Charley Hull lends an original touch to women’s golf
By LEWINE MAIR
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.”