St. Louis golfer hits balls around a quarter mile far

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ST. LOUIS — Bobby Ray doesn't hit golf balls, he destroys them. He's not allowed at many golf ranges in the St. Louis area.

"Some big-name [ranges] I have been kicked out of a Bellerive, Norwood Hills, Algonquin. Finding a driving range is the toughest part of my job," Ray said.

It's all because Ray hits golf balls a long, long way.

"I've hit some golf balls close to 500 yards out in Colorado. In competition, my long right now is 446 yards, which is just over a quarter mile," Ray said. "I am like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite, I get to say I hit a golf ball a quarter mile."

The Rockwood Summit 2012 grad was 6-foot-2 and 165 pounds in high school.

He moved on to the University of Tampa and had a solid career, but he knew pro golf was not in the plans.

"I am a head case and anybody that knows me well knows that I get into my head and I explode on the course and you have to be calm, cool and collected to play good golf," Ray said. "At the same time, I knew I did hit pretty far."

Ray is now 18th in the world long drive rankings, with three top-five finishes in his first two years on tour. His club head speed is 153 miles per hour.

On this day at The Quarry at Crystal Springs Golf Club, he was hitting balls 400 yards.

Ray is now 6-foot-4 and has 225 pounds of sheer muscle. But this competition is not just about strength.

"There's a reason Mr. Olympia is not hitting a golf ball very far. He's got no range of mobility," he said.

And not this type of hand-eye coordination either.

"If you want to hit a golf ball far, you have to center it up in the middle of the face and you gotta be coming at the right positions," he said.

Ray also has another competition he enjoys.

"Four years ago, I won a competition show called Paradise Hotel and it was probably the most memorable experience in my life," he said. "Essentially I was getting paid for a seven-week vacation. It's like 12 guys and girls, all similar age, everybody's good-looking probably, except me. I was like 'what am I doing here? How do I get lucky enough to have this experience?'"

But for the time being, the long drive competitions pay the bills, $20,000 to the winner for each event.

"To be the World Long Drive Champion would be life-changing, of course. To say that there's 8 billion people on the planet and you're longer than every single one of them, I can't imagine saying that statement and actually meaning it," he said. "Because that's a lot of people and to say that you're better than everybody at what you do in that moment would be a pretty cool feeling."

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