‘Breath of fresh air’

Be it in America or the U.K., you don’t wait until the last few holes for the excitement to kick in. It starts at the beginning, when it’s Charley Hull’s turn to tee off and the fans are yelling “Go Charley! Go Charley!” She whacks her drive down the fairway and she’s up, up and away. Slow play? She hates it.

“There’s no doubt that Charley is a breath of fresh air,” said Pádraig Harrington, the winner of two Opens and a PGA Championship, of the 29-year-old Englishwoman. “It’s quite a step change in the women’s game. Over the years, I think the ladies were taught that golf was all about consistency, about hitting fairways and greens. Charley’s much more swashbuckling than that. She gives it a rip off the tee, finds it and gets it up and down from there. She’s playing the game more like the men are playing it.”

In 2025, Charley set her third LPGA title – the Kroger Queen City Championship  – alongside four Ladies European Tour titles and, what with her tie for second place in the AIG Women’s Open at Royal Porthcawl, she became a four-time runner-up in majors. For a favourite moment to set alongside her performance at Royal Porthcawl, she mentioned her second-place finish with Michael Brennan in the Grant Thornton Invitational, a December event that paired LPGA and PGA Tour pros. “Now that was fun from start to finish,” she said.

By the end of the year, Hull was the first Englishwoman to have reached the top five in the Rolex Women’s World Rankings since the rankings began in 2006.

Was that a thrill? “It was good,” she said in a post-Christmas chat, “but I want to get to No. 1.”

So what are her plans for that? “I’m going to work harder.”

Hull has always worked hard. When she was a child, her father, Dave, would watch her knocking ball after ball in the fields around the family home in Burton Latimer, an ancient town some two hours northwest of London and first mentioned in William the Conqueror’s Domesday Survey of 1086. The moment he realised the extent of her talent, he took her to nearby Kettering Golf Club for early lessons from Kevin Theobald. There was a day when Theobald spotted that Charley was hitting what he called “girly” shots. Straightaway, he called a halt. “Don’t hit it like that for heaven’s sake,” he urged. “Hit it like a man.”

When Charley was in her teens, father and daughter joined Woburn Golf Club, where Matt Belsham took her under his wing. He remains her swing coach to this day. “Matt,” said Dave, “has always got the best out of her.”

Harrington, in returning to his theme, added that Charley could “change the concept” of the way the women’s game is played. “In three or four years time – and onwards – she will be the role model for girls going forward. You’ll see more aggressive players, more of the hit-and-miss variety. They’ll be hitting it wild, hitting it long and people will stop setting up courses in a way that stops people like her from using their drivers.

“I don’t want to take away from those girls who are more meticulous and go for the fairways-and-greens approach. It’s just that the game’s moved on and, more and more, people are going to be looking at Charley and thinking, ‘I want to play like that.’”

For another of Harrington’s thoughts on the player, he suggested that she probably plays as she does because she’s played a lot with boys.

Charley, for her part, has thoughts about the men which she’ll no doubt share with Harrington at some point. She loves watching the men’s majors, because the courses tend to be longer and trickier than the others. And when it’s not majors, she looks at films of the men’s game from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s: “Those were the years when their way of playing was more of an art, more of a challenge. It wasn’t boring then but the average tournament can be a bit boring now.”

Harrington was spot on when he suggested that Hull had played a lot of her early golf with boys. She still does, often meeting up with the young men she knew as boys at Kettering whenever she is back at her home in Burton Latimer.

At the age of 6, she was a member of the Kettering boys’ team. “Our secret weapon,” was how the lads would describe her. There was one occasion – she was 7 at the time – when she was drawn against some 17-year-old youth who was understandably pleased with himself when he was 4 up at the turn. Only then, Charley sparked a bit of a revival with a birdie at the 10th.

“F*** girls” was the boy’s less-than-fulsome tribute.

Six holes later, Hull had won the match.

“The moment he said what he said, I knew I’d got him,” she chuckled.

Dame Laura Davies is not too different from Charley. The World Golf Hall of Famer used to play with her older brother, Tony. In the beginning, he would outhit her but, before too long, it was the other way round. “There are no weak points in Charley’s game,” Davies said. “She goes for pins and isn’t scared of making a hash of things. She does what Tiger did.”

