Charley Hull’s creative bet with her boyfriend is helping keep her vacation dreams on track.
Getty Images
Golfers, and especially professional golfers, don’t incentives are needed to make birdies.
The incentives are right there in the numbers.
The more birdies you make, the fewer putts you will make. The fewer shots you make, the better your scores. The better your scores, the better your position on the leaderboard. The better your position on the leaderboard, the fuller your bank account.
But those incentives become like a 50-pound vest when you’re a professional player. You feel them alwaysat every event, at every moment, staying above every beat. The pressure and stress of playing professional golf are so omnipresent, so all-encompassing, that you begin to forget you feel them at all. Sometimes it helps to trick yourself into remembering those stimuli, or better yet, create new ones altogether.
This theory leads us to LPGA star Charley Hullwhose whirlwind 2024 season is coming to an end on this week’s tour, The Annika. Like many professional players, it has been a long year for Hull, full of travel between different continents, countries and events. And, like many professional golfers, Hull is planning to celebrate the end of that season with an extended party with her boyfriend, “Gaz” Beadle, a UK-based TV personality. On Thursday at The Annika, Hull revealed that her postseason vacation has, in fact, become a source of in-season inspiration and a reminder of golf’s first, most essential drive.
“I actually made a bet with my boyfriend. Every five birds I make we get an extra day on our party,” Hull said Thursday with a laugh. “I was trying to make 10 birds. Hopefully I’ll have more over the weekend and I’ll have a two-week break at the end of the year.”
By the time she met the media, Hull’s holiday betting was off to a strong start. She had just finished an opening round with seven birdies Annikajumping in with an added rest day and a few shots off the top of the leaderboard in a loaded field at The Pelican Club. And as she explained, her and Beadle’s bet was no small feat.
“100 percent,” she said when asked if extra incentives like this help her game. “They really help me focus.”
Hull said she and Beadle have made similar bets before, and that she finds they help tap into a different part of her competitive side. Maybe it’s a distraction from the cold financial realities of pro golf, maybe it’s that these bets turn those financial realities from theoretical (“more money”) to physical (“more time in a cool place”).
Either way, it’s working for Hull. The next vacation, she said, will take the couple to Europe. And with a big win – her first in two years – at an LET event in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago, there’s little doubt the time away will be well earned.
