Fishing from a canoe in the Delaware River, I like to ship the paddle and let the boat go where it will. I watch the stony bottom, which flies by under fast-moving water. This is not Philadelphia. This is two hundred river miles above Philadelphia, where the stream-rounded rocks are so clear they look printed. Shoving the rocks, anadromous lampreys have built fortress nests, which are spread around the river like craters of the moon. Mesmerized, I watch the rocks go by. Fly-casting for bass, I see golf balls.
From shallows in the Merrimack in Manchester, New Hampshire, I once picked up a ball that bore the logo of a country club two and a half miles upstream. If the river brought it there, the ball had come through deep water and then over the Amoskeag Dam. In the Connecticut River above Northampton, Massachusetts, I’ve seen golf balls by the constellation—too deep to reach and too far from any upstream golf course for their presence to make sense unless people hit them off their lawns. Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain. Mine include watching for golf balls, which I do with acute attention, the fact notwithstanding that I quit golf cold when I was twenty-four. These days, my principal form of exercise is on a bicycle, which I ride a good bit upward of two thousand miles a year. I go past golf courses. How could I not? I live in New Jersey, which has a golf-course density of five per hundred square miles, or twice the G.C.D. of Florida, which has more golf courses than any other state. Moreover, the vast undeveloped forests of the southern part of New Jersey tend to shove the densities toward and beyond Princeton, in whose environs I ride my bike. The woods that lie between public roads and private fairways remind me of the dry terrain between a river levee and the river itself. In Louisiana along the Mississippi this isolated and often wooded space is known as the river batture. If you’re in Louisiana, you pronounce it “batcher.” From my bicycle in New Jersey, if I am passing a golf-links batture, my head is turned that way and my gaze runs through the woods until a white dot stops it, which is not an infrequent occurrence. I get off my bike and collect the ball.
The Delaware is less accommodating. When you are flying along on fast current, you don’t just get off your canoe and prop it up on a kickstand in order to pick up a golf ball. Over time, seeing so many golf balls in the river was such a threatening frustration that I had to do something about it. Research led to the telephone number of a company then in Michigan. A real person answered and was even more than real. She understood me. She knew what I was asking and did not call 911. Instead, she had questions of her own: What was the speed of the current? What was the depth of the river? Was the bottom freestone? Sand? Clay? Silt? After completing the interview, she said, “You want the Orange Trapper.”
“The Orange Trapper?”
“The Orange Trapper.”
It came in various lengths. I said I thought the nine-footer would do. The nine might be stiffer in the current than the twelve, the fifteen, the eighteen, the twenty-one, or the twenty-four. Besides, nine (actually, 9.6) just felt right. It was the length of my fly rods.
What came in the mail was only twenty-one inches long, with an orange head, a black grip, and a shaft that consisted of ten concentric stainless tubes with a maximum diameter of five-eighths of an inch. You could conduct an orchestra with it. It was beautiful. The orange head was a band of industrial-strength plastic, as obovate as a pear and slightly wider than a golf ball. A depression in its inside top was there to secure one side of a ball, but the genius of the device was in a working part, a bevelled “flipper” that came up through the throat and would waggle into place on the other side of the ball. The Orange Trapper worked two ways. It had no upside or downside. You could surround a golf ball with either side, then lift it up as if you were playing lacrosse with no strings. You could turn the head over—a hundred and eighty degrees—and the ball would generally stay put. But flip the thing over once more and the ball would always roll free. Made by JTD Enterprises, it could have been designed by Apple.
Even so, finesse was required to trap a ball in shallow current. After seeing one, and swinging around, and going hard upstream, and shipping the paddle, you had about five seconds to place the head of the Trapper over the ball. I missed as often as not. It wasn’t the Trapper’s fault. My average would have been higher chasing hummingbirds with a butterfly net. The river is an almost endless sequence of shallows, riffles, rapids, and slow pools. For the real action, I went below some white water into a long deep pool with Don Schlaefer in his johnboat. Don is a fishing pal. He plays golf. He had no interest in the balls in the river, but he could put his boat right over them and hold it there while I fished with the Orange Trapper. I picked up a dozen golf balls in half an hour.
Marvelling at the craziness, Don said, “Why are you doing this? They’re only golf balls. Golf balls are cheap.”
I said, “Money has nothing to do with it.”
A Titleist Pro V1, currently the Prada golf ball, costs four or five dollars on the Internet and more in a pro shop. If a person of Scottish blood says money has nothing to do with that, he is really around the corner. True, I don’t find balls of such quality often in the river. But they’re a high percentage of what I pick up in the roadside woods of New Jersey. Titleist makes about a million balls a day. In the United States, for all qualities and brands, a present estimate is that golfers lose three hundred million golf balls a year.
Why? Ask George Hackl, who grew up playing golf on courses around Princeton, now lives in central New Hampshire, and is a member of Bald Peak, Yeamans Hall, Pine Valley, and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.
Hackl: “It is an indication of the vast disparity of wealth in this country that golfers in some places can hit seven-dollar balls into woods and thickets and not even bother to look for them.”
