Wednesday February 10, 2010

  Most Golf Balls Hit in 12 Hours - world record set by Nigel Mangan

  ORLANDO, Fla, USA -- Nigel Mangan , a 34-year-old Irishman who has never played an 18-hole round of golf, used a teeing system made by the company he works for, Egan Golf, to hit 7,721 balls - setting the new world record for the Most Golf Balls Hit in 12 Hours .

 Photo: The second he hit the record breaking ball.
   ( enlarge photo )

Nigel Mangan hit 7,721 balls at a pace of one every 3½ seconds, with a few short breaks. Each shot had to travel 100 yards and be accurate within 30 degrees.

   “It was 12 continuous hours of hitting golf balls approximately every 4 seconds, I only took six five-minute breaks throughout the whole day, it was tough”.

   Nigel has been in training since November, even through the recent severe weather conditions, and has suffered blistering and bleeding on his hands along with muscle strain in his knees and shoulders.

   “The pain was worth it in the end” he says, “I knew it wouldn’t be easy when I agreed to do it but we love nothing more than a challenge. Some people also said that launching the Egan Golf Center to the market during a recession wasn’t going to be easy but, like this record attempt, it only made us more determined to succeed”.

   Egan Golf have developed an innovative golf home training system, Golf Center , which provides people with training drills and tees up each ball automatically, which helped Nigel on the day of his record breaking feat.

   This world record for the Most Golf Balls Hit in 12 Hours wasn't just some publicity stunt, though. The attempt was made in a benefit for the Folds of Honor Foundation , which provides scholarships to families of American soldiers killed or wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Mangan hit his first ball at 6 a.m. and continued until 6 p.m., taking only a few short breaks. By noon, he already had hit more than 5,000 balls.

     "It sounds fairly simple, but you wouldn't believe how tired you get trying something [like] this," Piranha Golf president Steve Collins said of Mangan, who hit more than 5,000 balls by noon and easily eclipsed the previous Guinness world record of 7,350 in a half-day.