Tommy Fleetwood's Wife Gets Honest About Big Age Gap
The 2025 Open Championship is drawing near as the best golfers in the world travel to Northern Ireland for the final major title of the year.
Royal Portrush will take center stage for the first time since the club held the 2019 Open Championship which saw Irishman Shane Lowry win his first - and only - major title with a six-shot victory over Tommy Fleetwood. The latter has never won a major title, but he's been in contention at the Open Championship on a number of occasions with three top 10s to his name.
As Fleetwood gets ready to compete in another major title close to home, his relationship with wife Clare is back in the headlines. The two share a 22-year age gap, though neither seem to give it too much thought other than when the later claimed Fleetwood was a bit too young for her when they first met.
"We've got a 23-year age difference. Of course, I turned him down. I was like, 'Don't be stupid,'" she joked.
The couple first met in 2015 when Clare Craig was attempting to woo Fleetwood professionally as the up-and-coming golfer's manager. “We were always on similar flights to or from Manchester airport, sat next to each other for hours, so we became friends,” he told The Times.
“We spent more and more time together and it just so happens we fell in love.” How long did that take? “Not long, just months. We already had such a strong connection and the extra time spent together just tipped us over the edge.”
After initially planning to keep their work life and home life separate, they chemistry in business - and home - was just too good.
"We planned to keep our life and our work separate, for me to find another agent. But it became more apparent I wasn’t going to find anybody I’d trust as much because, after all, Clare is a very, very, very good agent by trade; it wasn’t like she was my wife just helping the family out. So in the end we thought, ‘We’ll just give it a go, but we will never let anything get in the way of our relationship,’ and it’s just always worked perfectly.
Fleetwood admitted the couple "gets comments" but neither are bothered.
“Oh, we definitely get comments. But it’s never been a thing to us. Clare actually looks very young for her age and I look old — it’s probably all that sun. She’s incredibly cool and I’m not cool at all, though I am quite mature for my age.”
As for calling his wife a "WAG", Fleetwood doesn't think the title fits too much.
“Ooh, I don’t think she’d like to be called a WAG much,” he said. “Clare does much more than me, she’s a very, very busy woman. Both of us absolutely love working — we’d far rather be busy than not busy.”
The Englishman will be on the course alongside Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas at 10:10 a.m. ET.
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