I moved into my new house 2 years ago, and we’re located in a neighborhood adjacent to a popular upscale golf course. I have a Parson Russel Terrier who loves to look for lost golf balls in the rough in the evening.
So far he’s found 600 balls, but most of them have blemishes, scratches, or cuts, however, I have about 200 that are basically pristine except that many have ID marks on them.
The less-worthy balls are donated to the local high school golf teams, but the nice ones are available for sale. These pristine balls are from all popular brands. If you are interested in some message me.
Back in the 1990s, a bunch of us decided to take up golfing, just because we were engineers, we all wore the Dilbert uniform, so we should golf. We were all horrible golfers, so bad that we tended to avoid the “good” golf courses.
Usually when we hit a ball out into the weeds we would just abandon it, but one of my friends would go looking for his, just because we tended to hit a lot of them off into the weeds (like I said, we were horrible). He didn’t always find his ball, but he always came out with a handful of golf balls, most of them in good shape. After just a few months he had an entire bucket filled with golf balls. None of us ever had to buy golf balls again, which was a good thing, because like I said, we were horrible and we were always hitting balls off into the woods.
A lot of idiots like us that couldn’t golf would frequent the crappy public golf courses, where people didn’t look at you funny if you shanked a ball or two off into the wilderness. Find an area that has a really crappy public golf course and advertise there. All of the idiots like us who never managed to make it through nine holes without losing a ball or two will appreciate cheap golf balls, even if they are slightly used. It’s not like we plan on keeping them for long. They are going to end up off in the woods again soon, so the cheaper the better.
If I still golfed I would buy yours (because I still have basically no usable skill at the game), but I gave it up a long time ago.
I read a story some time ago about a man who dived to fetch the balls that are lost in the ponds of golf courses and he claimed he made a fortune of this. The picture of him in full scuba gear in the middle of a golf course was hilarious. I wonder who he sold the balls to, but googling around I found many stories like his. Good luck!
PS: And good dog indeed!
A friend of mine got so angry while playing one specific hole that he threw his club, which got stuck in a tree. He climbed the tree to get it back and actually found someone else’s club up there as well. Seems he wasn’t the first person to get that worked up in that specific spot.
I may try and sell them on eBay, although shipping will be expensive.
Dogs are a natural finder of things, as long as the thing has a distinctive smell. When I pick up a golf ball and smell it I can’t smell anything, but Milo can smell a golf ball in two feet of deep rough. He’s not 100% at finding them, but I’d say 80% of the time he comes up with one.
He brings the balls to me and drops them at my feet. I give him a treat, and off he goes. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Last week he found the rare golden Vice golf ball. I had heard about them but had never seen one. They’re made in Germany and are kind of expensive. I told everyone that Milo had finally reached the “Willy Wonka” stage of his career.
Back in my teens, I lived near a municipal course whose eighth and ninth holes adjoined a park and reservoir. Plenty of golfers hooked their shots out of bounds* - over a chain link fence, bouncing off the surface of a roadway, over another chain link fence closing off the grounds of the reservoir and into the water.
One summer the city drew down the water level in the reservoir for plumbing repairs. There was an amazing number of golf balls exposed for yards out on the muddy shoreline, which was a bonanza to neighborhood kids like me, especially those of us that played golf. Many of the balls were in fine shape; others were weathered and probably dated back to the days when balls were gutta-percha and people played golf in knickers. I didn’t have to buy a ball for years.
The OP might find a market for lightly used balls by posting notices on supermarket bulletin boards, assuming that’s a thing in his area.
And yes, that’s a good dog.
*the lost ball bonanza would’ve been even more extraordinary if the reservoir had been on the right-hand side of the course as opposed to the left, as out-of-control slicing is more common than hooking.
Yes, when a pond is drained it’s a bonanza for finding lost balls. Unfortunately, you sometimes have to wade through two feet of muck, and my dog is too small to do that. But there are hundreds of lost balls in the numerous ponds waiting for someone to find.
Posters are a good idea, but I had no problem selling the balls once I started using Facebook Marketplace. I’ve already got a good batch for Spring so I will try both methods this year. Thanks for chiming in.
In case you’re wondering, Milo is also able to find some balls in the winter months. He can sniff them out under six inches of snow. A dog’s nose is an amazing thing. They can easily smell things that would be impossible for a human to smell. Law enforcement is smart to use them to find drugs, illegal food, and dead bodies (cadaver dogs).
