The white sign with "Big Dawg" painted in red sits 318 yards away.
Maurice Allen, wearing white pants, black shirt and white hat, pushes a pink tee into the ground and picks up his white-shafted driver with the gleaming dark blue head.
Allen begins his swing. The club head climbs the clock face, as golfers call it. Starting at 6 p.m. it goes past nine, past 12, past 3 -- when will he stop? -- until it reaches five, almost all the way back around his body.
Then the anger is unleashed. The club begins its journey back around until it punishes the golf ball. The sound is different. It's a sharp crack with an echo, much different from the thuds and curse words often heard on the driving range. A few of the range rats look up after Allen's drive. The ball screams into a sky so hazy it's white, easily clearing the sign, coming to a violent stop in a bank of green kudzu that rests some 20 yards further away.
"How far did that go?" someone asks.
"355, 360," Allen answers dismissively, unhappy with the rocket-shot anyone else on the range would have traded their new $400 driver for.
Though late to the game, Allen is living the dream of most banana-slicing duffers -- he's a long-drive pro. A student who recently finished his first year studying chiropractic medicine at Life University in Marietta, Allen has been competing for a year and will travel to Metter in South Georgia for another competition this weekend. He's competed in eight events in North America and Europe with five top-five finishes. Not bad considering he's been at it for a little more than a year.
He has driven a ball 457 yards in competition. It didn't count because it didn't come to a complete stop within the landing grid, which varies between 40 and 80 yards. The longest fair drive he's hit traveled 442 yards, which wasn't long enough to win. Imagine what he can do from the white tees.
During the PGA convention in Orlando earlier this year, he posted one of the fastest clubhead speeds ever recorded: 161 mph. PGA Tour pros average 115 mph, with some whipping the club around in the 120s.
Allen is just 5-foot-8, much shorter than the behemoths who compete on the tour. He makes up for his lack of height by being one big fast-twitch muscle. He also has a unique physical advantage that the others don't: his right arm is a few inches shorter than his left and he can barely turn his right hand, the result of surgeries to correct a broken arm. Because he can't pronate or supinate his hand, he usually strikes the ball with a square clubface. Slices and draws occur when he doesn't hit the ball on the correct plane.
Like the result, his swing is different than an average golfer's. He concentrates on turning his shoulders first as he puts 100 percent of his weight onto his right leg during the backswing. Most golfers are taught a 70-30 balance with the shaft of the club stopping when it's parallel to the ground. During his downswing, he opens up his hips and tries to slam the butt of his club into his right foot, so that the club stays inside the golf ball. As his hips open up on the left and his arms become parallel to the ground he concentrates on pushing the club through the ball with his right hand while holding a 90-degree angle between his hands and the club until he strikes the ball. He then releases the club, with his forearms rolling through the shot, which reduces the loft and adds distance.
But he doesn't concentrate on his form too often. He has darker thoughts.
"Take rage, malice, anything that's negative; that's me for 2-1/2 seconds," he said.
The force is incredible. He's broken golf balls in half -- not just slicing the cover -- actually breaking everything including the core of the ball. His clubs don't last long, either. The club faces can't consistently withstand the pressure of the ball coming off about 212 mph. Either their faces cave in or their backs explode. He breaks about two clubs a week.
One of his teachers, Ted Fort, who works at the Marietta Golf Center where Allen practices, said his friends don't believe him when he tries to explain how fast Allen swings and how hard he hits the ball. Allen is the third long driver Fort has worked with.
"I've seen everything you can imagine," Fort said. "He's beyond that."
When Allen and Fort began working together eight months ago Allen's drives would go 300 yards forward and almost as many to the right or left because his stance was off. Fort hooked him up to a computerized tracking device and couldn't believe the stats the machine was spitting out. Allen's swing was much faster than Tiger Woods'. He just needed to learn how to straighten the direction and flatten the ball flight to add distance.
"He had so much backspin because of the clubhead it looked like an F-16 taking off," Fort said. "It would start flat and then climb up quickly. We had to get his trajectory down. That way it will tumble when it hits the ground."
They moved Allen back some so that the ball is four inches to the left of his left foot. Most golfers will line up with the ball just inside their left in-step. He began to hit the ball straighter and by learning how to rotate his forearms the ball began to flatten out, adding the accuracy and distance necessary to compete on tour.
That he's swinging a club and competing is as odd as his swing. Although his dad played, Allen hated golf growing up in Orlando.
"I thought it was the most god-awful thing," he said, instead competing in volleyball, basketball, baseball and track.
While enrolled at Florida A&M and working for the campus recreation department, Allen was helping organize a drive, chip and putt contest for kids. He stopped into a Golf Etc. store in Tallahassee to discuss the event. The owner began teasing him when Allen said that he doesn't play golf. Obviously athletic, the owner handed Allen a 7-iron and told him to hit into one of their simulators. The ball flew more than 250 yards, about 100 yards more than an average golfer. Someone watching gave Allen an old TaylorMade driver and told him about a long drive competition that was being held later that day. He didn't place any of his attempts in-bounds, but was hooked, to use a phrase most golfers don't like.
"I don't like to lose," he said.
Fort loves teaching him but there is one aspect of Allen's game that Fort doesn't appreciate. Most of the range balls he hits can't be retrieved. They clear the netting on the right side, go into the woods on the left or land in the kudzu behind the Big Dawg sign. A few reach Allen's daily goal of making it all the way to the swimming pool of an apartment complex that's 450 yards away. He doesn't try to do that when there are people swimming.
"He's a very expensive customer," Fort said.
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