The Long Ball

Apologies to the regular reader for my tardy appearance at the keyboard today.  I know many of you can't get out of bed in the morning without your Unplayable Lies fix, and really who could blame you?

A special shout out to friend of the blog Warren "Wally" Light, who I visited yesterday as he rehabs

from a knee replacement.  He's doing so well that I remarked as we were leaving yesterday that I wasn't quite clear on why we were visiting him, as he seemed sufficiently mobile that he should be coming to see us.  And just a reminder at right that Wally had no doubt been shortening his swing to accommodate the bad left knee, so we're all hopeful that he can now get the club at least to parallel.  Honestly, he looked so sprightly that I almost expect him to show on the first tee on Saturday...

But back to business, shall we?  So, as promised, I watched on a tape-delayed basis the RE/MAX Long Drive Championship from Las Vegas, and I'm quite glad I did.   What great fun and shear brilliance to set it up as a match play event with a winner-take-all purse. Color me hooked...

They ran the guys through a gauntlet of qualifiers, including loser brackets to avoid it being "one and done."  From what I saw, long drive match play is even more fickle than 18 holes of match play, and being a favorite is worth exactly nothing.  So, let's start with the headlines:

Thirteen inches. 

Jeff Flagg.

Thirteen inches? Are you kidding? There has never been a RE/MAX World Long Drive Championship like this. 

Never. 

Forty-three-year-old Jeff Crittendon quietly packed his belongings into his golf bag behind the grandstands that surrounded the brightly lit tee box stage. It was a clear but chilly night -- the low 50s in the no-humidity desert feels like the low 40s -- but the man known as The Critter didn’t feel the cold, just the sting. 

He became the Cinderella story of the World Long Drive event Tuesday night. The Critter won his quarterfinal match against Matt Hanger by one yard. Then the Critter upset former world champ Joe Miller, a high-ball hitter who struggled with the wind, by one yard.

Then Crittendon lost to former minor league baseball player Jeff Flagg in the final, incredibly, unbelievably, by 13 inches. Officials had to go out on the grid to measure the two shots while Flagg and The Critter waited on the tee, nervously, awkwardly and numbly.

There were eight qualifiers, the so-called Las Vegas Eight, and therefore seven matches.  From memory, I believe the largest margin of victory was two yards.  That's what kind of night it was.

And Gary Van Sickle has it exactly right, it was quite the surreal scene as the players took their last shots.  Each match consists of the two players hitting six shots each in groups of three, and Jeff Flagg hit three unnecessary shots, as it turned out, since they hadn't done the measurement yet.  There's a six-inch rule in effect (I'm gonna take the high road here and let that one pass), meaning that if the difference was withing that range they would go to a 3-ball playoff.

I am a bit surprised by the venue and timing, as the cold and wind to which Van Sickle refers kept the distances well under 400 yards.  Now it's always interesting to see players adapting to conditions, and the equipment (think 3 degrees of loft) and swing speeds (+/- 150 mph) are so extreme that any slight mishit will send a ball not just off the grid, but out of state.  I'm just surprised that the promoters didn't opt for an environment that would maximize distances, 'cause these guys can bop it 450 yards or more in the right conditions.  

Van Sickle earlier filed an interesting profile of the winner (good call Gary) and Connor Powers, the most interesting swing in the field, with this good piece of writing as the lede:

Jeff Flagg and Connor Powers are living the dream. It’s just not the dream they were

That must be quite the fast shutter.

planning on. 

Their dream was professional baseball when they were teammates on the Mississippi State University baseball squad and they hoped that right about now they’d be playing longball as power-hitting Major Leaguers. 

That dream died a slow, frustrating death. So they have moved on to Dream 1-A. Now they’re playing longball as power-hitting major-leaguers in a different game, the RE/MAX World Long Drive Championship.

Quite a few ex-baseball players in the field, so there must be a transferable skill there.

Powers, and how great is that name, was the top seed and immediately lost to The Critter in the first match of the evening, barely putting a ball in play.  But it's his swing that you'll remember, think  Happy Gilmour on steroids.  Back to Van Sickle:

Powers signed with the San Diego Padres after college and played first base and third in the Class A minors for three seasons before being released, playing for the Eugene Emeralds, Fort Wayne TinCaps and Lake Elsinore Storm. 

When he decided to try long drive, he went to the Catalyst Golf Performance Center in downtown Chicago to do golf-specific and long-drive-specific training. According to Mike Napoleon, Catalyst’s director of golf instruction, Powers improved his clubhead speed from 133 mph to 150 in seven months and recorded a ball speed (the speed of the ball leaving the clubface) of 222 mph in Mesquite. 

“I’m sure a lot of guys did it on their own but I had a whole team behind me at Catalyst to get me where I am,” Powers said. 

He is 6 feet 2, uses a driver with -- yeow! -- only 3.5 degrees of loft and his day job is as a baseball hitting instructor via his website, DeadRedHitting.com. He’s also got a driver with 3.25 degrees of loft.

I like that last bit, because it seems that nowadays everyone is following TaylorMade's lead and lofting up.

But here's video of the swing for your amusement:

So, how about this for a plan.  When Wally gets back on the golf course I'll take some video and we can do a side-by-side comparison with Powers.  There's little doubt which of them takes the club back further...