Tag: World Championship

Bryson DeChambeau blasts his way into final day of long-drive World Championship

The biggest hitter on the PGA Tour shows he can compete with anybody when it comes to the long ball.

Forget experience. Forget the faster hitters. Forget the social media naysayers.

All that matters: Bryson DeChambeau advanced to the final day of the Professional Long Drivers Association’s World Championship in Mesquite, Nevada Thursday. The same Bryson DeChambeau who four days earlier helped the U.S. team claim the Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin.

With gusty, erratic winds blowing into the players’ faces, the 2020 U.S. Open champion – at golf golf, not long-drive – won two of his first four sets against three other competitors to lock up one of 16 total spots on Friday’s final day of competition.

Players competed for points in five sets, with an early-afternoon group of 16 players competing for eight spots and a late-afternoon group of 16 competing for eight more spots in the final field. DeChambeau was in the late-afternoon group, and he finished tied for fourth among those 16 long-ball bashers to advance.

DeChambeau’s longest blasts in each of the five sets traveled 358, 338, 359, 333 and 333 yards. His drives of 358 and then 359 were among the top five balls hit by all 16 competitors in his group.

Those blasts into the wind were quite a bit shorter than on Day 1, when DeChambeau hit five balls past 400 yards. But long is relative in this muscled-up sport, and none of Thursday’s 32 competitors hit anything close to 400 into the breeze. After Tuesday’s favorable winds on Day 1, the 64 competitors who made it to Wednesday’s Day 2 also faced headwinds.

Those winds have proved favorable to DeChambeau, who doesn’t swing as fast as several of his competitors. But dead-solid contact with a controlled ball flight can pay off into the breeze. DeChambeau’s Trackman launch monitor numbers, when available, have been impressive – his best ball in his fifth set came with 144-mph clubhead speed, 213-mph ball speed, 227 yards of carry and a peak height of 121 feet to travel 333 yards total into the breeze off the right, as reported by the YouTube commentators during the livestream. The ball rolled considerably down the dryer right side of the landing grid.

None of DeChambeau’s long-ball success should be a total shock, even if the 28-year-old faced some social media criticism before the event that this is all a publicity stunt and he was going to be out of his league. He has proved those doubters wrong day after day in Mesquite in his first effort at elite long-drive competition, crushing the ball past much more experienced long-ball veterans.

DeChambeau led the PGA Tour in the recently concluded 2020-21 season with a 323.7-yard driving average, and his longest drive on Tour in that season was 414 yards. His average measured clubhead speed on drives was 132.25 mph, but he has said he can go faster in training and has backed that up at the World Championship. The top players in elite long-drive competitions frequently surpass 140 mph in clubhead speed, and DeChambeau showed he can get it past that 140 mark on the launch monitor in competition.

Keep in mind, all this is new to DeChambeau, winner of eight PGA Tour events. He even has a new club in his hands to max out his yardage. He’s swinging a 48-inch Cobra RADSpeed driver with an LA Golf Tour AXS Blue shaft – designed to create a low-spin, low-loft launch – that has been tipped an inch, making it even stiffer. On Tour he normally swings a Cobra driver that is less than 46 inches and much easier to control.

The longest drive of Day 2 came from Wes Patterson, who sent one 381 yards in the early-afternoon group. Colton Casto and Kyle Berkshire, the defending champion after winning the event in 2019 and with the 2020 competition having been canceled because of COVID-19, both hit balls 380 in that same Group A.

The longest drives in DeChambeau’s Group B came from Scottie Pearman and Martin Borgmeier, both of whom reached 367 yards. Ryan Steenberg hit one 361 in the same group.

The players who qualified out of Group A were Justin James, Casto, Bryce Verplank, Berkshire, Brandon Flynn, Patterson, Hyeon Jun Hong and Josh Koch. In Group B the players to advance were Ryan Steenberg, Borgmeier, Zack Holton, Nick Vorbeck, Ryan Gregnol, Pearman, DeChambeau and Taiga Tazawa of China, whose celebratory antics have gained fans on social media.

Friday’s final will progress from group play to a head-to-head match between two players to lock up the title. The finals begin at 6:45 p.m. ET (3:45 local time) and will be livestreamed on the PLDA YouTube channel.

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Watch: Bryson DeChambeau opens long-drive eyes with 412-yard blast in World Championship

The PGA Tour’s longest driver advances through first-day round play at Professional Long Drivers Association’s top event in Mesquite.