At 9, Charley won the East Midlands Young Achiever of the Year award. The TV presentation was made by John Inverdale, a sports commentator of good repute, and when he came to hand over the trophy, he asked the little girl, “What’s your ambition?”

Charley paused. “What does ‘ambition’ mean?” she asked.

That year, she was playing off the same 11 handicap as her father when she won the Ladies’ Golf Union’s Health Perception championship at Turnberry, an event that featured an initial entry of 24,500 women club golfers from across Great Britain and Ireland.

Two years later, when Tony Jacklin played alongside her in the annual Farmfoods British Par 3 Championship at Nailcote Hall in the Midlands, this British and U.S. Open champion had no hesitation in saying that she had “the looks and the golf to win millions of dollars.”

That, too, has happened, though there was the proviso from a Jacklin friend that she might get diverted by boys.

Not for a bit she didn’t. But when she turned 23, she could have done without falling for John “Ozzie” Smith, a mixed martial arts fighter. She went out with him for more than a year before marrying him in September 2019 in the ancient church next to the Hulls’ family home and the house that Charley is currently refurbishing for herself.

By one account, the portents were not good from the moment the minister did as he had always done in taking a picture of the latest happy couple as they approached the church gate. When, at the end of the service, the minister wanted to show off his picture, there was just a blank sheet of paper.

Sure enough, a divorce was looming.

“He was very controlling and going on at me all the time,” Charley said. “He would tell me what I should and shouldn’t be wearing, telling me how and how not to spend my money. Still worse, he didn’t like me discussing things with my parents. I’ve got great parents and there was a limit to how much I could take of it.”

Things got worse as Charley’s golf got better. Who knows whether her husband was jealous of her fame. Regardless, she drew strength from adversity.

“She’s much smarter than people think she is, and you’d need to be pretty smart to answer the random questions she might throw at you.”
— Georgia Hall

Typical Charley, she would have liked the divorce to have been over and done with in five minutes. That it turned into a protracted affair prompted her good friend, Georgia Hall, the 2018 Ricoh Women’s British Open champion, to comment recently that she couldn’t understand how Charley played so well amid her personal turmoil.

Hall, who is expecting a baby this month, marvels at the way Charley whacks the ball to the extent where she once saw her hat and her ball take off at the same time. She also marvels at what goes on in Charley’s mind when, say, she’s playing on a bleak stretch of links. With Woburn coated in trees, she pictures a protective length of Woburn woodland on whichever side of a fairway suits her eye.

“She’s much smarter than people think she is, and you’d need to be pretty smart to answer the random questions she might throw at you,” Hall said.

Sitting at the dinner table in Singapore not so long ago, Charley wanted information from her fellow diners on lighthouses. Still more recently, she started telling Georgia “about some war” that happened centuries ago.

Hull is an original – someone who is maybe all the more entertaining because even in the brief period when she was at school, she was not the same as her classmates. She would spend her days looking out of the window rather than at the blackboard as she waited for her dad to take her to play golf.

“Playing golf was all I wanted to do, only now it’s different,” she said. “In the last few years, I’ve been trying to play catch-up with the studies I never did. I’m not finding it easy but, to give you an example of what I’m up to, I’ve got in the habit of Googling everything to do with my next stopping point on the LPGA circuit. I want to know how the town or city started out, and what it’s famous for now. I sometimes need a bit of help to take everything in but, once I’ve had a bit of help, I’m OK.

“Science, geography and history are my favourite subjects and, at some point, I might do something about it. My caddie keeps telling me I’m laughingly smart but there’s so many gaps I’ve got to fill in.”

It sounded as if she needed the equivalent of her swing coach, Matt Belsham, to serve as a kindly tutor.

Being quick off the mark is something that Dave Hull and his partner, Basienka, noticed about their daughter on the day she was born. The midwife had handed her over to Dave and, straightaway, the child had opened her eyes and smiled at him. “That little girl’s been here before,” said the midwife. “In all my years of delivering babies, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Dave, who had earned £2.50 per five-and-a-half day week when he was training as a plasterer and simultaneously adding to his knowledge as a builder, was no different from Charley in doing things at the double. Once qualified, he would work seven days a week renovating one house after another. Before too long, an older friend, who was in the same line of business, said that he wanted to get rid of some of his properties. Dave ended up buying a few and signed a contract on the back of a cigarette packet.

