How Charley Hull’s viral cigarette lit up the golf world: ‘It’s a little surreal’

Tobacco has been having a pretty good week. First we had those images of Paul Mescal and Natalie Portman looking like a starry-eyed advertisement for divorce and May-December romance as they took a smoke break outside some bar in Islington. Then along came Charley Hull, the 28-year-old English golfer who set the internet ablaze when she signed autographs for a gaggle of adoring fans at last week’s US Women’s Open in Pennsylvania with a lit cigarette dangling from her lips. There were several admirers awaiting her signature (and one indisputably grown-ass man who slipped her his number), and she didn’t bother to stub out the ciggie as she moved from fan to fan.

It’s easy to fall for Hull’s smooth ponytail and IDGAF swagger, but the viral images only tell part of the story. As she told a gallery of reporters on Sunday after carding a three-under 67 in the final round at Lancaster Country Club, she rarely goes for alcohol (“I don’t need to drink because I can have a fun time without it”), and she has started smoking old-fashioned cigarettes as a way to limit her nicotine consumption. You can vape anywhere, you see, but you can’t light up indoors.

For the passing observer, Hull is John Daly by way of Kate Moss, strutting across the links firing up heaters behind aviator sunglasses without a care in the world. She’s a blonde knockout, yes, but she’s also England’s highest ranked golfer (male or female), a six-time winner on the LPGA and Ladies European tours, and an ADHD-diagnosed gym rat who shares TikTok videos of herself training with kettlebells, inspiring women to both rhapsodize about her thwack and wonder if their boyfriends love golf or they just love watching Charley Hull. She was married and divorced (to a literal MMA fighter) all while in her mid-20s, which makes her a rock star in our age of delayed adultification. In the simplest terms, she is a whole mood.

Hull’s Instagram bio says “shy kids don’t get sweets” – it’s a line that she told her caddie before a heart-pounding fairway shot on the 72nd hole of last year’s US Open at Pebble Beach – but there are few eclairs and cupcakes to be found on her grid. Come to think of it, there aren’t that many golf-brags either. She’s not smug about her superiority. She is the world No 9 with more than $8m in career earnings, having finished runner-up at the US Women’s Open and the Women’s British Open last year, and yet her posts are all too relatable, cringey and vaguely aspirational, showing Hull getting ready for a wedding, traipsing through Los Angeles in an awkward crop top, fending off a question from some random guy on the street.

There’s a clip that she posted a couple of days ago showing herself at a press conference, sparring with a male journalist who wants to know what she makes of the attention that her cigarette received versus her success at Pebble last year. She laughs – she is both in on the joke and so over it. “The attention I’ve received is a little surreal,” she told the Guardian on Wednesday. “I’d rather be known for playing great golf and being a good role model for young people. That’s what I’ve worked hard for for the past 15 years or so. A little like Scottie Scheffler’s arrest the other day, it’s sometimes crazy [that] grabs the headlines”.

Yes, smoking is incredibly unhealthy, and there’s a reason people call cigarettes “cancer sticks”. But it’s hard to behold the images of Hull striding across the green and not want to do a little dance inside. Here is a prodigy who started golf at the age of two, began home-schooling at 13 and debuted at Women’s British Open a mere three years later. Her every movement is tallied, scored and reported across the globe. She plays the game, keeps her hair blonde, and gets gussied up like some love interest on Ted Lasso, always ready to be scrutinized. And yet she is uncommonly self-possessed, perfectly at ease being messy for the collective gaze of millions.

Hull has been rapping on the door of breakthrough stardom with runner-up finishes in two of the last six majors. But only after she lit up that dart did her follower count surge by more than 70,000, according to NBC Sports. Her appetite for an occasional smoke, the story we are all talking about, should not be the reason we are talking about Hull at all. It is an incendiary concession and repudiation both. But asked about her outsize personality at a recent media gaggle, she didn’t miss a beat. “Literally, all my friends always say I should have a TV show with what goes on in my life,” Hull said. “If you think I’ve got a lot going on in the golf course, you should see what I’m like at home.”