So who owns the bragging rights as the biggest hitter at your local driving range?
The local pro, one of his assistants or a single-figure guy who works out at the local gym, plays front row in the town’s rugby 1st XV and eats steak for breakfast?
Lee Brandon - power glamour.
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We’re not talking practice range here, we’re talking testosterone fuelling station where we all go to rip a few drives over the fence past the 250 yard marker.
That is why we go to the range is it not? We don’t go to groove a swing – though there’s a tendency to groove our faults – we go to warm up before plucking out our shiny driver to kick ass!
The reason I ask about bragging rights is because at the Countryside Driving range near Clearwater Florida this week, the longest driver’s a woman.
Lee Brandon a curvaceous 40 year-old, won the women's division of the RE/MAX World Long Drive Championship in October with a drive of 291 yards, 3 inches, though she also claims a career best 347 yards.
She did not hit a golf ball until five years ago, and admits her talent isn’t to get the ball in the hole in the least number of shots – she shoots regularly in the mid-80s when she plays - but completes barely 30 rounds of year.
Lee doesn’t have to have an all-round game – she only gets paid for her tee shots!
She takes on all challengers as part of her 10-city US tour promoting Spalding's new line of Top- Flite XL 3000 golf balls. The posters scream "Do you have the balls to challenge Lee Brandon?'' and the guys have been rolling up in droves - without success.
Says Lee: "I would not have the audacity to say I am a great golfer. That's not what I am. I've been told I'm a gifted ball-striker with great potential."
At six feet and 190 pounds, she’s an occasional model but mostly a strength and conditioning trainer who coaches Olympic athletes and NFL footballers and who has applied physical science to the golf swing.
"Posture equals power," she says. "I use the spine muscles and the stabilisers of the spine to generate power. Sort of like the suspension wires holding up the Golden Gate Bridge, our muscles have to be engaged to suspend our foundation."
Lee’s dream of becoming an Olympian ended in 1979 when she stuck her arm accidentally through a plate glass window in a locker room and almost bled to death.
The accident severed an artery in her left elbow. Her heart stopped on the operating table but her life and arm were saved, although it was seven years before feeling returned to her left hand.
Later she accompanied one of her fitness clients to a driving range to evaluate the biomechanics of his swing and spine, hit a few balls herself and discovered a talent for it.
Now, through golf, she wants to influence the future of the sport for women.
"Let's get them strong and looking powerful. Everybody is saying make women's golf more marketable. Well, I have a marketable look," says Lee.
"I don't think it's selling out. If women could step up and stand over a golf ball with powerful quads that are rippling through silk slacks and with strong shoulders under a colourful tee shirt…that would be good business.''
Certainly the Evian Ladies European Tour could do with some power-glamour to attract more sponsors who don’t seem keen to support an event on English soil.
And I'm sure interest would explode if a handful of players like Lee were to emerge in Europe even if only curtain raisers to the main event.
Instead of searching the schools and golf clubs for the next female superstar, maybe the women's pro game should start checking the gyms and track and field clubs and stick a driver in her hand instead of dumbell, javelin or discus.
What do you think? Does women's golf need to improve its glamour image to raise its profile or continue to trade on its skill factor and fall deeper into the men's shadow. Tell us on The Forum
