Inside The Annual Golfing Tradition That’s Raised More Than £185,000 For Charity

The Golf Monthly Forum is an online meeting place for all keen golfers to chat, exchange ideas, learn, laugh, obsess, arrange a game, and debate anything and everything to do with the game we all love. With more than 29,000 members, there are always people online ready to interact, and it is a hotbed of opinion and information.

Once a year, and a regular and extremely popular fixture on the Forum calendar since 2010, there is a charity day in aid of Help For Heroes. This is open to members and their guests, and so each year is a perfect combination of reuniting with familiar faces at the same time as making new friends.

At the heart (bad pun intended!) of all this is lynchpin and selfless organiser, Richard Hart. Recent years have seen the day hosted at the likes of Hankley Common, Hayling, Tandridge and West Surrey – this year it was the turn of the lovely Blackmoor Golf Club on the Hampshire/Surrey borders where Richard is a long-standing and rightly proud member.

He became involved in 2012 when the event made its first move from its original base, Aldwickbury Park in Hertfordshire, then the home club of the event’s founder Rick Garg. As the day grew in popularity and stature – it is now a guaranteed sell-out – Rick wanted to take it to different venues and make it a permanent fixture on the Forum calendar. He achieved this quite brilliantly, though cruelly and very sadly he suffered a fatal heart attack while playing at his new club, Centurion, in 2016. The event has now raised getting on for £190,000, a brilliant sum for such a worthy and vitally important cause.