The college kid with the wicked slice probably wouldn't believe it if you told him. It's a summery Monday morning at a public driving range in Studio City, California, and the greatest big hitter ever to swing a golf club just showed up in the stall next to his. Not that Mike Austin makes much of a grand entrance these days. At ninety-four years old, the man who hit the longest drive ever recorded on a golf course struggles just to make it from his bed to his wheelchair to his usual spot behind the stalls. Then again, any weakness of the body is offset by the still-sheer immensity of Austin's personality.
"No, no, no, no, nooo!" he shouts, crunching his one good hand into a fist. Austin is giving a lesson to Nancy McClaskey, 69, a retired elementary school principal from Pasadena, and she hasn't quite mastered the "supple quickness" that characterizes Austin's superpowerful swing ideal. Her shots are plinking short and left. Austin, who was paralyzed on one side by a stroke in 1989 and came close to death during an illness last year, hunches forward in his chair in a fit of fury. He is often in a fit of fury. "Whip that club! Whip it, Nancy! Where's the speed in your hands? Let me see some goddamned fight in that club!"
In his prime, which extended into his eighties, Austin packed as much punch from the tee—and off it, for that matter—as any golfer ever. He couldn't putt to save his life, which kept him from any real success on the PGA and Senior PGA Tours, but stick a driver in his hand and small miracles would happen.
Always a showman with a salty vocabulary, Austin dazzled Bobby Jones as a teenager with three-hundred-yard tee shots at East Lake Country Club in Atlanta, around the corner from Austin's childhood home. He claims to have broken the four-hundred-yard barrier in 1937.
By the 1960s he was hosting The Mike Austin Golf Show on television, on which he once displayed his power by knocking a ball through the Los Angeles telephone directory. Another time, he says, to win one of his many hustles, he hit a two-hundred-yard drive with a taped-up Coke bottle.
But those were mere mulligans compared with the rocket he launched on September 25, 1974, at the U.S. National Seniors Open Championship in Las Vegas. Goosed by his playing partner, 1950 PGA champion Chandler Harper, to "really let one go," Austin, then sixty-four, unleashed all hell on the ball, sending it 515 yards before it finally came to rest—sixty-five yards beyond the flagstick on the par-four fifth hole. Thirty years later, it's still the longest drive ever, according to Guinness World Records. (The PGA Tour began logging individual driving distance in 1980. The longest drive since then is thought to be 457 yards, by J.C. Goosie, at a Senior Tour event in 1988; the longest recorded drive on the regular Tour is 427 yards, by Chris Smith in 1999.)
Austin's nearly unfathomable accomplishment seems lost on the Monday-morning hackers at the Studio City range. The cantankerous old man is all but invisible to them as they swing like Visigoths for the far target 250 yards out. McClaskey, meanwhile, can't crack 125. It's more than Austin can stomach.
"Look here, get me up!" he demands. His sandpaper growl bears traces of England, where he was born, and the American South, where he grew up. With an awkward hoist, Austin is on his feet, leaning heavily on McClaskey's left shoulder. He wants to hit the ball. Standing on the square of fake grass, he reaches for her driver but suddenly feels unsteady and calls for his wheelchair.
"Last year," Austin says, down but undaunted, "I hit a seven-iron one-handed, backhanded. It went 147 yards."
Every day on every golf course in America, the game within the game isn't putting but driving. How far you hit the ball from the tee establishes your worthiness as a player, perhaps even as a man. Bomb a ball into the center of the grid on a long par five and you're God's gift to everything, if only for a moment.
"Distance is freedom," says Philip Reed, who has written a new book about Austin, called In Search of the Greatest Golf Swing (Carroll & Graf, $20). "If you're a long hitter, you can do things other golfers can't. You can cut a dogleg. You can get on in one. You can say, 'Your ball's way back there. Looks like I beat you.' And that's the game of golf."
In the three decades since Austin set his record, average driving distances have crept upward like crabgrass around a forgotten green. In 1980 the length of the average drive on the PGA Tour was 256.9 yards. In 1990 it was 262.8 yards. Last year it was 286.3 yards, with long hitters such as John Daly and Hank Kuehne averaging north of 300.
The gains come partly from better tools: long, snappy shafts, high-performance balls and clubheads the size of toaster ovens. At the same time, the fixation on distance has never been more acute. An entire golf subspecialty has emerged expressly for big-bombing bragging rights. Long Drivers of America (LDA), founded in 1994, now has close to a thousand members—up from 200 just three years ago—and sponsors more than 400 long-drive events annually.
"The big drive is the touchdown or home run of golf," says Jason Zuback, a four-time RE/MAX World Long Drive Champion. He has knocked a ball 412 yards in competition, the same distance Tiger Woods hit one during a practice round at the British Open in 1998. "The long drive is the thing that makes all your buddies crazy with envy," Zuback says.
