Evan “Big Cat” Williams still remembers his mammoth drive at the first hole in the Thailand Open in 1977.
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“It was a par 5, about 580 yards,” Williams said. “The ball ran and I had a good wind behind me.
“I played with a Japanese man who was about 5-foot-6. I hit driver then half-wedge; he hit driver then 4-wood and 7-iron. We both made 4 (birdie). I tapped in for my (birdie) before he did; he tapped in from six inches.”
At age 62, Williams is still a big hitter, capable of 275 to 300 yards with his Titleist driver.
“(The drive) is the sex-appeal shot of golf,” says Williams, an instructor at Great Lakes Golf Center in Auburn Hills and Cracklewood Golf Club in Macomb. “Everybody likes to see the ball go a long way.”
Big start
Decades ago, the 6-6 Williams helped popularize long-drive contests. Though the 496-yard drive remains his longest recorded shot, it isn’t what earned Williams renown.
In 1974, Golf Digest magazine held a long-drive competition at Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskill Mountains in New York.
“They had a guy named Jackie dePalo on the cover and they unofficially declared him to be the longest hitter in the world,” Williams said. “At the same time, Jim Dent was the longest hitter on the PGA Tour. They wanted to see who was the longest hitter.”
Another long driver, Dick Middleton, who had the fastest recorded swing at the time, was the third contestant. A friend, stand-up comedian London Lee, convinced the contest promoter to add Williams.
“I hit it 368 (yards) in the air and spun it back two yards, so I got 366,” Williams recalls. “Dent hit it 354; DePalo I think was 331 and I can’t remember where (Middleton) ended up.”
The win launched Williams’ career and that event was the genesis of the National Long Drive Competition, which began the following year.
“I was a young assistant pro, 26 years old, and no one knew who I was, and I ended up winning that contest no one expected me to win,” Williams said.
Williams didn’t qualify for the inaugural National Long Drive contest, but won the next two years — in 1976 at Congressional in Washington (with a drive of 307 yards) and then at Pebble Beach in 1977 (353 yards).
“I set the record, which stood for about 20 years at Pebble,” Williams said. “Now they just hit it ridiculous. It’s a different era; we used wooden heads and the first graphite shafts. Now everything is so technical and the ball is different.”
Williams was an accomplished athlete and played four sports in college: golf, basketball, football and track. He played basketball at Canisius and played against the likes of Bob Lanier and Calvin Murphy.
Williams got his nickname as a sophomore in 1966 after a fight with a teammate in the locker room. It was the same night Muhammad Ali pummeled Cleveland “Big Cat” Williams in three rounds in a title bout in Houston — and after that scrape, his teammates adopted the moniker.
He later transferred to Franklin College in Indiana to play basketball and golf.
He was invited to two rookie camps — the New York for basketball and the St. Louis Cardinals for football.
“I was good enough to get invited, but not good enough to stick,” Williams joked.
Drive for show …
Williams played sparingly on the PGA Tour and Senior Tour, focusing on a long-drive career rather than touring.
“The tough thing about (attempting both) is you’re trying to play one or two events a year against guys who play every week,” Williams said. “In between, you’re trying to hit the ball 400 yards and the distance is more important than how straight it goes.”
After his first National Long Drive win, Williams got an agent and began doing clinics and appearances.
“I thought I had something I could market. I had a monopoly on long hitting, with a lot of corporate opportunities,” he said. “My three goals in a clinic were to educate, awe and entertain — and I was able to do that for more than 25 years.”
That decision helped Williams have a more flexible schedule and be available nearly any day for outings, while Tour players were limited in their schedules.
“I don’t know how good a player I would have been had I concentrated on golfing rather than long driving,” says Williams, who is married and has two adult children.
In 1979, Williams wrote a book, “You Can Hit the Golf Ball Farther,” through Golf Digest Publications.
“Golf is played by a lot of people, and I try to provide information that people want,” Williams said. “Golf knowledge is marketable. People are happy to come and see me because adding 10 yards to their drives is something people want.”
Williams says the secret to hitting long drives is the same as with most other types of shots: fundamentals.
“A good long drive hitter should have a good golf swing. The basics are very important — grip, stance, posture and motion,” Williams said. “The distance comes from being able to delay the hit and getting a proper angle.”
He notes that Jamie Sadlowski, the two-time World Long Drive champion, is just 5-foot-11, 165 pounds — so stature and strength are not prerequisites.
“People would rather be known as a long hitter than a good putter,” Williams says, “and I’ve had a lot of fun with it for a lot of years.”
