By Coleman Bentley
There’s nothing more fascinating than seemingly impossible benchmarks in sports, no matter how niche. For years, the skateboarding world wondered whether a 900 was possible, and then Tony Hawk pulled it off. Same goes for the running community and the three-minute mile and so on.

If highest/longest/fastest/mostest is a consideration in a given sport, there will always be a mythical ceiling—a point at which the limits of the human body and the laws of gravity collide. The interesting part is finding out where, exactly, that barrier lies.

Just ask Maurice Allen. To put it simply, Allen can absolutely, positively smoke it. He won the 2018 Volvik Long Drive Championship with a 393-yard bomb. He can crush it 300 yards with a putter. He loves Ric Flair more than Ric Flair loves Ric Flair. So if there was anyone who was going to see if long driving’s resident impossible feat—carrying the windswept, mist-choked 342-yard span of Niagara Falls—was actually impossible, it was him. Not one to let a good showboat opportunity go to waste, Allen thus set out to deliver the answer the golf world has been looking for since John Daly first came up short in 2005. The verdict?

Hell yeah it is.

OK, so maybe a touch melodramatic, but you get the general picture: Maurice Allen is a very, VERY strong man. After a couple of weeks of prep and a couple of weather-related false starts, Allen managed to smash one over the Maid of the Mist, through the fog, and across the U.S./Canada border on just his fourth attempt. Making matters even more impressive is the fact that …

A. Allen didn’t just tickle one 343 and get the hell out of there. He cleared the gap by a healthy 15 yards on the fly.

B. Allen didn’t even think he caught the shot well, turning away and saying, “Nope, wind pushed it down,” before being informed that he had just made Mother Nature his mistress.

We only hope Allen and co. declared that record-setting ball before sending it on it into international orbit. Otherwise it’s going to spend the next eight to 10 months in Customs quarantine, as opposed to on Allen’s increasingly crowded mantel where it belongs.