safe veteran or the hot rookie. Instead she took the same question — do you trust form or do you trust temperament — and answered it both ways at once, daring the week to tell her which instinct was right.

The teams meet at Bernardus Golf in Cromvoirt, in the Netherlands, from September 11 to 13, with Angela Stanford’s United States on the other side of the draw. Twenty-eight matches over three days, foursomes and fourballs and singles, and the first side to 14½ points keeps the cup. Maguire and Rhodes join a European twelve alongside automatic qualifiers Charley Hull, Lottie Woad, Esther Henseleit, Maja Stark, Linn Grant, Céline Boutier, Carlota Ciganda and Nanna Koerstz Madsen; three of the four picks, Rhodes among them, are Solheim rookies.

Somewhere in the second-day fourballs, most likely, the whole bet comes due — the out-of-form veteran and the untested rookie standing over the same putt, one relying on scar tissue and the other on the fact that she has never yet learned to be afraid. Nordqvist has decided that is exactly the pairing she wants. We will find out at Bernardus whether a captain’s best data was ever a world ranking at all.

Tags: Anna Nordqvist, Leona Maguire, Mimi Rhodes, Solheim Cup, wildcards