In Search of Golf Balls

My life this summer has been measured in golf balls. Not strokes, not scores, but the physical balls themselves. 

I’ve been living next to a golf course, which often provides part of the route for my once- and sometimes twice-daily dog walks. I usually take to the course only when it’s nearly empty—during rainstorms or at the end of the day—and I stay in the roughs near the edges, where we are unlikely to disturb anyone’s play.

And that’s where lost golf balls live. 

Like an Egg in a Nest

I found my first lost ball on a day when the course was busier than I expected, so I went deeper into the rough than usual, where the vegetation wasn’t so much manicured as curated to be wild. And suddenly there at my feet was a bright-white golf ball sitting on a tuft of grass like an egg in a nest. So what do you do? You pick it up and take it home. 

As similar finds began occurring with some regularity on my golf course forays, I developed a taste for the hunt. Whether on a leisurely walk or a more demanding run, my eyes scanned all the places balls might go to elude their owners. 

And that’s pretty much everywhere. The other day I found one in the middle of the 11th fairway. No one was around. I checked several times in both directions before picking it up. From a distance I thought it was a piece of paper someone dropped, but being in search mode I took a closer look. Who abandons their ball in the middle of the fairway?

Often I now choose my route to optimize my harvest. The water-hazard hole has been especially generous. One day it coughed up three balls—two visible in shallow water a few inches from shore, the other in plain sight over a little bluff. Two holes over I found a fourth ball plopped next to the paved golf cart trail, thereby establishing my current one-walk record, a four-ball day that I’ve now achieved twice. 

And I keep finding more. The platter my wife and I have used to contain our collection no longer suffices. We’ve moved to a bowl, and that is rapidly filling.

The Lost-Ball Epidemic

It got me thinking. How many balls does a typical golfer lose? An average of 1.3 per 18 holes, according to an article on Found Golf Ball. That adds up to an estimated 300 million each year in the United States alone, according to Wikipedia, or about 25 percent of the annual total of balls manufactured worldwide. 

Stranded golf balls decompose at a rate I’ve seen estimated at between 50 and 1,000 years. Some believe they may pose an environmental threat, as many contain small amounts of zinc, for example, which is toxic to marine life. Still the amount is small, and no study has made the case definitively that lost golf balls are a hazard. 

In any event, many lost balls are recovered. In 2010, Knetgolf.com, which now directs you to LostGolfBalls.com, sold more than 20 million reclaimed golf balls, per a contemporary New York Times article. 

And as of this summer, an additional cache can be found at my house. 

Photo at the top of the page: My found golf ball collection as of Aug. 11, 2023.