CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It isn’t your typical lunch break at Leatherman Golf Learning Center in Charlotte and these aren’t your typical driving range guests.
“The first thing you’re trying to do is not get kicked out,” Sean Johnson said. “I think the most obvious thing is a lot of ranges you go to just aren’t long enough for long drivers.”
“I live in Greensboro, North Carolina,” Scottie Pearman said. “There’s only one driving range that’s long enough that I could hit at. It’s 400 yards long.”
Charlotte’s Sean Johnson and Greensboro’s Scottie Pearman are two of the top players in World Long Drive, a series that rewards one aspect of golf, bombing it off the tee.
Johnson won last year’s WLD championship and has a career-long drive of 481 yards.
“I’d say the most common question I get asked is do I have back pain? No, I do not have back pain currently,” he said.
Pearman is currently Top 10 in WLD, and once belted a ball 475 yards.
But he says it’s about more than just distance.
“The first question I always get to ask is how far do you hit it? And it’s like where are we? It’s one big science problem that I wish I would have paid attention to more in high school. Sorry, Ms. Brown in high school,” he said. “We have to prepare for every location that we go to Each place we go to requires a different shot.”
Higher ball speed creates longer distance.
The fastest ball striker on the PGA Tour this season hits it an average of 190 miles per hour.
Johnson and Pearman each hit their drives over 230 miles per hour.
“We do hit all golf-legal equipment,” Pearman said. “There’s no special golf balls, no special drivers that are illegal. Everything falls in the rules of golf.”
Pearman is a former FedEx delivery driver.
“I went to an adult league baseball game in my hometown and met another competitor that was competing at the time, he got me in to long drive,” Pearman said. “The rest is history. It changed my life.”
Johnson was a professional baseball player, when a freak injury ended his first sports career.
“Slipped on the mound, put out my arm to brace myself and popped my arm out of the socket,” Johnson said. “At 27 years old that was the writing on the wall of your baseball career is probably over. I went and got a sales job and in the meantime picked up a golf club and realized how far I was actually hitting it.”
Now a former delivery driver and a former broken baseball player are hitting big drives, cashing big checks, and realizing dreams they could not have imagined.
“If you take strength and perseverance in the face of adversity, and absolutely put everything you have into something, God’s got your back and He’s going to get you where you need to go,” Johnson said.
The two will compete this weekend in WLD’s Endless Summer in Ontario, Canada.
“If it can happen to me, it can happen to you,” Pearman said. “I come from a small town, single dad, grew up very poor. To now having everything I ever dreamed of. Don’t settle for something. If you have something in mind, go for it.”
Contact Nick Carboni at ncarboni@wcnc.com and follow him on Facebook, X and Instagram.
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