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

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 the flashy headline ‘Become a Record Breaker!’ that I could essentially make one up and try to set a new record. If approved, the bar would presumably be much lower, as I would be the first to try it. Since I was primarily a travel writer, I focussed on travel and came up with a few ideas for new records. One was either the most countries or most states played in during the same day, figuring that in either case I could manage three, possibly four, rounds including border crossings. Alternatively, in what I saw as a clever twist on the Guinness classic of the most people jammed in a Volkswagen Beetle routine, I could try to convince record keeping authorities of the wisdom of a record for the most people to ride in a single golf cart while playing 18 holes, thus sharing my soon-to-be Guinness fame with a select group of golf buddies. But when I called my editor to discuss these possibilities, he quickly dismissed them, explaining that he thought setting a new record was lame compared with breaking one that already existed. To make the story more colourful, he wanted me to beat someone. This mandate sent me back to the pages of Guinness, and severely narrowed my choices.

Given the small amount of space the book devoted to golf, there was not a lot to work with. Existing records included the Most British Open titles (six, Harry Vardon); Most US Open titles (four, a four-way tie including Jack Nicklaus); Lowest Score (59, a three-way tie including Annika Sorenstam); and Highest Career Earnings (over $41 million, Tiger Woods). Obviously, I had no chance at any of these -or any skill-based golf record. I’m just not very good. Given a year and a lot of funding, I am pretty sure I could break the 27-hole-a-day average, but the downside was that my wife would leave me. I was getting desperate and contemplating calling my editor back to beg for permission to create a new record when I saw it, near the end of the golf record section: the Greatest Distance Travelled Between Two Rounds of Golf Played on the Same Day. A wordy title if ever there was one, I had to read it three times just to be sure what it meant. The current record was held by one Nobby Orens of the United States, who in 1999 had played twice on the same day, first in London, England, and then Tarzana, California, spanning a distance of 9,582 kilometers (5,954 miles) between the two rounds. Bells went off in my head. If a professional travel and golf writer couldn’t find some way to better Orens’s mark, I certainly did not deserve to get into Guinness.

I immediately filed my request to break the record through the Guinness World Records website, the only way to do it in this information age. Just as quickly, I began to learn of the organization’s plodding mechanics and penchant for red tape. To register, first you file a request online, whether you want to break an existing record or petition them to set a new one. Several weeks later, they send you a form to sign, mainly a legal document giving them all sorts of rights to publicize your record without compensation and so forth, down to limiting your ability to call yourself a ‘Guinness World Record Holder’ for commercial purposes, should you succeed. You then sign and fax or mail this form back, to which they respond in four or more weeks with either a thumbs up or down on your record attempt, and if the answer is positive, they also send a lot of rules. The website says to expect four to six weeks for the entire process, but six to eight weeks or even longer is more common in my experience.

The frustrating bottom line is that it takes two to four months from start to finish to get an answer, and if the answer is no, you have to start all over again. This is why pros like Ashrita Furman send in proposals regularly and always have multiple record attempts in the pipeline, rather than just trying their luck one at a time and wasting months in between. To further confuse matters, if you do try for a new record, like my idea for the most countries golfed in one day, there is the very strong possibility that it is in fact not new at all, since more than 90 per cent of all records aren’t available to the public, in which case one of two things will happen. They might give you approval, but you were hoping to play in four countries and you find out that the current record is already up to seven or something totally preposterous that you cannot match. Or there might be a similar record, in which case they could come back and inform you that you cannot set the record for most countries golfed in a day, but you can have a go at breaking the one for the most continents golfed in a week, or some such derivation.

I also learnt some other important truths about the application process. First of all, Guinness World Records is a marketing-driven company, and they like seeing their records broken on television and in print. That means that if you contact their public relations people (they have both in-house staff and an outside agency) and tell them you are trying to write a high-profile feature for the nation’s largest golf magazine but things are moving too slowly, things suddenly begin to move faster. This is not to suggest they are any less lenient about the actual standards of achievement for media, but they were able to expedite both the application process before -and the approval process after -my attempt. I have since confirmed this habit with several other media outlets, but I also know that while they do respond faster, they still sometimes say no, even when it means losing a lot of publicity, which is reassuring in a purist or egalitarian sense. If you are not involved with the media, there is still a way to get quick and easy service when it comes to applying for records. Every would-be record breaker has the option of paying an expediting fee for what Guinness World Records calls Fast Track service. This guarantees you a response to your query in no more than three days versus somewhere around six weeks, a tempting convenience. The catch is that as of this writing, the Fast Track fee was £300 per record request, and while they reply faster, they might well still say no. If that happens, any further requests you want expedited, even in the same category or record setting vein, require additional Fast Track fees. An unprepared or unlucky record seeker could run up thousands of pounds in fees before getting permission to try a single sanctioned attempt. I cannot imagine this route appeals to any but those most desperate to be in the book and to be in it quickly.