Golf Central

These days, top tour players routinely smash the ball a mile, but that does nothing to diminish the achievements of the players over half a century ago who managed to thump the ball past 300 yards using far less technically-advanced equipment.

On this day in 1948 Slammin' Sam Snead won the long-drive contest prior to the USPGA Championship at Norwood Hills Country Club in St Louis with a distance of 320 yards. Snead lost in the quarter-finals of The USPGA, by the way, in a 42-hole duel with Claude Harmon. In 1950, Bobby Jones went under the surgeon's knife to cure a serious spinal operation and in 1997, Tiger Woods won The Byron Nelson Classic, his first event since that tidy little win at The Masters.

On this day in 1964, yoof culture exploded into violence between mods and rockers on the shingle of Brighton, later immortalised in the film Quadrophenia, starring Phil Daniels, Leslie Ash and one Toyah Wilcox. But more of her later... In 1969, Apollo 10 was launched as dress rehearsal for the moon landing, while more hot news from space on this day in 1991 as 27-year-old Helen Sharman from Sheffield becomes the first Briton in space as part of the Russian space mission, Project Juno.

Meanwhile, it's co` latha breith sona dhuibh! as they say in Gaelic outposts of Scotland to a strange trio of musicians - member of post-punk outfit Devo  and now Hollywood indie soundtrack king Mark Mothersbaugh (58), shrieking, lisping punkette Toyah Wilcox (50) and irritatingly easygoing acoustic troubador Jack Johnson (31). It would also have been Fred Perry 99th birthday, had he not joined the centre court in the sky in 1995.