Notable long drives
515 yards: Mike Austin, U.S. National Seniors Championship, Las Vegas, 1974. Austin, then 64, hit his drive 65 yards past the par-4 No. 5 hole at Winterwood Golf Course.
Some simple steps to getting more distance off the tee are:
1. learn to hit a draw. If you hit a fade off the tee, you are losing between 10 to 30 yards off the tee compared to a draw.
2. learn to swing in sequence - first your weight shift, then your hips, then your arms falling on the inside of the target line, and only turning your shoulders at the very last moment possible.
3. strengthen your grip - try a grip with three knuckles showing on the left hand
And to hit a draw or hit it straight, it is important to understand how the clubface impact affects the ball. And how you can control the clubface is something that can be learned. A learning program with videos and instruction manuals is this program here.
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Mr. Shinny didn’t do it all by himself (he got a little help from his cousin, Mr. Orange)
but there’s a new Magic Driver in the bag. It was a dogfight this month. Read on for the
details. To make the story more meaningful, a little background is necessary.
The Death of the Clone and Knock-Off
There was a time when a few Big Names ruled the golf world. If you were a Player
years ago you loved Wilson or Hogan or MacGregor. The Big Three were expensive to
buy and usually sold only by Green Grass golf professionals. Later, Ping and then
Callaway entered the contest with great success. High prices always motivate golfers to
search for alternatives and that’s when the clone and knock-off business took off. If
you wanted a set of clubs that cost about half what the name brands were selling for, you
found yourself a clubmaker and he could build a set that looked a lot like one of the name
brands. But you still couldn’t show up to play at the Olympic Club with clones in your
bag.
And then things changed. The Name Brand Companies began protecting their designs
with copyrights. It became more and more difficult for copycats to produce clubs that
were too close to the name brands. Lawsuits flew around and copycat companies went
out of business.
And there were quality issues. As the golf component business moved more and more to
Taiwan and then mainland China the quality sometimes came down with the prices. Lots
of products were returned because they failed in play. These factors lead to the rise of a
whole new class of entrepreneur. Ambitious small-time businessmen found their way to
China and started businesses based on original clubhead designs and high quality
standards. Top design and performance no longer was the domain of the Big Guys.
Today there are no really successful companies left that are ripping off original designs.
The next wave in the custom golf component business is original products that, at a
minimum, are totally competitive with the best from Titleist, Ping, Callaway, Taylormade
or Hogan.
Mainland China the new center of the Golf Universe.
It won’t be long before almost all golf club heads, shafts and grips will be made in
Mainland China. It’s hard to imagine a Chinese worker welding dozens of Titanium
driver heads a day with each one worth a year’s wages in China.
But China has been open for years. First, the multinational golf OEM companies
sourced their components there. Then came Golfsmith, Golfworks, Dynacraft and others
serving the custom clubmaking industry. Along the way a few Americans with Chinese
heritage began to import heads to distribute in America. Today, importing from China
doesn’t take multinational power or an ethnic heritage. Plain old Americans can take
their original ideas to China and return with a product that performs in the American
market.
Mike Tait (SMT) and Steve Almo (Bang Golf)
The two companies that have emerged as the leaders in originality are Bang and SMT.
Bang is the brainchild of Steve Almo and SMT came from the imagination of Mike Tait.
At some point in the future it will be interesting to discuss Bang Golf in more detail as
well as Infiniti, Zero Tolerance, Integra and Kent Sports. But for today, I’m going to
focus on SMT. SMT stands for Superior Metal Technology.
Mike Tait has been in the golf industry for many years. He’s a former golf pro who made
a living distributing Chinese components to the American clubmaking community. In the
last few years, a new category emerged. It is the Long Drive Tour. It turns out that the
Long Drivers are the ultimate supporters of the golf component industry. By
definition, any competitor in the Long Drive business cannot possibly use off the shelf
clubs. They are subjecting their equipment to abuse that an average golfer cannot even
imagine. Shafts are 50 inches and these athletes can destroy a clubhead with a few
swings.
That is what got Mike into his own company. He was importing Chinese titanium driver
heads and began to notice he was replacing as many as he was selling in a bad month.
The long drive contestants were simply crushing anything the touched. He resolved to
start a company that made a product that would withstand the demands of the Long Drive
Professionals. In addition to creating original designs, he subjected each head to cannon
testing blasting each one at least 100 balls at speeds exceeding the 140+ MPH
swingspeeds that it takes to be competitive. The result was an almost instant success. He
captured the hearts and minds of the golf techno freaks who hang out on the Golf
Equipment Aficionado’s Forum on Delphi. (BTW: If you’re interested in golf
equipment, the GEA is a great forum.)
