Why It’s Almost Impossible to Drive a Golf Ball 450 Yards (ft. Dustin Johnson) | WIRED

in the game of golf every hole begins with the tee shot and over the years players have been finding ways to drive the ball farther and farther and farther in 1980 the hardest hitter on Tour average 274 yards from the tee but these days the best players average closer to 320 yards with individual drives sometimes clearing over 400 yards but could those numbers go up today we're gonna look at why driving a golf ball 450 yards is almost impossible to find out what it takes I got a lesson from one of the PGA's hardest hitters out local butter there use motion capture technology to compare my swing to the pros and looked at how changes to equipment have helped golfers drive even farther we add additional layers to add speed now before we dig into this question let's clarify what we mean by longest dry because in golf there are a couple different ways to measure a drive one is called total distance and the other is called carry distance Dustin Johnson is one of the top drivers in the PGA his longest drive ever recorded 489 yards but that is using the total distance metric which measures how far the ball flies through the air and bounces and rolls before coming to a stop here's the thing total yards doesn't always reflect a player's true range if you're playing on a sloped course you ball can roll a lot and if you get a lucky bounce off a hard surface it can add a ton of yards to your total drive distance in 1992 Carl Cooper's tee shot from the 3rd hole of the Texas open ricocheted off a golf cart path and wound up traveling 787 yards before rolling to a stop that's almost half a mile the point is if you want to examine the limits of human performance from the tee the purist metric is arguably carry distance not total distance so what's carry distance it's how far the ball travels through the air before making first contact with the ground so you get no bounce and no roll I can carry it you know up to about 3:30 in the air because we play all different courses you know firm soft whatever style of course like so always just look at carry numbers because then you can always figure out how far it's gonna roll out because carry is gonna be affected by things like wind it's gonna be affected by the humidity would altitude your app but the total distance that's like what kind of course you're on right what kind of grass is like what kind of elevation you're at or what kind of slope there is on the course it's a lot less relevant to your play exactly so we're gonna focus on carry distances right about now some of you might be wondering about long drive competitions where players compete to crush the ball as far as they possibly can and we'll come back to those I promise they're actually where we got our four hundred fifty yard limit but to understand long drive competitions you first need to appreciate how drives work on the PGA so I met up with Dustin Johnson at his home course in Central Florida to learn the basics I am going to go try driving and I would love if you have a time to just watch me for a little bit sure give me a couple tips I'll even tee it up for you for the first time then you're gonna have to do it after that now I hadn't swung a club in almost 20 years but I figured I'd at least be able to hit the ball just contact us all you're trying to make like I said contact things were really out of whack my grip wasn't right my stance was off but with a little practice and lots of patience from Johnson hey I eventually made some property we recorded our shots using a radar system called track man which captures things like distance spin rate and where the balls land most of my drives were well under 200 yards while most of Johnson's traveled closer to 300 and unlike me he wasn't swinging as hard as he could the fact is distance doesn't matter that much if your shots are landing all over the place like mine were DJ's drives have a lot of power but they're also precise and accurate but being able to hit the ball really far is obviously still crucial so in terms of fitness and strength what is the most important piece of the puzzle in terms of maximizing your Drive distance the most important piece probably the legs you know you create a lot of power from from your lower body and your legs and then you know obviously flexibility in the upper body but you know and strength I mean you kind of using your whole body so it's all very important and then there's technique there are several parts of the swing to consider there's a starting position the backswing top of the backswing when the club briefly pauses the downswing impact and then the follow-through the pros are very consistent highly consistent that's Stanford's Jessica Rose who co-authored a study comparing the swings of professional golfers to amateurs it is that smooth fluid movement with no hesitation that creates that power generation Rose says that driving is essentially a sequence of rotations with energy and momentum being passed from the legs hips and lower back to the shoulders arms and wrists each of those rotations works like a link in a chain if one of those links breaks the drive suffers to emphasize just how different the pros are from amateurs they ran my swing through a motion-capture analysis and compared it to their database of professional golfers now perhaps the biggest difference in your swing compared to the pros there's the back swing it's muted your s factor so your tilt of your shoulders are much less than the pros look how much less my shoulders tilt than Johnson's it's a major break in my kinetic chain causing me to sacrifice distance on my drives that's the thing peak rotational velocities are important but maybe even more important is linking each of those rotations together once you've mastered that fluid movement TaylorMade golf's Brian basil says that the ingredients for a long drive are actually pretty easy to define so for a long drive you really need four things you need to optimize four things you need head speed so that's really comes down to the player how fast you can swing we can change it through club length and the weight of the club ball speed so how solid do you hit it and how efficient and how how good is that driver so you get the most out of it third launch you need to launch it high but you have to have the right spin rate to go with it so 17 degrees and say 1500 rpms of spin high launch low spin would maximize carry and roll may not be the most playable launch condition but it certainly would get to distance but when it comes to golf a player's game also has a lot to do with their equipment in fact it can have such a big effect on performance but the United States Golf Association has rules about the size shape and weight of players clubs the size of the head 460 cubic centimetres is ultimately the larger size and all the drivers today for the most part are there the length of the golf club 48 inches is is that is the rule albeit most players are less than that 45 and a half inches is typical the USGA z' rules are meant to standardize the game but they also limit players power one of the most important restrictions has to do with something called coefficient