Guinness World Record for longest golf marathon may have been broken by Kelechi Ezihie, of Inwood

An Inwood  man may have set the world record for longest golf marathon when he finished 36 hours of golf at the Huntington Crescent Club on Tuesday morning.

Should Kelechi Ezihie meet Guinness World Records' verification requirements — eight pages of them, including that the whole attempt be recorded on video with a time clock visible — he will join a crowded pantheon of endurance achievers. It includes a Queens man who bounced 4 miles, 30 feet on a pogo stick while juggling, somebody who sat in an ice bath for four hours and the Scorpions Inline Hockey Club of Namibia, who, coincidentally, played their sport nonstop for a shade over 36 hours.

"I’m just happy it’s over," said Ezihie, 27, who teed off at 6:30 p.m. Sunday and finished shortly before 7 a.m. Tuesday. "The last two rounds, I was limping. I got to the final 18 [holes] and I was just ... I can’t go anymore, this has to be it."

Speaking Tuesday morning after zero sleep, Ezihie said he couldn’t remember how many rounds he had played — seven or eight, he thought — but said he had shot the course’s 70 par several times. Along the way he endured rain that soaked his feet, which eventually made walking painful, and the devastating revelation, in the form of a phone call from his sister, that a British man had a little more than a week ago exploited northern Norway’s midnight sun to golf 32 hours. Ezihie said he briefly considered golfing 24 hours and calling it a day. He dismissed the thought. "That’s not how I was raised," he said. "I didn’t want to be looked at as someone who gives up."

A spokeswoman for Guinness, Kylie Galloway, said in an email that the London-based organization’s record specialists had "received an application and look forward to receiving evidence to review." Review will take 12 to 15 weeks.

Test run for endurance

Ezihie is an assistant manager at Life’s WORC, the Garden City nonprofit that serves people with intellectual disabilities and autism and held its annual golf outing at Huntington Crescent on Monday. He attended Lawrence High School but was born in Nigeria, where he plans to open an indoor golf center, and set up a GoFundMe for that project ahead of his record attempt.

Anyone looking to play 36 hours of golf, interrupted by bathroom breaks at the end of each round, must deal with at least three practical considerations: fatigue, darkness, and finding a course whose management is more willing than most.

Ezihie, who golfs mostly at North Woodmere Golf Course and plays a 10 handicap, did a test run for endurance one hot Sunday last summer, golfing 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. "Then, on the way home, I stopped at another golf course, so I played 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. that day."

For this attempt, he drank coconut water and Powerade and ate beef jerky and, toward the end, a plate of shrimp.

As to darkness: About a month ago, "I bought some balls that glow in the dark and I bought some flashlights," Ezihie said, and "snuck on" to a course in New York City to see if golf in the dark of night is possible. It is, but it is not easy.

Flashlight for night play

The glowing balls "don’t go as far and have less traction, so there’s not much control," he said. "You just smack it down the middle." Some of the flashlight batteries died early, making it difficult to navigate Crescent’s Devereux Emmet-designed course, which Ezihie had not seen before his attempt.

Finding a course was difficult. Before securing permission from Huntington Crescent, Ezihie said he called hundreds of clubs as far away as Texas and Ohio. "They all turned me down," he said. He was fortunate to find in Hagen Freihoff, the Crescent’s general manager, a man who shared his expansive vision. "I got a very strong sense of his determination," Freihoff said. "This is a very traditional club with a lot of history and this is something where we can write a little bit of history."

Ezihie came to golf late in life, in 2023 when he moved to Indiana for a job and fell in with friends who played regularly. There wasn't much else to do, he said. For Ezihie, one merit of the sport is that he's the only one in his family to play: "I come from a big family and I’ve always been compared to my brothers, whatever sport I indulged in," he said. The sport has a character-building element to it that appeals to him. "When you are on a course, you are on your own," he said. "You hit a bad shot, you take your medicine and move on." He hopes to play again on Saturday, he said.