Go Long: Inside the World of Competitive Long Drive Golf

This was published in the July 2010 issue of Golf Canada.

From the back tee box, the par four opening hole at the Muskoka Bay Club plays to a stout, albeit downhill, 441 yards. With the glowing sun making the already shimmering landscape even more alluring, Brett Cleverdon tees his ball up and doesn’t for a moment second guess himself. “Let’s just go ahead and see if we can put it on the green,” he says assertively. He rears back, turning his body behind his shoulders, sets the club just past parallel to the ground at the top and begins to uncoil, waiting until the last possible moment to ferociously unleash the club head.

His swing is a harmonic convergence of power and precision and it launches the ball spiraling majestically into orbit before crash-landing in the green-side bunker. If there were any thoughts that his confident tone on the tee was mere bravado, they were quickly erased by the tiny grains of sand that splashed upon the ball’s arrival. You see, Cleverdon is a professional long driver, which may have a very different meaning for many different people. But to most, it means he can hit a golf ball far … really far.

The first things you notice are the three distinct sounds you hear when a long driver punishes a golf ball. First, there’s the whizzing of the club as it makes its final descent, cutting a swath through the airspace surrounding the ball. When it reaches its intended target, the combination of titanium meeting dimpled thermoplastic creates a shrill yelp as the ball jumps from the club face and for the all-too-brief moment that it’s still in your presence, it makes a sizzling sound, similar to the one made when you sear a piece of meat on a hot grill. With swing speeds regularly in the 150 mile per hour range (the average speed of a PGA Tour player is roughly 115 miles per hour) in the grip of a highly skilled professional hitter the driver becomes a certifiable WMD – weapon of massive distance.

While the concept of hitting a golf ball as far as possible isn’t a recent innovation, long driving as a competitive sport is relatively young. The origins date back to 1975 when Golf Digest started the National Long Drive Championship, which it ran until 1993. The next year two former participants – Art Sellinger (a two-time champion) and Randy Souza – formed the Long Drivers of America and began their own competition, the World Long Drive Championship. Now held every October inMesquite, Nevada, the championship is considered to be the crown jewel for any long driver.

The format for competition is simple. Participants have two minutes and 45 seconds to hit six balls onto a grid that can extend up to 460 yards long and is anywhere between 40 and 60 yards wide. Their longest ball that doesn’t stray out of bounds will represent them on the leader board. Depending on the size and scope of the event, the field will be put into different groups and paired down round-by-round until a champion is crowned, with each new round requiring a new distance to be set.

If having six cracks at the same shot seems like a lot, Cleverdon cautions that it’s much more difficult than it sounds, especially when the pressure is on and your first few shots haven’t found their mark. “You have to think of every ball as your sixth one,” he says.

He points to fellow Canadian Jason Zuback – a five-time world champion – as someone who not only thrived in the format, but also excelled at being able to bring his best stuff from the range onto the competitive tee. And while Zuback is now the most decorated long driver in history, his path to the top of the mountain was more fateful than calculated. While playing in the qualifying round for the Alberta Open in 1996, a fellow golfer marveled at Zuback’s length off the tee. He told him about a local qualifier for the World Championship and encouraged him to attend, citing the fact that Zuback’s was the longest ball he’d ever seen. Zuback took him up on the challenge and never looked back.

“I don’t think I really set out to be a long driver,” Zuback admits. “I’d always enjoyed hitting it far and I always hit far throughout the years. I started off and had a lot of success early on. My first time I made it to the world championship, I won the whole thing and then repeated that three more times for four in a row.”
His streak was snapped in 2000 when he finished in second place, after Swede Viktor Johansson edged him out by a single yard. He remained a strong contender every year thereafter though until he reclaimed his spot as the king of the long drivers in 2006. While it may be easy to look at the start of Zuback’s career – four wins and a runner-up in his first five appearances – as a reason to keep at it, he says that even though those memories of victory are nice, the appeal for him now comes from the pursuit.

“Once you get hooked, it’s very difficult to get away from it. You’re always trying to better yourself and [better] your competition as well,” he says. “You’ve got an element of competing against yourself and then in the grand stage of competing against everyone else.”

