Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book. Larry Olmsted

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       3 Getting into Guinness Gets Personal

       Jack Nicklaus. Bobby Jones. Tiger Woods. Annika Sorenstam. Ben Hogan. Larry Olmsted.

       What do these golf luminaries have in common? Except for one, they are household names, the world’s most accomplished players and in (or headed for) the Hall of Fame. As you might have already guessed, the one exception is me, Larry Olmsted. How do I fit in this Who’s Who of golf greats, this pantheon of smooth swings? I hate to boast, but Annika, the boys and I are all current holders of Guinness World Records for our accomplishments on the course.

      -GOLF MAGAZINE, MAY 2004

       While some records can only be attained by people who have dedicated their lives to acquiring expertise we are also very keen to include records to which people of no particular brilliance can contribute.

      -PETER MATTHEWS, EDITOR, GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS, 1997

      In the spring of 2003, I was like most other people in America: I knew what the Guinness World Records book was, had grown up reading it as a child, had seen it on television, but that was it. I did not really know anything more about the book itself. But my curiosity was suddenly piqued by a newspaper article I had read while on a golf trip to Ireland and Scotland, all about the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the book. I found this milestone and the many other factoids the article recounted very curious, and it stuck in my memory.

      A few months later, I was in New York City, having breakfast with Evan Rothman, the new managing editor of Golf Magazine, the nation’s largest and most influential golf publication. Over bagels, we discussed how golf is often perceived as a rather staid and unsexy sport, and Golf Magazine as an equally staid publication, written for an older, tartan-trouser-wearing audience, despite the current boom in youth interest by the sudden dominance of superstar Tiger Woods. Rothman did not want to miss out on this emerging market and was looking for offbeat stories with interesting, humorous and more unique slants in an attempt to court younger readers. I had heard this tale many times before: it is editor-speak for ‘we want something different from what we are used to and since it is different we don’t know what it is and cannot really describe it.’ Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous non-definition of pornography, ‘I know it when I see it’, editors often go on these vague mission quests for new direction.

      Making golf sexy is no easy chore. Lots of people can write magazine articles, but new and interesting topics are hard to come by month in and month out. For a freelancer, good story ideas are the coin of the realm, and soon I was put on the spot when Rothman asked me what kind of ‘radical, different, edgy’ ideas I had for this new format, which I had known about for all of five minutes. As I pondered what exactly could make golf suddenly quirky, sexy, or at least entertaining reading, something in my synapses fired and connected with the newspaper story.

      “How about…,” I stammered, trying to choose my words even as my thoughts were still forming, “…I try to break a Guinness World Record in golf, and write a funny first-person piece about my efforts? Even if I don’t succeed, it should be entertaining.” I began speaking faster, spitting out words before he could say no, pouring out what I recalled of the facts and figures I had read, about the huge sales figures and the global popularity, relating it all to the book’s upcoming anniversary. “We could pepper the story with funny records and even,” I added on the spur of the moment, “run a sidebar on how to go about breaking Guinness Records, about getting into Guinness.” I had nothing else to add, because at the moment, that was the sum total of my Guinness knowledge.

      Like Justice Potter, Rothman knew quirky when he saw it. My proposal was quickly approved and we figuratively shook on it, pending my research and more formal proposal explaining just what I intended to do to get into Guinness, which was an awfully good question. I still knew virtually nothing about the book, about how to go about breaking records, or even about what kind of golf records it covered. So my first tentative steps into the world of Guinness World Records began when I walked into a nearby bookstore to pick up a copy of a book I had not read in more than 20 years.

      I went home and began imagining what kind of record I might break. I toyed with an idea for hitting balls on the practice range until I saw that such a record already existed -and was insurmountable. The record at the time was for most balls hit in an hour, and to avoid the cop-out of tapping them in rapid fire succession just a few inches from the tee, the rules required that each shot travel at least 100 yards to count. Clearly, Guinness had already thought of every short-cut readers might try to use to sneak into its pages. The current record was 2146, or one ball struck every 1.67 seconds. For me, it was out of the question. Ditto for most holes played in a week (1706, or 13 and a half full rounds each day!), most holes played in a year (10,550 or just over 27 a day), and even most golf balls stacked and balanced on top of each other without adhesive (nine…but how?). It was far too late for me to start collecting golf balls: fellow American Ted Loz already had 70,718, each with a different logo. I quickly scanned the golf records in the book and checked out the Guinness World Records website but found surprisingly little to go on. Only about one-tenth of 1 per cent of the published entries pertained to golf; to make matters worse, most were not in the book at all. Up to that point, I had assumed the book was comprehensive and contained all the Guinness World Records, but I quickly discovered that less than one-tenth of all certifi ed records were actually printed and bound, so I had no real way of knowing what the standard of existing golf records was. In addition, there is virtually no description of how records are set or under what rules, just the results themselves. I did learn from the website, under СКАЧАТЬ