Three fascinating long drivers tell the stories behind their success, and offer tips on how you can let it fly.

There’s a feeling that professional long driving today resembles ordinary golf only in the way a Nerf basketball hoop over your rubbish bin resembles the NBA. Kyle Berkshire, the reigning king of World Long Drive, swings at 150 miles per hour and has hit a 433-metre drive in competition – at roughly sea level. Cameron Champ, widely considered to be among the longest hitters on the PGA Tour, has a clubhead speed of 130mph, a popcorn hitter by Berkshire’s standard. 

The vibe at the World Long Drive Championship is sensory and primal, a theatre of stunning physiques, crashing walk-up music, violent club/ball sounds and TrackMan-frying numbers. It’s not bomb and gouge, just bomb, with nowhere to hide if you can’t deliver. It’s unabashedly physical and without guile, a siren call to the game’s most atavistic desire: seeing how far one can smash the ball. It’s done for cash (Berkshire took home $US125,000) and bragging rights.

But the driving force is the competitors, an unlikely cast of swing outliers and specialists who do this one thing very, very well. Male and female, they are as eclectic a bunch as you’ll find in sport. 

Here, we’ll meet three of the best and most appealing.

Kyle Berkshire

Ball speed of 230mph, at 200 beats a minute

For starters, there’s the Samson-like mane of hair, which Kyle Berkshire hasn’t had cut since 2017 and which during competition conceals a heart that beats a chest-bursting 200 times per minute. As he strides to the tee, you see the outline in his back pocket of the notes marking firm spots and tiny slopes of every yard of the grid he’s about to attack. Unseen but going on in his head, is his favourite “music” – Chic Anderson’s call of Secretariat’s 1973 Belmont Stakes victory to win the Triple Crown. And the vision of actor Robert Duval whispering in the golf movie, “Seven Days of Utopia”: “Feel it… Trust it.”

Then comes the good stuff. After teeing his ball so high that his driver could easily pass clean under it, he begins a sumo-wrestler-like side-to-side step, each foot dramatically clearing the ground, his backswing beginning when his right foot settles to earth on the last stomp. Berkshire’s turn is huge, his hands so high at the top, he seems to touch heaven. 

Berkshire’s downswing might be the most powerful in golf history, the consistent 150mph-plus clubhead speed and 230mph ball speed substantially higher than his competitors. He has won his past three WLD events, including the championship in September 2019 (the most recent time it was held), and his goals are even loftier. “I just started serious training for the first time,” Berkshire says. “To now, my results have mostly been due to genetics, and we’re addressing that. The goal is to produce 240-mile-per-hour ball speed within a couple of years, and I totally believe that’s possible.”

Berkshire, who has 42 percent mid-frequency hearing loss in both ears, a condition since birth – he can barely hear the roar of the crowd when he’s competing – goes far beyond typical measures such as launch angle and spin rates. He notes the ball’s speed at “terminal velocity”, studies the angle at which the ball returns to earth and even the efficiency of its spin. “My teacher, Bobby Peterson, is a former military tank expert and knows how missiles – in my case, the ball – should perform,” he says. 

Berkshire takes 12 to 15 drivers to competitions, each tweaked and spotted with lead tape. “There are a lot of layers, nooks and crannies in this sport,” he says, “and I’m serious about looking inside them all.”

He started in the game at age 3, played at the University of North Texas, then finished his degree at Central Florida. He began long driving in 2017 and was a force almost from the beginning. His father, Bill Berkshire, is a former Secret Service agent who travels with his son. “It’s hard for Kyle to rent a car because he’s only 23, so I do that,” says Bill, who notes that his son was hitting it 225 metres by age 6: “He’s gifted, no doubt about it.”

Martin Borgmeier

The power of german engineering

Martin Borgmeier makes no secret of his mercenary plan of attaining long-drive fame in America so as to promote the European Long Drive Games, a series of overseas events he and a partner co-own. Worldwide fame might not be far off. Borgmeier, 29, a personable and hirsute German (he’s known as The Beard in European long-drive circles), was runner-up to Kyle Berkshire in the 2019 ROC City Rumble in Rochester, New York, and reached the quarter-finals in two other World Long Drive events. Before that, in 2018, he won three times on the European Long Drivers Tour, in Belgium, Russia and Italy.