The next step was to capture the hearts and minds of the Long Drivers. SMT did that at
the Nationals that were completed in early November at Mesquite, Nevada. SMT won
the open division with its bright red 450 Deep Bore head (on an Accuflex shaft), and
the senior division with its Purple Nemisis model. These new designs are successors to
the Shinnecock, arguably the most successful long drive head in the last year. So that’s
my lead in for the next part of the story, a contest between Mr. Red and Mr. Purple
and Mr. Shinny to unseat the current Magic Driver, my old friend the Nicklaus Air
Max 360.
The Battlefield - Pasatiempo
It was convenient that my friend Brian invited me down to Pasatiempo on November 9th
for a friendly round with another Oracle veteran, Dan, a.k.a, The Doctor. The rains had
subsided the day before but the course was still as soggy as a wet sponge. Brian had a
bad back that day so he decided we should play the white tees. It was, absolutely, the
longest 6100 course in the world. But it was perfect for a contest between Mr. Red and
Mr. Purple.
Mr. Red came out of the bag on the second hole. This was literally the first swing for the
driver that I built the night before with an Apache 58+ shaft flexed at 6.0 on the PCS
Equalizer System. I even cheated a little bit and made the club 46 ” talking a page out
of the Long Drive Bible. The online forums all suggest a long, smooth swing on an
inside to out and upward path. Perfect swing, solid contact and (gasp!!) a drive that
seemed to stay in the air for ten seconds. If you have played Pasatiempo, you know that
the second hold is a long, difficult par four. I was in the middle of the fairway with a
nine iron into the green. As many times as I have played Pasa the only drive I
remember that was farther was in the middle of the summer when the fairways were hard.
There is only one way to say it, this was a B-O-M-B.
After a very long fade on the fourth and a dead straight bullet on the sixth, the Doctor
asked if he could try Mr. Red. He hit a pop up that sailed past a solid shot with his own
custom fit Callaway Biggest Bertha on the ninth. From that point on, the Doctor and I
were hitting several drives with Mr. Red on most holes. (You can do that on Pasatiempo
and still finish a round in four hours.)
Without boring you with every detail, Mr. Red also gave up a career best on the tenth
hole. With the round complete, it looked like a hands-down victory for Mr. Red. It was
so much fun that we really didn’t give Mr. Purple a fair shake. Shinny didn’t even make
the trip.
Confirming the Results (or not!!)
I went back to the shop that afternoon and fired up the Distance Caddy to confirm my
perceptions. Over the years, I have been fooled many times by a club that seemed to be
performing but found the honeymoon was very short. I had a little nagging doubt in the
back of my mind. On a couple of holes at Pasa, everything felt right but when I got to the
ball, I was disappointed that it wasn’t a little farther.
The Distance Caddy is a very useful tool for fitting clubs. When connected to a personal
computer, it records the carry distance, clubhead speed, ball speed, and a statistic called
efficiency. Efficiency is a calculation based on the energy transfer between the
clubhead and the ball and provides a shorthand indication of how solid the shot was. The
DC Wiz Fit software lets you test four clubs side by side and compare the individual shot
statistics and the averages. Over the last few months, I have found the comparative
statistics to be very reliable.
My swing speed tests out at 105 MPH, plus or minus. Distance Caddy measurements
show that a 105 swingspeed will deliver a 225-235 carry distance, a ball speed off the
face in the low to mid 140s at normal efficiency ratings. Another way to figure the
relationship is through the ratio of ball speed divided by clubhead speed. A ball speed of
130 divided by a clubhead speed of 100 yields a ratio of 1.3. The ball is coming off the
face at 1.3 times clubhead speed. If you know your ball speed, you can work to achieve
the proper launch angle and spin rate to reach maximum distance. Launch monitors like
the Swing Dynamics machine focus on this ratio. Experience shows that ratios in the 1.4
range are very good and 1.5+ are excellent. Very few amateurs exceed the high 1.4
range. Understanding numbers and relationships like this make reasonable
expectations very clear. Physics will tell you how far you can expect a ball to travel.
You can’t defy the Laws of Nature.
When I tested Mr. Red on the Distance Caddy, some very disturbing numbers came up. I
was getting higher than normal clubhead speed, well north of 105, which I attributed to
the extra length of the club. The carry distance was a few yards farther than normal.
However, the balls peed just barely got into the 140s, which was much too low. I began
to suspect that the Apache 58+ shaft was too weak. I couldn’t think of any other reason
that the high swingspeed was not getting into the ball.
