Golfers, and particularly professional golfers, don’t need incentives to make birdies.
The incentives are right there in the numbers.
The more birdies you make, the fewer strokes you take. The fewer strokes you take, the better your scores. The better your scores, the better your leaderboard position. The better your leaderboard position, the fuller your bank account.
But these incentives become like a 50-pound vest when you’re a pro golfer. You feel them always, at every event, in every moment, standing over every shot. 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 incentives, or better yet, to create new ones altogether.
This theory brings us to LPGA star Charley Hull, whose whirlwind 2024 season is nearing completion at this week’s tournament, The Annika. Like many professional golfers, it has been a long year for Hull, full of travel between different continents, countries and events. And, like many pro golfers, Hull is planning on celebrating the end of that season with an extended holiday with her boyfriend. 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 imperative incentive.
“I actually had a bet with my boyfriend. Every five birdies I make we have an extra day on our holiday,” Hull said Thursday with a laugh. “I was trying to make 10 birdies. Hopefully I’ll have more over the weekend and I have a two-week holiday at the end of the year.”
By the time she met with media, Hull’s holiday bet was off to a strong start. She’d just finished a seven-birdie opening round at The Annika, vaulting her one added vacation day and a few shots off the top of the leaderboard in a loaded field at The Pelican Club. And as she explained, her bet was no small part of the success.
“100 percent,” she said when asked if extra incentives like this help her game. “They really do help me focus.”
Hull said that she has made similar wagers before, and she finds they help to access a different piece of her competitive side. Perhaps it’s distraction from the cold financial realities of pro golf, perhaps it’s that these bets turn those financial realities from theoretical (“more money”) into physical (“more time in a cool place”).
Either way, it’s working for Hull. The forthcoming vacation, she said, will take the couple to Europe. And with a breakthrough victory — her first in two years — at an LET event in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago, there’s little doubting the time away will be well-earned.
