Mighty Mike Austin and the 515-Yard Drive
Thirty years ago a brash pro belted the longest drive in history. With a persimmon driver. He was 64. And the record still stands.
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.
MightyMike:
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