This suspicion was supported by the numbers that were coming in from Mr. Purple,
shafted up with an Apache 65P at 45 and flexed to a PCS Equalizer standard 6.5. The
DC showed that Mr. Purple was producing ball speeds in the high 140s with a normal
swingspeed. Mr. Purple’s efficiency numbers were much better as well, indicating more
solid contact. Indoor distances were about equal.
Day Two The Honeymoon is Over
Sunday November tenth I had another low-key round scheduled with my friend Todd, a
giant of a golfer at 6 10 who was playing his first round with a set of Apache 40+
shafted graphite irons at 2 over length. I wanted to be there to pick up the splinters.
I had Mr. Red in the bag looking for a repeat of the day before. It was a chilly day with a
blustery wind and intermittent rain. I won’t bore you with failure, but I never hit a solid
drive with Mr. Red. Maybe I was stiff, maybe cold, maybe the club was too long. I don’t
know exactly what the problem was but Mr. Red went back in the trunk after the first
nine. Luckily, the Nicklaus driver was still in the car and I salvaged the back nine.
Back to the Lab
I spent the next several hours at the Golf Lab testing Mr. Red, Mr. Purple and the trusty
old Shinnecock that had been waiting for a shot. The head styles are very different. Mr.
Red looks like a brick on a stick. It looks surprisingly small for its 450 cc size. Even
though Mr. Red bombed out of this competition early, I’m not totally ready to give up on
the large driver heads. There is simply too much evidence on the online forums that very
large drivers deliver better distance and consistency. I think that my trouble came from
the requirement to swing somewhat differently with a longer shaft. I also have to find the
right shaft.
Mr. Purple is a striking clubhead, both color, the polished face with no scorelines, and the
shape which is out of the pear-shaped tradition, but still radical. When shafted with an
Apache 65P, it looked like a winner and seemed to show that with indoor testing. Mr.
Purple fell out of the race when we went to the range. Despite building the club to a
much softer frequency, a PCS 6.0, the club still played much too stiff. This was
compounded by the relatively low loft of Mr. Purple’s head (8*). The ballflight was
simply too low and misses went low and to the right. It took about ten shots to confirm
that Mr. Purple was good in the net, but couldn’t take it to the course.
Luckily, Mr. Shinny was tested out and ready to go. The indoor numbers were very close
to Mr. Purple and both had beat out the Magic Nicklaus in swingspeed and ball speed
tests on the Distance Caddy. Also, The Shinnecock was a 10* loft shafted with a 65N at
45 flexed to a PCS Equalizer 6.0. The ultimate test was ball flight and shot shape. I had
grown too accustomed to working the Nicklaus both ways and loved the consistency.
A couple of range sessions confirmed that the Shinny won a place in the bag for at least
the next month. The driver was hot, launch angle perfect and the natural draw could be
turned into a fade.
Conclusions from the November Search
Finding the correct shaft flex profile is a problem. The newer shafts are touting high
bend point and some kind of tip stiff characteristics. I think they are just too
demanding for most players to hit. For example, the 65 P from Apache which is gaining
a following on the PGA Tour after K.J. Choi used it to win two tournaments is too
difficult for my 105 MPH swingspeed even at flexes much softer than normal. I haven’t
found a flex soft enough to work with the 65 P.
On the other hand, the Apache 65 N which is described as a mid bend point shaft and
aimed at amateurs is a good performer, although it still plays very stiff. I think it is
important to dial down flex with the newer shafts. This is especially true when the shafts
have been PURED.
Ultralight shafts might contribute to distance problems for golfers with higher swing
speeds. My experience this month with the Apache 58+ makes me wonder if there is
enough backbone in the ultralight shafts to transfer power from faster swings. More
testing will be required, but I’m thinking that if you’re going to use an ultralight shaft, it
might be necessary to step up to a much stiffer flex.
Loft is your friend. Most golfers tend to make the macho choice and buy drivers with 8
or 9 degrees of loft. Depending on the head style, this is likely to be too little. Mr.
Purple was an 8* head. I couldn’t get a decent trajectory. I think it would take at least a
10* Nemesis to be playable for a good amateur. The Shinnecock was 10* and it
produced a trajectory that I would have guessed to be 8*. It also takes a higher loft to be
able to work the ball both ways. This shows one more time that you’ve simply got to
take a driver you’re thinking of buying to the range to see the ball flight outdoors.
The Power Plug is still performing. We have about 30 players who have installed them
in their drivers with 100% satisfaction. Reports are that the counterweight delivers a
little more consistency and an average of ten yards more distance. This may be a trend, I
heard from an inside source recently that Apache is working on a backweighted shaft.
Interesting. As for irons, we’re still testing. I have plugs installed in my irons but I’m
still tinkering to find the correct weight.
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