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Imago

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Imago

Most two-year-olds who manage to make contact with a golf ball send it about 30 metres. On the tenth tee at Barnbougle’s Bougle Run, Emmett Perry set up the way he always does: feet planted, shoulders coiled, no fear of the club that’s still a little too long for him. Then he swung, and the ball just kept going, well past where a now three-year-old’s shot is supposed to stop.

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That was Monday, August 3. Emmett, nicknamed ‘Little Lefty,’ drove the ball 110 metres, beating the previous unofficial mark of 108 metres for the longest golf shot by a two-year-old, GOLF.com.au reported. He had already reached 112 metres on a simulator days before, so the number itself wasn’t a total shock to the people around him. Watching it happen on grass, a day before his third birthday, was another matter.

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Context makes the number harder to shrug off. Emmett was already averaging close to 80 metres before he ever stepped up for the record attempt, a gap large enough that his family stopped treating his swing as a cute party trick and started keeping actual numbers on it.

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A frame in the 98th percentile for height and weight helps explain some of that power, but it does not explain the timing or the technique behind it. Emmett has only been swinging a club with any real intent for less than a year, which makes a 110-metre drive at not-quite-three less a fluke and more the product of repetition packed into a short window.

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That repetition traces back to a single wet afternoon and a golf centre his family had never planned on visiting, the starting point for everything that followed.

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Emmett’s family stumbled into the sport last September, while searching for somewhere to play golf on a rainy day and landing at WillFit Golf instead. What began as shelter from the weather turned into a standing arrangement, and coach Brendon Hill has worked with Emmett ever since.

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Hill’s approach has centred on shaping a natural motion rather than forcing a technical one onto a two-year-old.

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“His swing has come quite naturally,” Hill said, crediting Emmett’s own drive to practice more than any coaching trick.

That drive shows up at home as much as on the course. His mother Nicole simply hands him a club and lets him play, and golf quickly became the toddler’s favourite thing to do, long before anyone was talking about world records.

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Being left-handed has added its own complications along the way, since off-the-shelf gear is not sized for toddlers who swing from the other side. The family had his glove imported from the United States, while his oversized clubs were left uncut so he would not immediately outgrow them.

Emmett turned three the day after setting his record, and his team shows no sign of slowing him down. Hill has described the achievement as proof of what is possible when a child’s focus and enthusiasm line up early, and the family plans to keep developing his swing rather than treat the record as a finish line. Whether or not an official body ever certifies the number, the toddler golf world record now belongs to a three-year-old with room to grow, a coach who trusts his natural swing, and a driver he can already send past players decades older than him.

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Pulkit Prabhav

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Pulkit Prabhav

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