But even the longest of the long hitters acknowledge that something extraordinary occurred on that autumn day in the Nevada desert thirty years ago. Guys like Zuback study footage of Austin in his glory years (the actual record drive was not filmed; Guinness corroborated the distance by interviewing witnesses, including Harper) to understand exactly how a sixty-four-year-old former actor with a steel-shafted persimmon driver and an oldfashioned two-piece ball could outdrive today's best golfers—by the length of an entire football field.
Austin's secret was a revolutionary approach to hitting a golf ball that evolved out of his engineering and physics studies at Emory University and Georgia Tech and his PhD work in kinesiology, the science of human movement. "Mike looked at the human body and said this is the best way to fit this machine with this job," says Reed. "It's the most efficient swing in history. You watch the old films, and the swing is so natural that it looks like Mike is laying up even when he's going for the moon." (Austin has a teaching video, available at peacerivergolf.com.)
What distinguishes the technique is a forceful lateral shift of the legs coupled with an unusual hand position and club swing. Unlike the standard Tour-pro approach, Austin relies on what conventional hitters might call "casting," throwing the clubhead around the swing circle. It's the only way, according to Jaacob Bowden, a long-drive specialist studying the Austin method, to swing fast enough to keep up with such a forceful leg shift. Finally, while a conventional swing squares the clubface only at the last second, Austin keeps his blade squared much longer throughout the swing circle—before, during and after impact. His left hand is actually palm-up during the take-away.
"This guy had a golf swing that was forty years ahead of its time," says Art Sellinger, the two-time national longdrive champion who cofounded the LDA. "Mike Austin could get more out of less than anyone. When amateur golfers sit on the couch, this is how they dream of hitting a ball."
The day was a typical Vegas scorcher under fair skies with an afternoon high of ninetyfour. The National Seniors Open, a precursor event to the PGA Senior Tour, was in its second day and Austin was playing in a foursome with Harper, Pete Fleming and Joe Brown.
Austin is the first to tell you he was having an exceptional round even before his monster shot. "I was hitting the hell out of the ball that day," he says from his home in the L.A. suburb of Woodland Hills. He's sitting up in a hospital bed in his cluttered living room, fiddling with a miniature golf club he keeps in the folds of his leopard-print sheets. Although it's almost spring, Tanya, his wife of fiftyeight years, is quietly taking down a Christmas tree. "On two par fives before that hole," Austin says, "I used a driver and a seven-iron to get onto the green."
Winterwood Golf Course is one of the oldest tracks in the Las Vegas Valley. It was built in 1964, and ten years later was still way out in the desert. Today it's called Desert Rose and is just another overplayed local course lost in Vegas's sprawl. The fifth hole (now the fourteenth) was a flat and narrow 450-yard par four with a slight dogleg right and a stretch of low trees down the right side. Approaching the tee that day, Harper made Austin a good-natured challenge: "You've been whacking the ball," he said. "Let's see what happens if you really let one go."
Austin says he passed word onto the foursome ahead to stand clear. And then, using a Wilson persimmonheaded driver with a ten-degree loft and an extra-stiff forty-three-inch steel shaft (by comparison, most of today's drivers, along with their titanium faces, have forty-fiveinch shafts, to generate greater swing speed), he struck with the power of the ages. "I knew I knocked the hell out of it," Austin says. "But the ball went up strangely. Went out about ten or fifteen feet high and kept going and going at that flattened level. I could put my finger on it the whole way until just before it dropped."
Chandler Harper is now ninety and living at home in Portsmouth, Virginia. His memory of that day is as vivid as Austin's. "Three of us hit our shots about 140 yards short of the green," he says. "But Mike's drive beat all that by a mile. I went ahead to look for his ball and spotted a ball on the next tee well behind the fifth green. I told Mike to check it because we couldn't believe it." It was, in fact, Austin's Titleist 100. Says Harper: "I had never seen a ball hit anywhere near that far. I played fifty times with Sam Snead and Ben Hogan, but nothing compared to this." Adds Tanya, who watched her husband play that day, "It was like God held the ball in the air."
Harper likes to joke about the hurricane-force tailwinds blowing that afternoon. After all, on the eighth and ninth holes, Austin drove the green again with four-hundredyard wallops. Guinness says there were 35 m.p.h. gusts; according to the National Weather Service, the maximum winds that day were out of the southeast at 27 m.p.h.
Austin has heard every wisecrack in the book: The fairway was probably hard as rock; the high-desert elevation made all the difference; the ball took a fortunate bounce. Some question whether it happened at all. When asked if the ball hit a cart path or a sprinkler head, Austin gives one of his icy blue-eyed stares and says, "That damned ball hit nothing but my club and the ground it landed on."
Perhaps the saddest part of the story is that Austin merely shot par that day. He went on to finish in the top ten at that tournament, but he was never a professional all-star. His best finish on the PGA Tour was at the 1961 Ontario Open, where he tied for thirty-seventh place with a total of 291. His low score in a Tour event was a 285 at the 1958 Tucson Open, where he tied for fifty-first. After the 515-yard drive, Austin pitched back onto the green and three-putted. As Reed laments, "Longest drive in history and Mike walked away with a bogey."