When Dave’s first partner died, he had bought another property – it took in all three of a manse, a gamekeeper’s cottage and a barn – on an area 200 yards from their daughter Lisa’s primary school. He wanted to do renovation work in the morning and look after Lisa for the rest of the day.

Within a few years of Basienka giving birth to Charley, the arrangement he had with her was much the same as the one he had had with Lisa, only he would pick her up from school and take her to the golf course.

When, at the age of 16, Charley was chosen to play for Great Britain and Ireland in the 2012 Curtis Cup at Nairn, there was something of an uproar when Tegwen Matthews, the captain, discovered that the teenager did not know the first thing about foursomes. Matthews felt that she had no choice but to leave her out of that format on the first morning and, one day later, realised that four-balls weren’t Charley’s thing either. She did win her singles as GB&I defeated the Americans, 12½-10½.

Had he been consulted, Dave would have provided a wholly understandable solution: “The last thing Charley wants is to be hitting every other ball. And when it comes to four-balls, she wants to play her partner’s shots as well as her own.”

In early 2013, Charley turned pro and joined the Ladies European Tour. Later in the year, news of what had happened at Nairn was duly passed on to Liselotte Neumann, captain of Europe’s 2013 Solheim Cup team in Colorado, who had made Charley one of her captain’s picks. As a result, Neumann left her out of both foursomes.

After Charley had won one of her four-balls, Neumann asked who she would like to play in the singles.

“All of them,” said an excited Hull before settling for Paula Creamer, who will be one of Angela Stanford’s vice captains at Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands at this year’s Solheim Cup.

Hull defeated Creamer, 5 and 4. With charming naivete, she waited until the hand-shaking was over before asking the American if she would be good enough to sign a ball for a friend at home. Creamer obliged before hurrying to fill in family and friends with the latest bit of believe-it-or-not Charley news. Four or five years later, over a cup of coffee, Creamer revealed that it hadn’t been too long before she would find herself giggling every time she thought about it. “I realised that it was precisely the kind of thing I might have done when I was her age!” she said.

It was Charley’s wish that her dad should watch her lessons so that he could keep an eye on what she was doing when she went out to practise. He did what she wanted, but the moment he was sure that everything was working well, he would disappear to walk his dog, Esme.

This wouldn’t have been the way with many another father, but Esme always came first. One summer, when asked if he would be going to the AIG Women’s Open and the Solheim Cup, he said that the events were too close together for that to work. It had to be one or the other.

“I can’t leave Esme for two weeks,” he explained “She needs her walks.”

After Esme’s death last year, Dave felt wretched. He had told Charley that, as he was turning 75 this year, he wasn’t going to get another dog. Charley didn’t like the sound of it. She rang him up a couple of days later. “Dad,” she said, “I’ve found a puppy you’re going to love.” She was right. Foxy, the German Shepherd they went to see, came back with them. She’s now 6 months old and Dave couldn’t be happier.

“Kids go through stages and you can lose a child if you don’t leave them to it. Golf’s golf and it’s not enough on its own. A golfer has to have a life at the same time and no-one would want to destroy it. It’s only by switching off that you can switch on.”
— Dave Hull

There’s seldom a time when Dave isn’t impressed by his daughter.

Yet there was an evening in 2016 when she invited friends round for drinks before she flew to Florida for the LPGA’s end-of-season CME Group Tour Championship. He wisely recommended that she make it an early night, only to find her and her friends in the shed at the top of the garden early the next morning. “They were all blotto!” he laughed.

“I’m all right dad,” she assured him, before he took her to the airport.

Off she went and won the tournament, picking up a little matter of $500,000.

“Kids go through stages and you can lose a child if you don’t leave them to it,” he said. “Golf’s golf and it’s not enough on its own. A golfer has to have a life at the same time and no-one would want to destroy it. It’s only by switching off that you can switch on.”

In 2023, Charley was diagnosed with ADHD and left with the feeling that the condition had turned her into “a 100 mph person.” Medication did nothing to change a swing speed which was off the charts. When it came to the ’23 AIG Women’s Open at Walton Heath, where she and Lilia Vu started the last round in a share of the lead, there was much the same result as there would be at Royal Porthcawl two summers later. She ran out of steam towards the end.

