I wrote a blog called “What kind of golf balls should I buy?” a few weeks ago and I addressed the use of used balls. Since then I have stumbled into a few articles that made me curious enough to do some more research, and here’s what I found.
Adam Barr of the Golf Channel
Adam Barr of the Golf Channel gives a statement that is totally predictable. He says that used (or recovered) golf balls sell better during recessions. Wow! Who could have seen that coming? It’s no surprise that the subject gets extra attention at this time, as the Tournament Players Championship is currently taking place at Sawgrass, in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, just south of Jacksonville. The 17th hole there is famous for its green, which is almost totally surrounded by water.
Used golf balls are a big business. With many premium balls costing in the area of $4.00 apiece, it seems that many golfers, if not the majority, are spending a little more time and effort looking for the ones that go into the brush or woods. I always hesitate to look in dense brush or the abundant palmettos here in Florida having heard many stories about encounters with snakes. I hate snakes and in that respect I am by no means unique. I have seen skin divers in many of the water hazards here in Florida. One of these days I’ll talk to somebody that does this, because alligators are an issue here. Now, I like alligators just fine – from a distance. At one of my favorite courses gator sightings are, if not commonplace, certainly not unusual.
Barr recounts a conversation with Jim Best, who says he pulls 120,000 balls per year out of the water at that 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass. Best says he’s been doing this for 10 years, and it took time to develop a successful technique. Not something I ever thought about. The silt at the pond bottom is very fine, and it has a tendency to rise up and destroy visibility. He’s also had some close encounters of the first kind with gators. Some start getting aggressive when they reach eight to nine feet in length. A fourteen footer came with in four feet of him, but that wasn’t at TPC Sawgrass.
I saw an episode of “How It’s Made” about golf ball manufacturing. It came as a surprise to me that golf balls are painted. I guess I has always assumed that the color came from the suryln or composite material itself. The show was pretty interesting, but then I like that show.
And, who knew, there are specific differences in used balls. Recycled or refinished? (Tastes great or less filling?) Patrick Daniels of Second Chance Golf Balls says that recycled means that a “lake ball” has been fished out and allowed or encouraged to dry. Refinished balls, though, are sometimes sold by companies that buy these recovered balls, repaint them and put somebody else’s name on them. So mavbe you bought a used ball that says Titleist on it, but it actually was originally manufactured as a Pinnacle. And the ratio for sale is roughly 10 recycled balls to 1 refinished.
Stay tuned for More about Golf Balls Part 2, folks!
But right now it’s NBA playoff time, and the Celtics are matched up with the Orlando Magic, which creates a friendly rivalry between my son and I, who has spent most of his life in Central Florida and is a big Magic fan.
million per year for the last 70 years. That’s pretty significant, isn’t it? That’s just the Tour itself; it doesn’t include what individual players have done, and the Tour wants to change that.
same limits are decried by some of the race car drivers as causing the tracks to be too congested at critical places, leading to wrecks. Thankfully, improvements in saftey gear and practices have allowed most of the drivers involved in the crashes to walk away unhurt. Even so, it seems that more of them have been getting angry with one another, sometimes leading to skirmishes.
Every football field is the same size, same with basketball courts and hockey rinks. Baseball has a fixed distance between the bases, but the other dimensions differ from ballpark to ballpark. Every golf course has multples of nine holes and every hole is the same diameter, but every course varies in it’s layout, distance and the number and sizes of hazards.
I was twenty-five years old when I actually started playing golf. I learned to fear water hazards that day, a condition that plagued me for many years and the only thing I didn’t like about golf. After many years I learned how to overcome that fear, and I did it at the 18th hole of the Habitat Golf Course in Valkaria, Florida. This hole is a par five that crosses two big water hazards. The first hazard needs to be cleared from the tee, the second needs to be cleared on a second shot if I would have any chance of making par.
Until recently I hadn’t played much golf for a while. So I start up again and resume watching on TV, and I’m hearing about hybrid golf clubs. Am I getting old or has the age of specialization reached this far into the traditional world of golf? Or was the world of golf not all that traditional to begin with other than at Bushwood?
But when we talk hybrid here, I guess it’s like hybrid vehicles, where the idea is to merge the characteristics of two or more means of motive power to produce vehilces that will go farther on the same amount or less energy. What we have here is a way to combine the best characteristics of irons with the best characteristics of fairway woods. Unlike an iron, a hybrid club face, being somewhat hollow, can deform when it strikes the golf ball, then instantly it seeks to regain its shape, and that adds to the force applied to the ball. Also hybrids are closer to irons in terms of their length, which means a player would use an iron-like swing, as opposed to setting up further away like one would with a wood.
Dave's Divots 
More about Golf Balls Part 2
Posted in Commentary, Golf Analysis, Golf balls, Golf Commentary, tagged "How It's Made", 17th hole, Adam Barr, alligators, big business, close encounters, Florida, gators, glof golf balls, golf, golf ball manufacturing, Golf Channel, golfers, green, Jacksonville, Jim Best, lake ball, Patrick Daniels, Ponte Vedra Beach, premium golf balls, Sawgrass, skin divers, snakes, suryln, Titleist, Tournament Players Championship, used golf balls, water hazards on May 8, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Hopefully before you got here you read Part 1. If you haven’t please do; there is a reason this is Part 2.
An unnamed top company executive, after asserting that the performance difference between a ball straight from the factory and a ball that had been at the mercy of the elements is big. He was quoted as saying, “…we don’t think that consumers who want quality and consistency are well served with re-used balls.” Ahem. Oh, sorry, I had to clear my throat.
Steve Ogg, Callaway Golf V.P. of golf ball R&D, said that golfers using any ball that was previously submerged for months will experience less distance than they are used to, and that there will be a loss of spin, too, although to a lesser degrees. And, he says, that the aerodynamics of a repainted ball “may be significantly degraded”.
You, as the consumer, don’t know where these used balls came from. Even if you find one in the water yourself, do you know how long it has been there? Hey, if it’s right there, easy to see from where you are, then it couldn’t have been there long, right?
Can you tell the difference between a recycled and a refinished ball besides the fact that refinished ones are more expensive? Would it shock you to discover that there are “shady people” that might lie to you about the quality and/or condition of their used golf balls?
Have you ever thought about how many golf balls are sold each year? I never had until I started this research, but you can bet Steve Ogg and Golf Ball Paul have. I had a reaction to discovering that an estimated 500 million balls are purchased in the U.S. every year! I’m still trying to analyze the reaction – is it amusement, surprise or indifference?
Am I consistent enough with my drives that I can tell if I would lose ten, twenty, or thirty yards off the tee? Can I tell if I would lose backspin on an approach shot that would cause my ball to roll off the green? Or whether a loss of spin would affect my draw shots or fade shots? Can I hit a draw shot or a fade shot on purpose anyway? Is the difference going to show up on my scorecard?
I would have play a lot more golf than I do now to tell the difference. I would have to make my golf games into laboratory experiments, which I think would diminish my enjoyment of the game.
But, of course, I could be wrong about that, too.
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