"You are sitting here with the Leonardo da Vinci of the golf swing," Danny Shauger says as he arrives in Austin's living room. "Mike Austin created a swing that has the power to change the way golf is played." Shauger, 64, is as close to a protégé as Austin has ever had. A former Hollywood set coordinator with fading tattoos, Shauger has spent the last twenty-five years learning Austin's unique method, and he's become something of an Austin evangelist. Clearly, their time together hasn't been easy. When Shauger's cash flow ran low, Austin insisted that Danny buy him dinners, fix his cars and make repairs around the house to pay Austin's $100-an-hour teaching fee.
In his prime, Austin was tall and handsome with a physique to rival that of Jack La Lanne, who was one of his many celebrity students. Austin loves to talk about the Hollywood A-listers he's taught over the years, though it's hard to tell how much is bunk. He was an aspiring actor and claims to have had a movie contract with MGM in the 1930s; he says he shared an apartment with Errol Flynn around that time, and the two of them used to chase women around Hollywood. He especially enjoys telling the story of the time Howard Hughes showed up at his driving range in Culver City asking for lessons. Austin says he taught Bob Hope's wife to play and that Sylvester Stallone has dropped by the house for lessons. He takes credit for the swings of Seve Ballesteros and Tom Kite, among others. "Anybody who was anybody in the history of golf," Austin likes to say, "took lessons from me." Not surprisingly, he also claims that Tiger Woods stole all his secrets.
But spend some time with Austin and Shauger and you quickly understand why Austin's swing has for the most part stayed with Austin. It's only a matter of minutes before he and Shauger are bickering like an old married couple, arguing over club grip, foot position and arm motion. "Look here," growls Austin, "it's done like this."
"Mike Austin is a tremendous teacher and a brilliant man," Shauger says later over the phone, "but his anger has kept him from becoming one of the great teaching pros. If he were more personable, we'd mention his name in the same breath as Butch Harmon and David Leadbetter."
In his book, Reed offers some theories about the roots of Austin's bluster: He was bullied as a child for his snowwhite hair and near-albino skin. His father doted more on his two older brothers than on him. His life was forever altered by a mysterious fever during World War II that made it impossible for him to have children.
"Mike's always had problems with people," Reed says. "He should be a multimillionaire, but because he shoves and screams and curses, people feel alienated by him. He once told me during a golf lesson that I couldn't hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle."
Perhaps, just perhaps, Austin's message is finally getting through. The thirtieth anniversary of his recordsetting drive has sparked a Mike Austin renaissance, with a flurry of books, videos and articles. And then there's Jaacob Bowden, the twenty-eightyear-old golfer Shauger met last year at a driving range outside L.A. Like Austin in his prime, Bowden is sixfoot-two, 210 pounds and handsome as a matinee idol. He can also really clobber a golf ball. Shauger recognized Bowden's hitting potential and spent three months last winter teaching him the Austin method. Bowden's driving average has since bumped up from 285 to its current level of 336. In a recent competition, he knocked a towering four-hundred-yard blast.
"I used to look at John Daly and think, How does he do it?" Bowden says. "Now that I've adopted Mike's technique, I watch Tour events and consider Daly a short hitter."
It's hard to know exactly how history will record Mike Austin's legacy, but one thing is certain: Nobody will ever consider him an average golfer—especially if he has any say in the matter. When asked how he feels about his record having endured for thirty years, an actual smile steals across his face.
"It's an unbelievable thing," Austin says. "Nobody's ever done anything like it. People think they hit a ball three hundred yards and it's a goddamned miracle. But I know I did something all the greats couldn't do. That's something to really think about."
Mike Austin's record 515-yard drive has yet to be approached in thirty years. Which begs the question: Did it—could it—really happen?
T+L GOLF asked the engineers at Focaltron, a golf-performance company in Sunnyvale, California, to simulate the drive to see whether Austin's story flies. After plugging in all the known data—that day's wind and weather conditions, the altitude, the persimmon driver and the two-piece ball—here's what they determined:
At an altitude of 2,030 feet and a temperature of eighty-eight degrees, Austin would have needed the day's maximum wind gust of 27 m.p.h. behind him, an astonishingly low launch angle and spin rate and a swing speed of 150 m.p.h. to carry the ball 445 yards before it started rolling. (Indeed, Austin's swing was once measured at 155 m.p.h.; by comparison, Tiger Woods swings the club about 120 m.p.h.) A few lucky bounces might—just might—have yielded another sixty or so yards. Plus, by cutting off the slight dogleg, Austin shaved ten or more yards off the hole. If all these variables came together, the 515- yard drive could have occurred. Or perhaps, as Austin's biographer, Philip Reed, suggests: "Something unquantifiable may have happened that day. It's like the moment when a mother lifts a car to save her child from the burning wreckage. Whatever Mike did that day seemed to defy everything we know about the golf swing."
