by Rick Vogel

Rick Vogel is one of our most faithful readers and keeps us up to date on golf community news in the Asheville, NC, area.  This part of an email exchange last night is one of many such entertaining exchanges we have had over the last year.  Rick, his wife Lynne and his other faithful companion, Goldie, split their time between a home in Asheville and at Wolf Laurel, a golf community north of the city.  He and Lynne are retired innkeepers of 25 years, and they enjoy their time hiking, sailing and collecting golf balls. 

        Since I started this email about two hours ago, our snow has gone and we just came back from a walk with the dog over to the small stream that cuts directly across the middle of the 13th fairway from rough to rough, with a nice wooden bridge across it for carts.  The stream is maybe three feet wide, easy to step across but steep sided, six to eight feet below the fairway level.  Lynne and I spent maybe 10 minutes picking golf balls out of the grass on both sides, 35 of them to be exact.  I'm trying to train Goldie to retrieve them; so far all she does is stand on the edge above us looking perplexed.  Needless to say, this deep gash across 13 is a ball magnet.  Just for the hell of it, I'm including a breakdown of the brand names we picked up all within about 50 feet of one another:

11 Titleist, one with a Masters logo

4 Maxfli

3 Topflite

3 Wilson

2 Pinnacle

2 Callaway

1 Dunlop

1 Precept

1 Nitro Blaster

1 MC Lady

1 Nike

1 Slazenger

1 Srixon

2 Topflight X-outs (1 orange)

1 Maxfli Noodle (pink)

        So, OK, it has been a long winter and, yes, maybe I'm a little bored, but I bet this bunch of balls are a microcosm of lost golf balls all over America.  FYI, over the nine years we have owned this house on the Wolf Laurel course, we have collected over 1,200 balls while hiking the course. My brother and all his golfing buddies haven't bought a ball since 2002.  Have you ever wondered how many lost golf balls are lying in the rough all across this country's courses?

        I've done a little research and, according to John Calabria, VP of R&D at Maxfli, the number of balls produced in 1966 was 16 million dozen or about 192 million.  In 1998, it was 90 million dozen or 1.08 billion.  Go figure where all the billions of balls just from 1998 to 2009 are.  In the same article in the Nov.99 Golf Digest, Scott Smith reported that the liquid hazard that surrounds the 17th green at Sawgrass costs players 120,000 balls that get dunked there each year during 40,000 rounds, which works out to each golfer losing a sleeve alone on that hole. 

        Bobby Ellis, superintendent of the Indian River Club in Vero Beach, Fla., estimates that the crown of your average palm tree rising anywhere near the line of fire holds as many as four-dozen balls.  Scott says Florida's palm trees are lightweights compared to the cypress trees of California.  One such specimen at the Olympic Club in San Francisco was cut down last year and disgorged 200 golf balls.  The article says many abandoned balls get put back in play.  Second Chance, the ball-retrieval outfit, says that more than 100 million golf balls are recycled from hazards each year.

        In any case, can you imagine how many billions and billions of balls are out there all over the world's courses?