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Most golfers are more than happy to head home after completing a single round, and you’re usually just asking to feel it the next day if you try to play more than that. However, one man recently spent more than a day roaming a course on Long Island en route to setting a new world record for the most consecutive hours spent playing the game.
The USGA expects a foursome to complete a competitive round of golf in a little under five hours, although most courses expect the general pace of play to fall between four and four-and-a-half hours if you’re taking on 18 holes.
The vast majority of golfers will wrap things up for the day after playing a single round, but there are plenty of people who won’t think twice about playing 36 holes in a day. Some diehards take things even further—including Barry Gibbons, who set a record when he played 1,235 rounds and 22,230 holes (an average of around 3.4 and 61 per day, respectively) over the course of 2020.
That takes a fair amount of endurance, and the same can be said for anyone who attempts to set the world record for the longest consecutive stretch of time spent actively playing on a golf course, which seemingly sat at 24 hours as of the start of 2025 based on the Guinness Book entry concerning a guy who played 420 holes over a full day in 2019.
As far as I can tell, that world record authority hasn’t recognized what could also be described as the “Longest Round of Golf Ever Played,” but last year, a British golf pro named Isaac Rowlands revealed his plans to play for at least 32 hours at Lofoten Links in Norway while taking advantage of the country’s “midnight sun” summer phenonmenon.
Rowlands was able to do exactly that by walking a total of 182 holes while raising more than $6,700 for a cancer charity—but this article isn’t about him.
According to CBS News, Kelechi Ezihie initially set out to break what he thought was a world record by spending 24 hours at Huntington Crescent Club on Long Island during an odyssey he kicked off when he teed off at 6:30 PM on June 8th.
Ezihie, a Nigerian native who currently resides in Inwood, was apparently unaware of Rowlands’ feat before he got underway only to learn about the mark he actually had to beat at 3 A.M. on Monday (the sun does set in New York in the summer, so he was relying on glowing balls and friends with flashlights during the night portion).
The 27-year-old ultimately spent 36 hours on the course before calling it quits following a marathon where he was only permitted to take a break for five minutes every hour (his primary goal was to use the stunt to raise money for the indoor golf center he hopes to build in the country he hails from).
He did have to deal with some rain during the round and told Newsday he lost track of how many holes he played (he said he made it through either seven or eight rounds and noted he’d started limping during the last couple).
However, the folks who hand out Guinness World Records will presumably be able to figure that out once they review the footage he captured in order to verify the feat.