In Wales, Hull had been nine strokes behind Miyu Yamashita at the halfway stage before making a flight of birdies to be only three to the Japanese player’s rear going into the final round. Her next move was to have five birdies in her first 15 holes on Sunday which meant that she was just one shot behind. Only that was when she closed bogey, bogey, par to end up in a share of second place with Minami Katsu.

“I had to sit out of golf for a few weeks, and that’s when I learned to relax.”
— Charley Hull

Dave has often seen her go too quickly for her own good, and that Sunday at Royal Porthcawl was one such occasion. “It’s just Charley,” he said. “She’s never been any different.” On the other hand, Adam Woodward, her caddie of many years, felt that the Porthcawl finish had been more in line with Harrington’s thoughts on how there are days when course setups do not permit the Charleys of this world to use their drivers.

As for her ADHD diagnosis, Hull had what she saw as a lucky break when she injured her ankle falling off a curb at the Centurion Club last August. “I had to sit out of golf for a few weeks, and that’s when I learned to relax,” she said. For anyone else who struggles with the condition, she recommends the following. “Breathe in through your nose for six seconds and breathe out through your mouth for six seconds a few times. It’s definitely helped me to slow down.”

“I’m just me. You don’t know what’s coming out of my mouth next. And neither do I.”
— Charley Hull

People used to worry about what Charley Hull was going to say or do next, but not any longer. When she laughed along with the U.S. media about how that picture of her with a cigarette in her mouth went viral, she gave a 100 percent true account of how everyone in her family smoked and it was no big deal. People were just seeing her as she is. (Today, she doesn’t smoke and she doesn’t drink.)

“I’m just me,” she chuckled. “You don’t know what’s coming out of my mouth next. And neither do I.”

King Charles and Queen Camilla might have found that out on that day last November when Hull was invited to a state banquet at Windsor Castle during President Donald Trump’s visit to the U.K. – and was brave enough to go it alone.

Pre-coffee, she took herself off to the cloakroom and, on her way back to the dinner table, found herself getting a big hug from none other than President Trump, whom she had met at the odd golf event.

“Come with me,” he said. He asked one of the footmen to fetch a spare chair so that Charley could join him, the king and the queen for a chat. There would have been plenty of Charley contributions, though you doubt they had anything to do with golf.

Would we want Charley to change? Of course not. She’s a happy family person who, to give you an idea, could not resist swooping up her sister Nicole’s new baby at Royal Porthcawl and carrying him from the practice ground to the first tee on a daily basis.

“I love her attitude and I love the all-or-nothing approach as she hits the ball as hard as she can.”
— Annika Sörenstam

She’s also generous beyond belief. When she spots a homeless person, she sees it as her business to go into a shop and get them a meal. What she didn’t say, no doubt among a host of other things, was that she pays for family members’ surgeries, and that when one of her sisters got married, she not only forked out for a down payment on the couple’s house but covered the cost of a lavish honeymoon.

After her runner-up finishes in majors – tied second at the 2016 Chevron Championship, 2023 U.S. Women’s Open and 2025 AIG Women’s Open as well as an outright second in the ’23 AIG Women’s Open – there’s little question as to whether she would be a popular major champion.

Hall of Famer Annika Sörenstam said she is hoping for the moment to come this year.

“I love her attitude and I love the all-or-nothing approach as she hits the ball as hard as she can,” Sörenstam said at the recent PNC Championship in Florida.

“You’re asking me for my favourite Charley quote?” she continued. “That’s easy …

“‘Shy kids don’t get the candy!'”

Top: Charley Hull. Photo by Dylan Buell, Getty Images

Additional photo credits: Charley Hull at the 2015 Solheim Cup, Thomas Niedermueller, Getty Images; A teenage Charley Hull, with her father, Dave, on the bag, at the 2012 Kraft Nabisco Championship, David Cannon, Getty Images; Charley Hull at the 2025 CME Group Tour Championship, Michael Reaves, Getty Images

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Be it in America or the U.K., you don’t wait until the last few holes for the excitement to kick in. It starts at the beginning, when it’s Charley Hull’s turn to tee off and the fans are yelling “Go Charley! Go Charley!” She whacks her drive down the fairway and she’s up, up and away. Slow play? She hates it.