How far can Bryson DeChambeau take the long ball? Maybe longer than many considered possible for a legit PGA Tour player, as he repeatedly blew past 400 yards Tuesday at the Professional Long Drivers Association’s World Championship.

Fresh off the United States’ victory Sunday in the Ryder Cup, where DeChambeau flexed by driving the green on the par-4 opener in his singles match en route to accumulating a 2-0-1 record at Whistling Straits, the PGA Tour’s longest hitter showed even more power at the Professional Long Drivers Association’s World Championship.

DeChambeau, who received a special invitation to the World Championship in Mesquite, Nevada, advanced out of the first round of group qualifying with a longest blast of 412 yards. With each competitor swinging away in five sets of six balls each, DeChambeau finished second in his group to advance.

Despite some criticism on social media about this being a publicity stunt, DeChambeau showed Tuesday that he’s legit against the long-ball game’s best. Most players in the event didn’t sniff 400 yards Tuesday.

Sixteen players made up each of five groups of qualifying hopefuls, with 12 players advancing to Wednesday’s rounds of competition. Those 60 players will combine with four more from a round-robin to make up Wednesday’s 64-man field, which will compete in four groups to try to make it to Thursday and eventually Friday’s final round.

With his 30 total shots spread across five sets, DeChambeau hit five balls past 400 yards, with the longest of 412 coming in his fourth set. His shortest drive that counted went 355, and 21 of his shots found the grid that players must hit for the shot to count.

DeChambeau led the PGA Tour in the recently completed 2021 season with a 323.7-yard driving average. His longest drive on Tour in that season was 414 yards. His average measured clubhead speed on drives was 132.25 mph, but he has said he can go faster in training when he doesn’t have to worry about where the ball might land. The top players in elite long-drive competitions frequently surpass 140 mph in clubhead speed.

DeChambeau’s most impressive drive of 2021 might have come at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, where he cleared a lake with a 377-yard tee shot on the par-5 sixth hole at Bay Hill.

And all those stats came with a driver made for Tour use. It’s likely he’s using a maxed-out driver at 48 inches long for the World Championship, where balls off the landing grid don’t lead to double bogeys. Details on his long-drive clubs were not yet available.

In DeChambeau’s group of 16 players Tuesday, only four other players managed to send a ball past 400 yards, with Josh Cassaday leading the way with a 417-yard blast. DeChambeau managed to hit four of the group’s 11 total balls that traveled more than 400 yards in finishing second in the points for the group, trailing in points only Scottie Pearman, whose longest shot went 413 yards.

With the final two groups still swinging away and the day’s results not complete, Zack Holton had the longest drive of the day, a 419-yarder in a different group than DeChambeau. Kyle Berkshire, the defending champion after winning the event in 2019 and the 2020 competition having been canceled because of COVID-19, hit a shot of 409 yards in the first set and had 24 balls left at the time of this report.

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The Sixers were coached by Doug Collins …

The Sixers were coached by Doug Collins at the time and it seemed that Chapu could have a good time there again, because Collins told him he was going to be an important part of the team. But he got injured just before the 2010 World Championship. Collins called Chapu when he was in Turkey ready for the tournament and said: “Give up and don’t play. If you don’t, we can pull you out from the tournament because your health is in danger.” It was the beginning of the end. “I told him that I was not going to do it because I thought I could play. I also knew my body and, although it was not at one hundred percent, it could reach 80%. I also told him that playing at the World Championship would let me be ready to play the season in Philadelphia,” said Nocioni in his authorized biography. Obviously, Philadelphia pulled him out of the World Championship.

“Doug Collins lied to my face. Because …

“Doug Collins lied to my face. Because he told me that I was going to be like Jesus Christ for the Sixers. And that’s why they took me out of the World Championship. The one coach who lied to me the most was Collins. He promised me something that later it wasn’t true. Andre Iguodala and Evan Turner played in Philadelphia, and I started playing when Iguodala was injured. But when he came back, everything changed. Andre did not want me in the team, because I hit him in practice, pushed him, irritated him. He was complaining about it, and instead of having my back, Collins pulled me out of the rotation. Then he lied to me again just before the playoffs. One day he comes and says ‘I’m going to rest Iguodala for a few games. I’ll give you those games so you are ready for the playoffs. Because this is a big thing, this is not for kids. Be ready’. I played well in the final two games of the regular season, averaging 15 points, and we started the playoffs against LeBron’s Miami, I had 10 minutes and never played again.”