of restitution or cor in essence this tells you how much energy is transferred in a collision between two objects like a club and a ball if you swing two otherwise identical clubs at the exact same speed the one with the higher cor will hit the ball farther so we're looking at the inside of an m6 driver head you'll see the the carbon fiber the titanium even the slots down in the bottom here this is all to maximize the use of weight and the flexibility the back of the face inverted cone technology that spreads the cor cor is described as a number between 0 & 1 current regulations don't allow for a club head to exceed point 8 3 cor but with modern materials and design methods equipment manufacturers can actually exceed that number so we'll make this face over the COR limit to begin with and then we'll measure each head will inject a certain amount of resin to bring that head back to the legal limit we'll measure it again we'll feed that back through the system and we can do need to do that every single head that we make and then there's the ball itself there's a lot of engineering and science that goes into the design of a golf ball to make it perform the way it does how important is the ball in the player club ball equation in terms of distance it's played a critical in driver distance over the last 20 years when wound golf balls were the most popular on tour those golf balls generated a lot of backspin so what's happened with solid constructions or multi-layer constructions is the golf ball spins less off the driver which over the years has given the player the ability to further increase launch angle launch angle coupled with lower spin is going to give players more distance a lot of people associate a golf ball as being this really hard object but it's actually quite elastic right and it's it's a function of how hard it's being hit that you see that elasticity sort of come to life that's right I would I would consider the golf ball spring there's not only the golf ball that's compressing and that face is another type of spring so it's the combination of the two that give you the ultimate ball speed so there's the driver design and maximizing the how that golf ball comes off the face with the driver design and then there's the golf ball design trying to maximise velocity with just within the golf ball itself some of the earliest golf balls were filled with feathers and over the years manufacturers have tried all kinds of things to improve their performance as recently as 20 years ago some balls have liquid inside of it you asked most people you cut a golf ball in half what would you see inside I don't think most people would have any idea yeah this has so this has a urethane cover and then it has windings that were over there to help increase velocity and help generate spin and this one this particular ball has a solid Center there are other golf balls like this one that's filled with corn syrup that is corn syrup uh-huh that oh and look at that so as we he says the corn syrup was supposed to help reduce spin they also wrap the ball scores in rubber bands which offered players control but at the expense of reaction but starting around the turn of the millennium players began to favor balls made from concentric layers of rubber and plastic that allowed them to hit the ball far in some circumstances and with control in others and this is what those look like on the inside the modern golf ball is going to be composed of rubber inner core poly butadiene and you can change the the compression of that core depending on what type performance you want and then the golf ball it's gonna have multiple layers depending on what you're trying to achieve and what type of player you're targeting on our TP v and TP v X we use a five-letter construction which starts with that soft poly butadiene core and then we add multiple layers three additional layers that are gonna add speed the last layer is that familiar outer shell talk to me about the importance of that dimple pattern the dimples in general they create less drag when you think about a golf ball it's a sphere and ultimately it's really not the most aerodynamic body it's it creates a wake when it's going through when it's punching through the air and what the dimples do is they reduce the drag by about half the USGA has size and weight restrictions designed to limit a balls performance - it has to be at least one point six eight inches in diameter and weigh no more than one point six 2 ounces they also test balls to see how far they travel under very specific launch conditions when struck by a standardized Club at a standardized speed no ball may travel more than 320 yards if it does players can't use it naturally some players hit harder than average which is why they can drive farther than 320 yards sometimes a lot farther and that brings us back to long drive it's well exactly what it sounds like sport in which players compete to drive a golf ball as far as they possibly can in April long driver Tim Burke won a competition with a monstrous 474 yard drive but that was his drives total distance so what was his carry watch again it's right around 450 yards here's the thing long drive competitions used to allow equipment that violated USGA rules and that made it tough to compare to the PGA but these days the clubs and balls that long drivers use all technically conform to the USGA specifications but they're right at the limit take club length for example most players on the PGA used clubs between 44 and 45 inches but long drivers for the maximum allowed 48 inches they also rely on more aggressive mechanics club faces with less loft and more compressed balls all of which combine for you guessed it longer drive distances so don't expect to see anything like that on the PGA Tour anytime soon why not in the PGA remember the ultimate objective is to get to the hole so accuracy and precision are really important there is almost no incentive to ever completely sacrifice control entirely in the name of distance based on everything that I've studied the golfer would still have to make a significant improvement again in their fitness to be able to swing harder at it here I mean we see long drive guys do it you know it's definitely possible you just have to swing incredibly hard and you have to have all the right things line up maybe one day the USGA rules will allow players to use clubs with more efficient energy transfer or father flying balls or maybe we'll see larger courses that encourage players to hit even longer drives but until that happens remember that what professional golfers are doing is already almost impossible [Music]

Channel: WIRED

Views: 2,316,634

Keywords: dustin johnson, golf, golf ball, golf balls, golf club, golf clubs, golf swing, long drive, pga, pro golfer, pro golfers, us open, tee shot, robbie gonzalez, almost impossible, u.s. open 2019, us open 2019, drive distance, long drive competition, driving distance, carry distance, dustin johnson drive, longest drive, golf drive, golfing, golfer, golfer drive, best drive, farthest drive, 500 yard drive, dustin johnson swing, 450 yards, world record drive, wired

Id: INKvTuLn65I

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2019