The record is to longest golf expostulate has stood dominant for 35 years and was completed with a wooden club, so have 3 decades of enhancing golfing technology unsuccessful to make an impression?
On 25 September 1974, a 64-year-old human called Mike Austin is available to have driven a golf round 515 yards from the tee on a Las Vegas golf course.
It was a 450 back yard standard 4 so he will have finished up more than 50 yards past the green. No-one on record has strike a round serve in a tournament.
The record was determined a year before Tiger Woods was even born, and previous to the final 3 decades of apparatus innovation.
Incredibly this human - purported to have strike a round over 200 yards with a can of cola strapped to a bar face and who never won a veteran pretension - still binds the affirm is to longest drive.
It stands someplace between legend and reality. The Guinness Book of World Records does not recognize a figure for on the whole drive, quoting instead stretch journeyed by the round in the air.
That record stands at 408 yards (373m) by Karl Woodward in 1999.
Austin's exploit was witnessed by one-time PGA winner Chandler Harper, march officials and the rest of his four-ball grouping. But how has it not been surpassed?
Technology in golf was meant to have altered the diversion forever. And anyway, golf - at least professionally - is seen as a young man's game.
"Nobody's ever done anything similar to it," Austin told Travel and Leisure publication before long before his demise in 2005.
"People regard they strike a round 300 yards and it's a goddamned miracle. But we know we did something all the greats couldn't do. That's something to unequivocally regard about."
He gathering the round with a tailwind of up to 35mph (55kmph) and was at an rgreat heights of good on top of 2,000m on top of sea level but the thing is that Austin was using a Persimmon motorist - the ones obviously done from wood.
Golf is meant to have moved on given then. Clubs are lighter, more inclined to forgive to mis-hits and are more powerful. They have vanished from being done of timber then steel to titanium and this has severely affected how far the round is being driven.
Tradition and talent
Top players' median pushing distances on the PGA Tour jumped up by over 20 yards in the 10 years between 1990 and 2000 and scarcely other 20 between 2000 and 2003. At that indicate there were 9 players averaging drives of over 300 yards.
At that time, when titanium technology was initial being utilised, drivers twice the stream confine - 460 cubic centimetres (28 cubic inches) in size - were being combined and pushing averages were at an all-time high.
And that is when golf's ruling bodies stepped in to keep what they saw as convention and a high level of talent in the game.
The effectiveness of bar faces was capped at 83% and serve - even more technical - regulations were placed on the balls. At the beginning of the 2010 season, even the amount of grooves on a bar face was limited.
With these regulations, Bubba Watson , the greatest motorist on the PGA Tour for 3 of the final 4 years, has obviously seen his median expostulate stretch drop.
At the finish of the 2009 season, it stood at 312 yards per drive. While not precisely a fragment shot, it represents a drop of 7 yards in 3 years.
In fact, the PGA Tour median now stands at 287 yards - a figure truly simply out of the attain of many amateurs, but a that has remained the same given 2003.
400-yard drives
"Maybe we done drivers as well big, as well quickly," says Doug Wright, business executive for Wilson Golf in Europe.
"If you look at other industries, they lend towards to confine their technologies, but we flattering ample went up to the confine true away."
In the 2009 season, 47 drives of 400 yards or more were available on the PGA Tour . The longest was 467 yards by Charley Hoffman, and whilst huge, it was still 50 yards partial of what Mike Austin completed with defective technology and an age disadvantage.
"If you were a burly player you could still obtain a few decent stretch [with an old-style driver]," says Wright.
"For the normal player you would strive to obtain coherence from the tee because the honeyed mark was so tiny and, secondly, the bar was truly heavy."
So are the manners getting in the way of new tech forthcoming out to help golfers?
"I'm always rhythmical about people who wish to suppress innovation," says Steve Burnett, coaching subdepartment manager at the English Golf Union.
"The normal golfer on the road wants to strike the round further, he wants the ultimate gadgets because golf's a hard diversion to play. It requires a lot of time and a lot of use so the simpler we can make it the better, is to illness of the diversion as a whole."
'Redundant courses'
And he is not the usually a who thinks that technology is of great use to the more unintentional player:
"If regulations authorised us to do whatever we longed for to the golf round and the club, then we do not regard it would affect the diversion to the loss of the median player," says Wright.
"I regard the veteran diversion - that a lot of the concern is around - and the danger of courses apropos redundant, is a not similar evidence all together. we can see both sides."
There is stepping up discuss about either there should be two sets of rules, a set for amateurs and a for professionals. The evidence is that homogeneity should be kept for chosen players but amateurs should be offering all the help they can get.
It is a similar thought to Formula 1 in that drivers are forced to infer their talent by pushing without navigation and braking gadgets available to periodic drivers .
Despite the advances in technology, there is a fact you cannot elude - the faster you pitch the club, all things being equal, the serve the round will go. Austin is rumoured to have a pitch that approached 150mph. A number of top pros are now overhanging the bar at upwards of 120mph.
But the elementary answer could be that golfers are not always perplexing to strike it as hard as they can as location is frequently more critical than yardage - a prime location on the fairway is far improved than careering off other 100 yards in to the woods.
The manufacturers however, with annual product cycles, are perplexing to eke out every in. of additional distance.
"It's something we always inquire them," says Jonathan Greathead, apparatus editor at Today's Golfer magazine.
"A year ago, manufacturers mentioned their motorist was the greatest, longest, most appropriate ever and now, 12 months later, they're rising something even more splendid - so how does this technology work?"
The actual innovations are not obviously in enhancing stretch but in accuracy, coherence and personalised clubs.
"Customisation is a large segment of the diversion now," says Greathead.
"Even a guy personification off a 20 or 21 encumber can drop may be 5 or 6 shots in just a few weeks, that obviously is a large difference, whereas the pros need every corner they can get."
Accuracy, or at least consistency, of modern golf apparatus is still seen by many as the key to low scoring, with regulations creation it more tough to fool around from the coarse .
But even in Mike Austin's day, stretch was not everything. After attack his record-breaking drive, he pitched back onto the immature and three-putted for a bogey.
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