It is hard to imagine how such a skinny guy can hit a drive of nearly 400 meters, but it is not a hallucination. The young man in question is called José Quilis, born 21 years ago in the town of Alhaurín el Grande in Malaga and has been nothing less than European Long Drive champion. For those who do not know, this sporting discipline consists of hitting the driver with all your soul and, above all, a lot of technique and try to overcome the rivals who will try to send his ball to an even more stratospheric distance than yours.
This cheerful and lanky young Andalusian, handicap 3, started playing golf at the age of 7 years old with his father at Alhaurín Golf. He caught the bug and became an avid fan. Years went by, the boy grew up, went to the United States to study high school, played in the high school golf team but he saw that the sporting results he wanted were not coming and decided to rest his clubs for a while. So he returned to his country. and, as the little worm had inoculated him with its perennial poison, he began to take a new interest in golf. He was practicing at the aforementioned Malaga course when a member of the club invited him to try a special driver used in Long Drive competitions. And he got his hopes up again. “I hit it quite long and from then on I got a taste for it and became passionate about it,” he recalls.
He played his first Long Drive tournament in Sweden in May last year: a European Championship where he finished in eighteenth place, with a score of 347 yards. His debut gave him “an impressive feeling”.
This is how he defines it: “I see the Long Drive as something completely different from golf, something that gives you a lot of adrenaline. Until you experience it once, it’s hard to describe”.
A Long Drive championship is “a lot of fun,” says Quilis, “because it’s one on one and you interact a lot with the public, you play a lot with the mentality of the other players”. Usually between thirty and fifty players compete, who play elimination rounds against each other in pairs drawn by lottery. Each player hits eight balls in each match in a time limited to three minutes.
“It’s something completely different than golf because you’re with the music, you’re interacting with the audience…it’s much more moving,” he explains.
It is striking that a player as slim as Quilis achieves such considerable distances, when the image we have of a Long Drive hitter is that of a stocky and very muscular guy. The ‘trick’ to sending the ball so far lies mainly in speed and width. “I consider having a good swing width to be very important. The club head practically touches my left leg. We are rotating our hips a lot more and taking our hands a lot further back compared to a normal swing”.
Regarding muscular strength, Quilis says that more important than power is to have “good technique, good amplitude and good speed, which you can work on everything, and you can hit the ball very long as well”.
His best distance so far in a championship is 424 yards, in the German Long Drive, where he finished second. Quilis won the first European Long Drive Games event of the year.
The prizes for the winner of these tournaments on the Old Continent are not yet at the same level as those handed out in the United States. “Here in Europe you can’t dedicate yourself full time to this,” Quilis acknowledges. It’s another thing in the United States. “There it’s much more of a spectacle, they’ve been around since 1976 and there’s a lot of prize money. In Europe you can win from 1,000 to 6,000 euros, depending on the championship, and in America you can win 15, 20, even 200, even 500,000 dollars”.
Entries to participate in one of these competitions are not cheap. “They are quite expensive,” Quilis acknowledges. In European tournaments they are usually around 300 euros.
Given the good results he has achieved so far, the young man from Malaga has set himself “very high” goals. He wants to participate in the world circuit, the World Long Drive, which is disputed only in U.S. scenarios, and “in fact I look very good there this year and I would like to, of course”.
In Spain it is such a minority sport that it is practically counted on the fingers of one hand and Quilis is the only representative of our country that has won one of the competitions held in Europe. He says that in Germany there is an important interest because it has been promoted “in an efficient way” and he is convinced that in Europe there will soon be an explosion of this golf specialty.
Long Drive competitions are not just held on golf courses. “They can be held just about anywhere,” Quilis explains, such as horse racing tracks or soccer fields.
The training of this golfer from Alhaurín el Grande does not focus on muscular strength – “I don’t touch much the gym”- but rather on flexibility -he practices Pilates- and above all he works on the speed of the swing with the superspeed clubs (shafts with a weight on one of the ends).
The drivers used in Long Drive competitions have nothing to do with the usual golf drivers. “They are completely different. I’m playing with the Callaway XR16 right now, which is 5 degrees minus 1 off the shaft, 4, with a quadruple X club and 48 inches (122 centimeters) long.
While he trains hard to achieve his dreams of a golf career in the United States, Quilis works in the family business, a greengrocer with organic produce located in Marbella’s Golf Valley, just behind Puerto Banús. “You also have to lend a hand at home and help out where you can,” he says.
When asked about what is the world record for Long Drive, he says that “it is very complicated honestly because there are so many variables that affect each stroke that you cannot compare one championship with another: there may be more wind, the fairway may be harder… but I think it is around the five hundred and some”.
He studied in the United States the first year of high school, at the age of 16, and was playing on a golf team, “but there came a time when golf tired me, I was putting a lot of effort into it and I was not getting results that satisfied me. That’s why I was away from golf for a while and thanks to the Long Drive I have regained the bug and see if I can also become a professional by the end of this year, which is something I would love, although I would also like to continue with the Long Drive. I see having a good drive as an advantage. In fact recently I was playing in Las Brisas (Marbella) and in a long par 5 of more than 500 meters I hit a drive and I was 50 meters away from the green… I caught the wind at my back”.
Just in case his illusions in the world of golf do not come true, Quilis is pursuing a university degree. He was studying psychology in Santander, but preferred to return to the Costa del Sol because of the milder climate, and now continues his studies through the University of Distance Education (UNED) “to see how it goes there.
To get an idea of what Quilis is up to, just take a look at the numbers he manages in relation to the player who won his fifteenth major in April. The average swing speed of the player from Malaga is 155 miles per hour and the ball speed is 208 mph. Tiger Woods’ current average swing speed is 122 mph and ball speed is 190.
At the world championship. In September of this year he went to the United States to compete in the World Championship and, although he was eliminated in the first round “by a few meters”, he describes the experience as “impressive”. He went to this world event, which brought together 96 participants in Oklahoma, thanks to his second place in the final European ranking, after the last tournament of the season, in Mallorca.
For 2020, he plans to combine seasons in the United States and Europe, going back and forth from America to the Old Continent between tournaments. To improve his performance with the driver, he has put himself in the hands of an English coach, Lee Cox. The only problem is that the lessons are in London, so Quilis has to travel periodically to the British capital.
And if between his part-time job in the family store, his training trips and Long Drive competitions he didn’t have enough, he has now embarked on another mission: to become a professional golfer. He is not dreaming of the European Tour for the moment, not even the Challenge, but… who knows!
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THE 459-YARD RECORD
The World Long Drive Championship has crowned dozens of champions in the more than 40 years since the competition was first contested in 1976. Winners of the annual event (in the Open, Masters and Women’s divisions) each receive a championship belt much like boxing champions.
Looking at the results of the Long Drive champions over four decades shows that only in the men’s Open category has the 400 yards been exceeded several times, the first time in 2003 (Clayton Burger, 402 yards), and that the longest distance achieved in a world final in that division has been 427 yards, achieved by Tim Burke in 2013. This year’s winner, Kyle Berkshire, won with a 406-yard drive. However, the longest absolute distance in a World Long Drive was achieved by one of the Masters category hitters (over 45 years old), David Mobley in 2011, with 459 yards. In the women’s division, the shot that reached the greatest distance was the one hit this year by the champion, Chloe Garner: 347 yards. The winners of the first edition of the World Long Drive Championship reached 307, 333 and 249 yards in the Open, Masters and Women’s divisions, respectively. It should be noted that, while the Open category dates back to 1976, the Masters was not introduced until 1996 and the Women’s until 2000.
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