So I’m a golfer, and I’ve just kind of discovered buying balls on EBay. I bought some last week and was really surprised by the quality – I got about 60 Titleist NXT Tours for less than a dollar a ball, and they look great!
My question is, where do EBay sellers get all these golf balls? Out of all the balls out there, NXT Tours (for example) are not outrageously popular, so I can’t imagine that one could just go comb the woods of your local publinx and find so many balls, especially in good condition.
I can’t remember if it was an early show of Dirty Jobs, or if it was another program, but there are guys that go around and dive in lakes for golf balls. They do the whole deal with SCUBA gear and everything. I don’t know exactly how many balls they found in just one lake, but it was a lot. Probably almost a pillow case full per person (there were 3 of them I think), per lake, and it only took them a couple hours or so.
If your typical golf course (warning, numbers pulled out of ass) has 6 lakes. Each lake takes 3 hours to gather the balls, and gets you 3 pillow cases of golf balls. You can do 2 lakes a day, get 6 pillow cases of balls, and finish a course in 3 days. You probably would need the other 2 days to clean/sort the balls. That means you can do 1 course a week. If you have 50 or so courses in reasonable driving distance you have a year to let those balls replenish, assuming you are the only guys in town.
Not unrealistic for a place like Florida that has a lot of courses and year round warm weather.
Caddies and kids who live near a golf course scour the rough for lost balls. If you ask around, you can find some of them. A lot of those balls are sold to used club dealers and pro shops. Unscarred balls are one price, and those that are a little wounded are much cheaper.
As** treis** said, the water hazards yield a lot of strays. Most courses have a contracr with one diver, and nobody else is allowed to harvest the ponds. However, some folks sneak in under cover of darkness to poach. Courses don’t allow anyone to fish the ponds, either, so some ponds have very large catfish and big snapping turtles. Poachers harvest these, as well, but they are a hazard to ball-poachers. :eek:
If you’re in the Southern states, you may want to watch out for alligators in the ponds too!
We used to live on a golf course and when we took walks in the evening, my husband would casually pick up golf balls that had found their way into the woods, long grass, etc. that surrounded the course. He’d also pick them up when he went golfing and had to retrieve his own ball from the rough (he’d generally find a couple others while he was in there). Within a few months, we had a huge bucket full of them, and he wasn’t even really trying that hard to find them. I can imagine if you really went looking, you’d have enough to sell on Ebay.
This brings back fond memories of my early teens, when they temporarily lowered the level of the reservoir in the park across the street.
The reservoir adjoined the 8th and 9th fairways of the local public golf course. Innumerable golfers pulled or hooked tee shots over a chain link fence, the balls finding their way into the water. When the water was drained, the mud was carpeted with golf balls, ranging from like new condition to ancient weathered specimens (I swear there were gutta perchas in there from the 19th century).
I and other kids scrounged balls like mad. I didn’t have to buy another one for years.
A LOT of stolen stuff is sold on eBay and I would guess golf balls would be easy to steal and who’d bother looking on eBay for them, unlike a high priced item like a bike which you would look on eBay if you got it stolen.
Lake Tahoe, just off Edgewood has enough golf balls to keep a diver busy all summer. For some reason, golfers like to hit one out there. I personally have a giant bucket-full harvested from the bottom of its clear, blue water.
I was playing a golf course in Florida. At one spot some kids were selling golf balls. Later in the round we caught them trying to steal balls out of our cart.
The balls on EBay probably were fished out of water hazards or woods. They also could have been swiped from Dick’s Sporting Goods.
A friend of mine is a placer goldminer, and was contracted by a country club style golf course to “recover” lost balls from its water hazzards. Apparently it had never been properly cleaned. He used a “Drege” (Think big underwater vaccuum cleaner) to harvest the balls. In one day he collected close to 1500 balls, out of a water hazzard not much bigger than a pond on steroids.
He got 30 cents a ball.
Apparently the club used the balls in their “Bucket of Balls- $10” Driving Range
He (and here is the highjack) postulated that in some long future time, there would be a type of slate, with golfball inclusions… He named it “Golfballiumite”…