Six golf balls, a shot clock with music blaring, and a WWE-style belt for a prize.<\/b><\/p>\n
No, it’s not a scene from the new Happy Gilmore film, but the professional sport of Long Drive golf. <\/p>\n
As the sport’s name would suggest, it is all about hitting the longest drive possible – and Northern Ireland’s Aaron Lennie is one of the best in Europe.<\/p>\n
No putts, no wedges and no water hazards. Driving distance off the tee is all that matters. <\/p>\n
Just how far are those drives? Well, at the recent Open Championship at Royal Portrush, Bryson DeChambeau topped the driving distance category with an average of 327.5 yards – <\/b>a full football pitch less than Lennie’s personal best of 437 yards.<\/p>\n
At more than 185mph, Rory McIlroy is one of the top players in professional golf for ball speed, but Lennie can surpass 200mph. That’s as quick as a Formula 1 car.<\/p>\n
Players have two and a half minutes to hit six balls down a long grid, with an out of bounds area either side. <\/p>\n
They go head-to-head in group or knockout stages, and there’s plenty of drama, a party in the stands and some showboating alongside it all.<\/p>\n
“It’s like a party atmosphere, a totally different scene to golf,” said Lennie, who recently won his first professional event in Austria.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know if people will like this, but it kind of has a LIV feel to it. There’s music blasting, there’s a lot of noise, a lot of energy. It’s fast-paced, which for some people is something that’s missing from golf. <\/p>\n
“It’s a breath of fresh air that way. It’s a game within a game. None of us claim to be good golfers but we can hit a ball far and we can do it well.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Six golf balls, a shot clock with music blaring, and a WWE-style belt for a prize. No, it’s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":102946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[1430,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-102945","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114938374088497547","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}