Any sport that craves mainstream acceptance can expect a few bumps in the road, but long drive has had to slay more than their share of misconceptions along the way, most notably that the players use illegal equipment and steroids. It should be noted however that all competitors are drug tested and all of their equipment – from clubs right down to tees (in competition, all participants use the same ball) – must meet USGA regulations. There’s also the stigma that despite their massive length long drivers aren’t real golfers, but Cleverdon says that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“The golf swings are extremely good. The vast majority of the guys that are good at the sport, their swings would fit in on [a professional] tour,” he says. “The only difference is everything moves faster. There’s more shoulder turn, there’s much faster hip drive, there’s much faster club head speed, so everything is just sped up, but you can’t hit a ball over 400 yards and straight without having a very technically good golf swing.”

While it may seem irrelevant what the perception of the participants is, those attitudes can trickle down and affect the sport’s bottom line, especially when it comes to acquiring new sponsors. And with a lack of overall capital invested, there are very few players who are able to dedicate the time necessary to look at the sport as a full-time job – Cleverdon says that long drive is “a hobby for 99 per cent of the guys.”

“Back five years ago we had probably 15 people that had reasonable endorsement deals; that actually made a reasonably good living at long drive. Now we have one,” Zuback says, pausing to allow the number to sink in.

Like their touring golf brethren, long drivers have to grind it out and it takes a toll on the body. Cleverdon estimates that he hits around 10,000 balls with a driver every year. By the end of the golfing season, he is spent physically and mentally.

“When you’re swinging a golf club at 150 miles an hour, it’s the same stress on your body as a 30-mile per hour head-on car collision or a 300-pound bench press. It’s the same force exerted on your body,” he says. “So when you do that from spring until October, you’re done.”

If the sport is to take some forward leaps, it seems likely that it will lean heavily on Canadian Sadlowski – the two-time reigning world champion – to do so. If you met the 22-year old on the street, based purely on physical size, you wouldn’t necessarily think he was the preeminent name in power golf.

“Finally we have somebody of normal size who can hit a golf ball farther than anybody on planet earth,” says Sellinger. “That gives a lot more respectability and acceptability in the product in that we’ve got a person who’s under six [feet tall] and under a 175 pounds that can win a world championship.”

Between Sadlowski and Zuback, seven of the last 14 world championship titles have belonged to Canadians. (Another Canadian, Jeff Gavin, finished sixth at the World Championship last year and has the fastest ball speed ever measured on the Titleist Launch Monitor at 221.8 miles per hour.) And while you may think there’s something in the water in Alberta – where both Zuback and Sadlowski are from – that provides the magic elixir for hitting a golf ball far, the connection may be water related, but it’s of the frozen variety.

“Hockey helps a lot. A lot of the Canadians that are high-level long drivers are right-handed golfers and play hockey left-handed,” says Cleverdon, referencing himself, Zuback and Sadlowski among that group.
“What that does is, it strengthens the opposite side of your body all winter, so that when you come out and golf in the summer time you’re able to use both sides of your body very effectively.”

Meanwhile, Cleverdon hopes Canadians will continue to be a key factor in growing the sport. For over a year, he’s been planning to bring a premier long drive event to Canadian soil, targeting September and Summerside, PEI as the location for the Midland Transport International Long Drive Championship.

“I love the sport of long drive more than anything else,” Cleverdon says. “We can do things that [only] 0.2 per cent of the golf population in the world can do, if that even. Every time I hit a ball, if I hit it well, there’s no better feeling in the world.”

Canada's New Favourite Son: Georges St-Pierre

This was published in the June 2008 issue of Chill.

Two days before the first ever Ultimate Fighting Championship event on Canadian soil, the country’s most famous mixed martial artist wasn’t thinking about his final preparations. He wasn’t thinking about the crowd in Montreal’s Bell Centre or Matt Serra, his opponent and the man that dethroned him as the UFC welterweight champion a year earlier.

No, 48 hours before the biggest fight of his life, Georges St-Pierre was thinking about how he could do more to help kids, while his charitable organization, the GSP Foundation, put the plan in action, hosting a pre-fight party to raise funds for various children’s charities.

“For me, growing up I had problems and what I want to do is to help kids," St-Pierre says of his reasons for starting the foundation. “I want to raise money to give it to different foundations, different organizations, to help kids, and for me it’s a way to give back to society."

That’s not to say he wasn’t focused on victory, but rather a testament to the kind of character he has. At a time when sports fans are fed a daily dose of cynicism because of athletes with checkered pasts, questionable morals and poor decision making skills, St-Pierre’s sincerity and generosity is refreshing and epitomizes what the 21st century athlete is supposed to be. As a result, he is quickly becoming one of Canada’s favourite sons. And while it would be one thing if he possessed all these admirable traits and didn’t have the skills to back it up, St-Pierre is a top-shelf talent.

