Golf Balls too Old to Use

On August 7th the First United Methodist Church held a Best Ball Outing at Whitetail Run near Fremont.  For the history leading up to this event see my post on August 2nd.

Picking up from there, as Karol and I were leaving the practice range my 50 year old golf bag finally gave its last gasp and the handle fell off.  The bottom had previously fallen off and was being held on by two bungee cords.  So, not wanting to take my clubs to the big event in a plastic garbage bag, I picked up a new bag at a local sporting goods store.  While transferring all the contents of the old bag to the new bag, I found a now expired credit card I had been looking for during the last 12 years.  The contents also included a nice collection of nice, but old, balls, pencils, gloves, tees, and just about anything I would ever need to tear up the course.

I was telling this part of the story to Glenn and Dave on Tuesday night and Dave said, “I hope you didn’t use those old balls”.  I said, “I did but why?”.  He went on to tell me that golf balls have a shelf life and they were probably “dead”.  DEAD BALLS!  Where did that come from?  In the 50 years I have been stomping around golf courses I have never heard anything about DEAD BALLS. I told Pastor Greg about this and he told me he had just bought 150 balls for 13 cents a piece.  I asked him what he thought the chances were that they might all be “dead”.  He said it didn’t matter as he had already lost half of them and besides that the price was right. As I thought about this “dead ball” idea some more, maybe that could explain a lot about my golf game for the last 50 years, or why I never could beat Leo, Karol’s father. More on balls later.

On the day of the big event, Karol and I eagerly arrived but with some apprehension.  After all it had been years since we last played.  Karol got paired up with the other women and I went with Gail and Wayne, with Roy as a driver and official scorekeeper.  As we headed for the first tee I was informed that I was to tee-off in a special place.  You might remember that at the end of the August 2nd post I made a tongue-in-cheek remark about the Methodists needing to loosen up.  They must have taken offense at that because here is where they sent me to tee-off.

                   

How nice of them to provide ramps for me to get up there.  There was a side benefit.  Most of my tee-shots have gophers and ground squirrels diving into their holes.  At least from up there I had a built-in loft that gave me a chance of hitting a bird.  But, I learned a valuable lesson.  DON’T MESS WITH THE METHODISTS!

Whitetail Run is a beautiful course, which I assume gets its name from deer.  We didn’t see any deer but we did see seven turkeys strolling across the fairway.  It is an unforgiving course in that if the ball goes anywhere but straight, it is gone for good into the Enchanted Forest.  If we were playing our own shots, I would still be out there, but I least I would have satisfied all the field requirements for a forestry degree.

But, we all had some good and bad shots.  The important thing was that we all had fun.  As we headed back to the clubhouse we spotted smoke, which we thought might be a grass fire due to the drought.  But, it was only Claude cooking up some of those world-class hamburgers he is famous for.  Here are some more selected pictures from the outing.

Now, what about dead balls?  For that answer I turned to my golf expert, nephew Brandon, who is CEO of Dancin’ Dogg Golf (www.dancindogg.com/), which makes OptiShot, a well-respected golf simulator.  He wanted to know what brand of golf ball I was using and what temperature extremes they had been subjected to.  I said I wasn’t sure about the brands since most of them had XXXXXX’s over them.  Combining the time the balls had spent in our garages in Sioux Falls and Fremont, they had seen temperatures ranging from 110 to –30.  When Brandon heard that he pronounced them “not fit for use”.  He suggested I put them all in a box for Matt, Niki, and Suzy, and, like my grandmother, mark it “Golf Balls too Old to Use”.  He also added that OptiShot will not be able to differentiate between a bad golf ball vs. a good one.  OptiShot measures the clubface through the impact zone - so the condition of the ball is not relevant to the simulator's performance.  OptiShot would probably analyze my swing as some kind of weird karate attack.

So, it appears that the best solution is to use old balls on an OptiShot to perfect one’s swing and then use new balls on the course. In fact, I heard that the Hooper Elevator is selling a new kind of golf ball that has the core made out of super-compressed soybeans.  Not only would that be a “green” ball, but buying it would help out the farmers in this drought.

But, next time I tee-off with that soybean ball, if it comes down short of Cherry County, I am giving up golf and switching to croquet.  Now, I suppose somebody will tell me wooden croquet balls have a shelf life.  What’s next?  Tiddly-Winks!