One tough man
Seve Ballesteros stares today into a frightening future. Perhaps, though, his kind and gentle spirit will be lifted by a cranky and ornery ghost, the memory of maybe the toughest man to ever swing a golf club.
His name was Mike Austin, a guy with hands like oven mitts and shoulders that rubbed both sides of a doorway. During the late 1970s and into the '80s, he worked with Ballesteros on a power swing, teaching the willowy Spaniard how to use the entire body to hammer a golf ball. Ballesteros, like all of Austin’s students, listened. They listened because of this:
Playing in the 1974 US. National Senior PGA Open in Las Vegas, Austin stood on the tee at the fifth hole at Winterwood, a 450-yard, par-4, and a smile creased his handsome face. His playing partner, Chandler Harper, had seen the power in Austin’s swing. He told Austin he’d never seen anyone hit a ball so far.
“Let’s see you really let one go,” Chandler said.
Austin did. The crack of the club on the ball made spectators gasp. There was a 27-mph tailwind, but the layout was flat. The ball scorched the earth just in front of the green and then skipped and rolled and stopped, finally, 65 yards past the flag. Officials, who knew they had witnessed something beyond spectacular, marked the spot and later measured it.
Austin’s drive had traveled a staggering 515 yards. It still stands as the longest drive ever in a professional golf tournament. He did it with a balata ball. And a steel-shafted driver. And a persimmon-wood clubhead.
Oh, and on that hot Nevada day Mike Austin was 64 years old.
I spent an entire day with him at his Los Angeles-area home in 1993 when I worked at the Los Angeles Times. Austin, who had a doctorate degree in kinesiology from Georgia Tech, served coffee and later lemonade and then he made sandwiches, and for hour after hour he unveiled the most fascinating life you could possibly imagine.
As a young man, for example, he hustled mobsters on Florida golf courses. (“In 1933, I beat a guy out of $6,000 and his enforcer pointed a .38 at me and told me he was going to shoot my hands off if I didn’t leave, so I thought it best to depart,” he said.)
A pilot, he crashed a booze-loaded military cargo plane into a lake in Nigeria during World War II. (“I made the biggest scotch and water in the damn world,” he said with a laugh.)
But nothing put Austin’s mark on the world like the crushing stroke he brought against a golf ball. He became a pro in 1928, startling people around the world with the mammoth swing, a frightening burst of strength and fury yet executed with seeming ease, a graceful explosion if there is such a thing.
He said the key was a “supple quickness,” a method of increasing clubhead speed to extraordinary levels by relaxing the muscles.
He played on the pro circuit for a while. His best finish was 37th in the 1961 Ontario Open. The flaw? Couldn’t putt.
Take that day in Las Vegas after his astounding 515-yard drive.
“I got it back onto the green,” he recalled at his home, “and then I three-putted for a damn bogey.”
Putting would have been easier, he figured, if he had two good eyes. In 1954, he got popped in the right eye by an errant shot from another golfer. The blow was so severe the eye came out of the socket and had to be, well, reinstalled. He was blind in the eye for a year.
“After that,” he said, “it focused a little lower than the other eye. So when I’d line up putts, they all seemed like they were on the side of a hill.”
But he kept playing. He didn’t quit. He never, ever quit.
But after a struggle in the 1964 British Open, he decided there was something bigger. In 1965, he started the Austin Golf Academy. Soon, everyone knew him.
“I used to stop practicing on the range when Mike showed up,” former PGA star Bruce Crampton said several years ago. “I’d just stand there and watch him. The things he could do with a golf ball. He is one of a kind.”
Ballesteros sought out the monstrous hitter. So did Gary Player and many others. Long-driver Mike Dunaway, who won big-hitting contests around the country for a decade or more, was a student.
“Nobody ever knew more about the golf swing than Mike Austin,” Dunaway said. “They broke the mold when they made him. When he was 80, he could still hit the ball out of sight.”
For the record, Austin was 80 in 1989. But at the end of that year, it all changed. He suffered a stroke. His right leg would always ache. His right arm hung useless. But he kept teaching. He learned to swing with only his left arm. He’d sometimes lurch from his chair at the practice range, steady himself on his one good leg and, amid a flurry of obscenities, show a student how the big swing was supposed to look.
Mike Austin never, ever gave up.
“The stroke got part of me, but it didn’t get all of me,” he said.
Just about three years ago, on a still-warm November day in Los Angeles, Austin died. He was 95.
In his prime, he showed hundreds, including a young Seve Ballesteros, how to hit a golf ball with stunning force. In his later years, we hope, he showed them how to fight.
And how to live.