“He’s a prototype of what you have to be in this day and age as the fight game has matured," says Marc Ratner, the UFC’s vice president of government and regulatory affairs and one of the most influential voices in the sport. “He can do it all, whether it’s on the ground, with the jiu-jitsu, with the grappling, or with the striking. I consider him to be what the fighters will look like from now."

At just 27 years of age and with two world title reigns already to his credit, the Montreal resident is just scratching the surface of his vast potential and is on the verge of becoming a bona fide super star. Despite all that he’s accomplished thus far, it’s the April 2007 loss to Serra that will continue to define his career. As one of the biggest upsets the sport has ever seen, it was a watershed moment for the UFC - the Rocky-esque upset that garnered widespread media attention at a time when the company was craving mainstream acceptance. More importantly though, it provided St-Pierre with a catalyst for change.

“What it taught me, this life lesson, is that it’s very hard to be champion and it’s very easy to go down," he says. “I made the mistake once and I will never do it again. I don’t say that I will never lose again, nobody can do such things, nobody is invincible. But every time I will come into a fight, I will be 100 percent, mentally and physically."

In three bouts since the defeat, just the second of his career, St-Pierre has certainly looked like he was operating at full capacity, winning all three in convincing fashion and looking more dominant than ever before in doing so. His most recent victory at UFC 83 this past April allowed him to avenge that loss, reclaim his world title and to top it all off, a record number of fans from his hometown were there to witness it. The 21,390 in the building that night set a North American attendance record for MMA and it was the fastest sell-out in UFC history.

But sheer numbers don’t come close to telling the story. From the moment the gates opened, about five hours before the main event, the support from the fans was obvious. Every time St-Pierre was shown on a video monitor, the entire building, as if on cue, would erupt.

“It was crazy. It was a good, positive vibe," he says of the crowd. “It was amazing. I couldn’t express how I was feeling when I won the fight."

The crowd was still in a frenzy when the two competitors shared an embrace after the bout, then watched Serra pick St-Pierre up, and carry him around the octagon. There were some harsh words exchanged leading up to the fight, so the show of respect was an appropriate end to their feud.

Ratner, who as the former executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission has a lengthy history with all combat sports, says displays of admiration between competitors like that is common place in MMA and it’s certainly not a surprise to see it after a St-Pierre fight.
“Georges personifies what’s right about the sport," he says.

All told, from his climb up the championship ladder to headlining a major event in his hometown, it’s been quite the journey for St-Pierre. Especially when you consider that his initial foray into martial arts was as a way to escape schoolyard bullies.

“Well, I started doing karate when I was a kid," he says. “At the time a lot of older kids were picking on me at school, I had a lot problems going on and karate was the only place where I was free."

Following the passing of his karate teacher, St-Pierre began training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and from there began to look toward MMA. He made his professional debut in the Quebec based Universal Combat Challenge (Now TKO Championship Fighting) in 2002. But while there were few roadblocks along the way, St-Pierre says that his family, all strong supporters now, were hesitant at first.

“In the beginning they were afraid," he says, “but eventually they saw that I was very talented and I really liked what I was doing."

It didn’t take long for people without family ties to recognize St-Pierre’s gifts either, and he now has some of the best training partners in the world. He works closely with legendary MMA trainer Greg Jackson and his stable of fighters, but a key to his development was realizing that fights are often won in the weeks and months leading up to the bout, and that diversification is paramount. He works with a Muay Thai kickboxing coach, wrestles with the Canadian national team, trains in Brazilian jiu-jitsu with black belts (St-Pierre has a brown belt) and has regular sparring sessions with professional boxers, including world champion Joachim Alcine.

It takes a disciplined lifestyle to be sure, and after a whirlwind year that saw him lose and then regain his title, St-Pierre seems more dedicated than ever. Having made it back to the top of the mountain, the challenge now becomes staying there and securing his place in history along the way.

“I’m very happy with what I’ve accomplished so far, but my belly is not full yet," he says. “I want to be known as the best fighter who ever competed in the sport, pound-for-pound, at the end of my career. That’s what I want to be and I still have a lot to do to reach that goal."

In the meantime, he’ll have to settle for being one of the most recognizable figures in an emerging sport and making an entire country proud.