He hasn’t done it in a while, but if you asked him to, Jamie Sadlowski could consistently hit a left-handed driver more than 300 yards.

Not bad, considering he actually plays right-handed.

The lefty driver is a relic from a time-gone-by for Sadlowski, a former World Long Drive Champion. The 30-year-old gave up the long-drive circuit two years ago to pursue a career as a legitimate touring professional. Switching sides on a tee box used to be a party trick he performed for clients during upwards of 70 corporate outings per year.

“Some people didn’t think that was impressive, but I did,” says Sadlowski with a laugh.

Sadlowski was co-medalist at his First Stage Q-School site in Maricopa, Arizona – a course he’s played a handful of times this year to prepare – after a 16-under-par total after four days saw him tied with Norman Xiong and Yannick Paul. He’ll play Second Stage at Bear Creek Golf Club in Murrieta, California.

The Canadian had, by his own admission, an “incredibly frustrating” year on the Mackenzie Tour-PGA TOUR Canada in 2018. He made only one cut and earned $600, a far cry from the “great living” he was making from long-drive outings and bashing balls as far as he could for corporate clients for nearly a decade.

Two years ago, he says, it was time for a change. He turned professional in 2016.

“I couldn’t sit on a par-5 much longer and have 156 guys come through and hit a tee shot for every one,” he says. “My body was taking a toll. I didn’t want to not try (to play professional golf) but then get to 32 or 33 and want to try then, and the window was closed. I needed a change of scenery.”

The desire for a change of scenery is what got Sadlowski into golf in the first place.

Growing up in St. Paul, Alberta (about seven hours from the U.S. border, just north of Edmonton), Sadlowski’s father was a foreman for a road maintenance company who would hire his son each summer for some odd jobs. He says he sat in a truck for about seven hours a day, with a primary task of picking up road kill.

“The work was not fun,” he not-so-fondly recalls.

One night mid-week, after another day of fixing signs and picking up dead animals, Sadlowski came home late from a party. His father gave him two options.

“’You’re not going to do that, and you’re going to work for me, or you’re going to do something you like,’” Sadlowski recalls his father saying. ‘”Because this is not working.’”

That was in 2007, when Sadlowski was 19. He went on to finish third at that year’s World Long Drive Championship (Open Division) and won $30,000. At the time, he was driving his mom’s minivan.

The following year, he won his first of two back-to-back World Long Drive Championships and turned long-drive into a full-time job.

“I didn’t see myself doing road-kill duty for much longer after that,” he says.

Although Sadlowski left that part of his hometown life behind, one thing that he’s kept with him all these years is his connection to hockey.

Like many young Canadians, Sadlowski was die-hard. He played year-round at a high level for a number of years before it started to slowly transition into eight months of hockey and four months of golf. He says he still gets a “little slide-y” with his swing because his action is rooted in a hockey shot, but he admits the sport has given him a “good pair of hands,” which has helped with his chipping.

Sadlowski now plays out of Whisper Rock Golf Club in Scottsdale, the venerable layout that’s home to more than 20 PGA TOUR pros and a handful of other professionals.

There he met with Peter Kostis, who was committed to helping Sadlowski become a real-life Happy Gilmore – to turn a hockey-playing long driver into a legitimate golfer.

“There’s more to being a PGA TOUR player than hitting long and straight. He’s 15 years behind in playing experience,” Kostis told The New York Times in 2017. “I’ve got to figure out how to help him accelerate that learning process.”

Sadlowski says he is no longer working with Kostis, as although the celebrated instructor was a big help, he feels he ended up learning “too much.” He would get to the golf course and was thinking too much, and without having college golf under his belt, he felt like he was on an island and couldn’t ever get anything going.

This year on the Mackenzie Tour, he estimates his scoring average in Monday games was “probably 63 or 64” – but the form didn’t translate to competition.

“The tournament conditions were a lot different,” Sadlowski says with a laugh. “It’s not like I was completely lost, though. It’s not like I couldn’t break 80 in a practice round.”

“Maybe I was grinding too hard early in the week.”

He began to see progress at The Players Cup in Winnipeg, Manitoba, his final start of the 2018 Mackenzie Tour season. With a help of a friend who caddied that week, he began to tighten things up physically and mentally.

With a renewed mindset, Sadlowski found the top of the First Stage leaderboard.

He says he had no expectations that week, but played aggressively and was rewarded. He went back to being an athlete, he explains, and not so much a polished golfer. He carried fewer thoughts, and just played golf the way he wanted.

Sadlowski knows he’s good, but he knows what he’s doing now – and what he has done the last two years – is quite different than what he started doing when he first picked up a golf club and hit it as far as he could (his longest drive in still conditions is 445 yards, while his longest ever – downwind – was a 480-yarder).

He’s not going to take a left-handed driver from a playing partner’s bag and take a rip in the middle of a tournament – he’s serious now. But if he has to send one deep in competition, this hockey-playing former road-kill scooper can still do it.

But that’s not all he can do anymore.

“I’m trying to get that mentality that when I step on the first tee on a Thursday, I think, ‘Yeah, you’ve got some talent. You don’t have any experience, but you can do things that other guys can’t do,’” he says. “I always have that extra gear that most guys don’t see.”