Ever wondered just how much further those skyscrapers hit the ball? How you can possibly keep up with bigfoot hefting his driver around like a sledgehammer? The answer might surprise you…
A regular topic of conversation in our playgroup is how are the more vertically challenged guys supposed to keep up on distance with the big dudes. We have two guys well over 6 feet in our group who get the ball out over 300 yards regularly, and a bunch of guys who are wondering (and hoping!) if that’s because of the gift of height that mother nature bestowed on them…
So I decided to get to the bottom of it…
TLDR: The big guys hit it further, but probably not nearly as far as you think.
To discover how much different height makes, I took a look at the stats for the PGA Tour 2024 Season, using players who had at least 100 drives in the season. I then cross-referenced these distances with their heights, and found a moderately significant relationship between height and distance:
This chart uses data from 184 golfers from 5’6 to 6’5 – and it’s fairly clear that taller golfers DO hit the ball further – but to hit the ball a yard further, you need to be about 2 inches taller. A full foot difference in height is worth about 5 yards in distance.
We can be fairly sure that most of these guys are in the gym, keeping themselves fit, and that most of them are swinging fairly hard, and work on their technique. While there are differences in build/physique and age, we’ll consider those in a future post – we have a pretty decent sample size, so we can be fairly confident this is moderately accurate. We may also add more seasons of data (and more players) in a future post to really dial it in.
In case you’re worried about outliers affecting the results, you’d be right to think that there are some outliers – and before we step into some of the more interesting ones, let’s see what happens if we remove outliers (particularly tall or short golfers, where there are only a handful of them). Here’s the same chart, but with data only for golfers where we have at least 18 golfers for each height increment.
We can still see the same trend, and 6 inches of height is worth just over 3 yards of distance, so the magnitude is similar – but the R2 value is a bit lower – meaning the trend is not quite so obvious here. I would love to come back and do this again with a lot more data and see if those R2 values really tighten up.
Before anyone starts scheduling leg-lengthening operations, though it might be worth taking a look at some outliers…
The average pro in our dataset is EXACTLY 6 feet tall (well, not exactly, but within a hundredth of an inch) and that’s how tall our very longest driver is… and if you want to drive it like Rory or Bryson… Bryson is a hair over 6 feet tall, and Rory considerably shorter. The biggest differences you will find between you will not be height-related, but more related to flexibility, hours in the gym, attack angle and ability to hit the middle of the face.