Though Borgmeier is still largely unknown in America, a couple of performance snapshots warn of his might. At the Russian event in 2018, he won with an astounding blast of 399 metres impressive even by long-drive standards. Another achievement is more foreboding: in March 2019, hitting indoors in Florida, Borgmeier attained a ball speed of 231.9mph, an unofficial (for now) TrackMan record. At 196 centimetres and 109 kilograms – years ago he was a small forward for a pro basketball team in Bavaria – Borgmeier is a good natural athlete. And his technique is still improving under coach Lee Cox, a distance specialist who helped Joe Miller to two WLD Championship titles.

Borgmeier might have made an even faster impression on the American circuit had it not been for getting accustomed to the format. In a typical WLD event, players execute 14 eight-shot sets, with top point-getters advancing to matchplay. “In Europe, it’s more about hitting the one big ball,” he says. “It’s not about consistency, it’s about going all out on every shot. I’m still getting used to the American way.”

Then there was the culture shock of his first stay in the United States. “Everything in America is oversized,” he says. “I can’t get over these huge stores, like Wal-Mart, which we have none of in Germany. The number of fast-food places here is unbelievable. So is the heat in some of the cities here. Even the driving takes getting used to. I’ve gone 160 miles per hour on the autobahn – I’m talking in my car, not my clubhead speed – and felt more safe than [in America].” 

Inspired as a youth watching on TV as Tiger Woods won the 2005 Masters, Borgmeier developed a sound technique, and by age 14 he was a 3-handicapper. His swing is more classic than quirky, though on the backswing, he rises to his full height before lowering himself coming down. He swings up and through the ball viciously along an in-to-out swing path, resulting in a powerful draw.

“If I can win here, it will go a long way to helping the sport in Europe and golf in Germany,” he says. “That’s my goal.” He then murmurs, “Ich kann nicht scheitern.” That’s German for, “I cannot fail.”

Ryan Steenberg

Trying to duplicate a 443-metre smash

The modern golf ball is virtually indestructible, its urethane and thermoplastic materials impervious to rocks, cartpaths and, sometimes, mowing equipment. But in Ryan Steenberg, golf balls apparently have met their match. “I’ve had the centres burst through the covers on me,” Steenberg says. “Another time, we cut one open, and the centre was like the crumbled yolk of a hard-boiled egg.”

Wow. Steenberg, who won the 2019 Exchange: Fort Jackson WLD event by outdriving Kyle Berkshire by 23 metres, is not to be trifled with. A nine-year veteran from Rochester, New York, who at 178 centimetres and 109 kilograms is still the most physically imposing player in long driving – fellow-competitor Paul Howell describes him as “scary” – Steenberg has produced some of the most legendary drives in history. Foremost among them was a 443-metre blast at the 2017 Mile High Showdown that other hitters still talk about.

“I’m still trying to duplicate that one,” says Steenberg, who has a bachelor’s degree in exercise science and conducts golf-specific training sessions privately and online. “The adrenaline, the eruption in my swing, the feel of that shot and the ball flight, it’s something that gets in your soul.”

Steenberg, 38, says long driving has come a long way since his rookie year of 2011, when he brought his massive biceps to competition for the first time. “Back then it was a good-ol’ boy, smash-balls-then-go-party, travelling circus, brute-force kind of deal,” he says. “It was a lot of fun, but far from the sophisticated athletic endeavour it is now.” Like most veteran golfers, Steenberg points to dramatic improvements in nutrition, conditioning, coaching and equipment. But he also alludes to an area that is the purview of veteran competitors such as himself, Jeff Gavin (age 53) and Eddie Fernandes (50): experience.

“I hit 500 to 600 full drives during a competitive week, which sounds like lot, but we’ve had talented young guys come along who hit a lot more than that and burn themselves out,” he says. “When I lost in the WLD Championship final to Joe Miller in 2016, I felt like I’d been through a war. I learned from that. Managing your energy is important. So is avoiding injury. So are watching the scoreboard to know where you stand points-wise, eating the right things at the right time of day, and a few secrets I won’t go into. They all come from experience, and they all add up.”

Steenberg, with two children under age 10, plans on staying in long driving for years to come. “This sport has taken me to Dubai, London, Portugal, Beijing and Mexico City, places I never dreamed I’d go,” he says. “The best days for long driving are still ahead, and I’m going to be there to see them.” 

IMAGES: Golf Digest US