Long Drive Competitors Now Have Their Own Ball—and It Can Work for You, Too
It’s not just chicks who dig the long ball, as a memorable commercial once claimed, it’s everyone. Have you met a golfer yet who doesn’t dream of hitting the ball farther?
Distance is golf’s Holy Grail quest for most of us. Even the longest of the long want to bash it longer, which you’ll notice when the World Long Drive Championship tees it up next week (Oct. 18-22) at Atlanta’s Bobby Jones Golf Course.
Bridgestone Golf isn’t trying to kid anyone with its newest ball, the e9 Long Drive. The name is a giveaway. Every manufacturer claims its ball flies farther but the e9 Long Drive has a different twist. It was designed with the help of World Long Drive competitors. Which makes sense because who knows more about crushing it than those beasts? And that’s why the e9 Long Drive, available to the public for $29.99 per dozen, is the official ball of the World Long Drive Championship.
Bridgestone's e9 Long Drive golf balls.
Courtesy of Bridgestone
Bridgestone golf ball marketing manager Elliot Mellow explains the e9 Long Drive’s unique backstory.
Sports Illustrated: Who had the brainstorm to ask long-drive competitors for input on a ball?
Elliot Mellow: I pitched the idea to our CEO. Some Long Drive guys are trying to cross over into pro golf. I thought, "if they’re serious about their games, let’s get serious about giving them something to hit." Bridgestone is a $40 billion company, we can put our name on anything. We wanted to be integrated into the fabric of what long drive is. Our goal was to create a product, prove it worked for them, then scale it to the consumer.
SI: Balls have been designed to fit certain individuals, like, say, Tiger Woods. But getting these guys involved is unprecedented, isn’t it?
EM: This ball is probably the most effort, in terms of going all over the country, that we’ve put into a non-tour ball. We’re dealing with professional athletes at Long Drive. They’re not professional golfers like at the Tour Championship but they’re professional athletes. So how do we take a distance ball and give it a purpose? Rather than just take a firm golf ball and put some marketing spin on it, how do we create a product that performs at a high level and has a reason for being? That was our plan.
SI: A ball with "a reason for being?" I like that. Where do you even start?
EM: We hooked up with a long-drive guy first—Bobby Peterson, a long-drive competitor who has a one-stop long-drive shop in North Carolina. He’ll teach you how to train for long drive, improve your clubhead speed, pick equipment, get fitted. If you want to do long-drive, he’s a pioneer in optimizing equipment for long-drive players.
SI: What did you learn about how a ball needs to perform for long drivers?
EM: We went to some of their events and they came to our place in Covington, Ga. They really helped R&D this ball. It was immediately apparent that these guys chase ball speed. That’s easy to correlate: I swing at X speed, my ball speed is Y and that equals Z distance. The reality is, optimizing launch conditions gives a great upside to their performance. After analyzing launch monitor data, we realized we needed to lower the compression of the golf balls.
SI: Isn’t that counterintuitive to what we’ve always thought about getting extra distance?
EM: Exactly. It’s a common misnomer that people think long drive, they think of a 120-compression ball, a ball as hard as you can make it. That’s exactly how all of the long-driver players thought.
SI: It had to be hard to change their minds on that, wasn’t it?
EM: They had to get used to it. Look, if you and I are on a golf course and swing as hard as we humanly can, we might athletically swing the club a little faster. But we’re probably not going to hit that ball in the middle of the clubface. That’s going to create sidespin which equates to less distance and less accuracy. We needed to create less spin, in general. So we slowly worked toward a lower ball compression than you might think. Ultimately, the ball is around 75 compression.
SI: How tough was it to sell that to the long-drive guys?
EM: Well, it is a different sound and a different vibration feel than they were used to. But they’re scored only on balls they can keep on the playing grid. So they needed forgiveness, and thus lower compression. We put a heightened focus on carry distance—launching higher, carrying farther, rather than getting the ball tumbling down the fairway, a game that some of them play.
SI: Were there any non-believers out there or were they convinced by the results?
EM: A few guys were more skeptical but they were players who weren’t involved with the development of this ball and didn’t know what we were doing. They came around pretty quickly once they understood the process. In the past, World Long Drive has just used the ball of whoever was the tournament sponsor. This is the first time they got to play a purpose-built product. The guys who were part of the process got it. They put it in play for the first time last November in Mesquite, Nev., and had nearly 50 percent more balls in play (on the grid) than the previous year. So the e9 was substantially more forgiving.
SI: The big question for us average golfers has to be, how can a ball designed for players with 130 mph clubhead speed work for those of us whose clubhead speed is 85 or 90 mph or even less?
EM: It works for both because the core of the e9 Long Drive has gradational compression. It’s like a Tootsie Roll almost. The other portion is firmer and creates speed. The center is soft and creates forgiveness. It compresses differently based on the force used. That gradation compression is proprietary to Bridgestone. We use it on our Tour B golf balls, too. A lot of amateurs are latching onto this idea. Like in a scramble tournament, amateurs use the e9 Long Drive for the tee shot. It still performs around the green, by no means like a tour ball would, but it’s a fully engineered golf ball.
SI: I see the e9 Long Drive comes in four color options—white, orange, yellow and pink. That’s a lot of colors. Is there a reason behind that?
EM: In the latest iteration of the World Long Drive competition, they’ll hit head-to-head simultaneously. If you watch on Golf Channel, you’ll see four players hitting at once at times. They narrow it down via brackets, kind of like March Madness. That’s the reason for four colors, so the players each hit a different color and they and the fans can easily identify who the shot belongs to. At the Tour Championship, two guys at our Bridgestone hospitality area asked me about getting some pink ones. So the colors are resonating with people more than I thought.
SI: It used to be that only hackers used colored golf balls. That stigma seems like it’s gone by the wayside now, doesn’t it?
EM: I’d say so. Fred Couples, a Bridgestone guy, is super-traditional. A few years ago at the Senior Players Championship in Akron, he said, "I’m not really in contention, is there anything I can do to help you guys create some hype?" We said, "why don’t you put a yellow ball in play?" So he used a yellow Tour RXS ball as a favor to us. After the round, I asked how it went. He said real nonchalantly, "I could see it better." Now, Fred won’t hit anything but a yellow ball. He said, "I can’t hit the white one. It’s like a mental difference, I need yellow." So yes, colors are gaining acceptance.
SI: Fred still doesn’t wear a glove when he plays, does he?
EM: No. That’s one tradition that will probably never change.