There is less to it than that. Golfers have egos in the surgeon range. They hit a drive, miss the fairway, and go looking for the ball thirty yards past where it landed. When their next drive goes into timber and sounds like a woodpecker in the trees, there is no way to know the vector of the carom, so they drop another ball and play on. It must be said, in their defense, that various pressures concatenate and force them to keep moving, no matter the cost in golf balls. The foursome behind is impatient. A major issue is how long it takes to play. It is infra dig to cause “undue delay.” In the Rules of Golf, there’s a five-minute time limit on looking for lost balls. The rule may be unknown to some golfers and by others ignored, but five minutes or less is what most golfers give to finding lost balls. The rest are mine.
From shallows in the Merrimack in Manchester, New Hampshire, I once picked up a ball that bore the logo of a country club two and a half miles upstream. If the river brought it there, the ball had come through deep water and then over the Amoskeag Dam. In the Connecticut River above Northampton, Massachusetts, I’ve seen golf balls by the constellation—too deep to reach and too far from any upstream golf course for their presence to make sense unless people hit them off their lawns. Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain. Mine include watching for golf balls, which I do with acute attention, the fact notwithstanding that I quit golf cold when I was twenty-four. These days, my principal form of exercise is on a bicycle, which I ride a good bit upward of two thousand miles a year. I go past golf courses. How could I not? I live in New Jersey, which has a golf-course density of five per hundred square miles, or twice the G.C.D. of Florida, which has more golf courses than any other state. Moreover, the vast undeveloped forests of the southern part of New Jersey tend to shove the densities toward and beyond Princeton, in whose environs I ride my bike. The woods that lie between public roads and private fairways remind me of the dry terrain between a river levee and the river itself. In Louisiana along the Mississippi this isolated and often wooded space is known as the river batture. If you’re in Louisiana, you pronounce it “batcher.” From my bicycle in New Jersey, if I am passing a golf-links batture, my head is turned that way and my gaze runs through the woods until a white dot stops it, which is not an infrequent occurrence. I get off my bike and collect the ball.The Delaware is less accommodating. When you are flying along on fast current, you don’t just get off your canoe and prop it up on a kickstand in order to pick up a golf ball. Over time, seeing so many golf balls in the river was such a threatening frustration that I had to do something about it. Research led to the telephone number of a company then in Michigan. A real person answered and was even more than real. She understood me. She knew what I was asking and did not call 911. Instead, she had questions of her own: What was the speed of the current? What was the depth of the river? Was the bottom freestone? Sand? Clay? Silt? After completing the interview, she said, “You want the Orange Trapper.”
“The Orange Trapper?”
“The Orange Trapper.”
It came in various lengths. I said I thought the nine-footer would do. The nine might be stiffer in the current than the twelve, the fifteen, the eighteen, the twenty-one, or the twenty-four. Besides, nine (actually, 9.6) just felt right. It was the length of my fly rods.
What came in the mail was only twenty-one inches long, with an orange head, a black grip, and a shaft that consisted of ten concentric stainless tubes with a maximum diameter of five-eighths of an inch. You could conduct an orchestra with it. It was beautiful. The orange head was a band of industrial-strength plastic, as obovate as a pear and slightly wider than a golf ball. A depression in its inside top was there to secure one side of a ball, but the genius of the device was in a working part, a bevelled “flipper” that came up through the throat and would waggle into place on the other side of the ball. The Orange Trapper worked two ways. It had no upside or downside. You could surround a golf ball with either side, then lift it up as if you were playing lacrosse with no strings. You could turn the head over—a hundred and eighty degrees—and the ball would generally stay put. But flip the thing over once more and the ball would always roll free. Made by JTD Enterprises, it could have been designed by Apple.
Even so, finesse was required to trap a ball in shallow current. After seeing one, and swinging around, and going hard upstream, and shipping the paddle, you had about five seconds to place the head of the Trapper over the ball. I missed as often as not. It wasn’t the Trapper’s fault. My average would have been higher chasing hummingbirds with a butterfly net. The river is an almost endless sequence of shallows, riffles, rapids, and slow pools. For the real action, I went below some white water into a long deep pool with Don Schlaefer in his johnboat. Don is a fishing pal. He plays golf. He had no interest in the balls in the river, but he could put his boat right over them and hold it there while I fished with the Orange Trapper. I picked up a dozen golf balls in half an hour.
Marvelling at the craziness, Don said, “Why are you doing this? They’re only golf balls. Golf balls are cheap.”
I said, “Money has nothing to do with it.”
A Titleist Pro V1, currently the Prada golf ball, costs four or five dollars on the Internet and more in a pro shop. If a person of Scottish blood says money has nothing to do with that, he is really around the corner. True, I don’t find balls of such quality often in the river. But they’re a high percentage of what I pick up in the roadside woods of New Jersey. Titleist makes about a million balls a day. In the United States, for all qualities and brands, a present estimate is that golfers lose three hundred million golf balls a year.
Why? Ask George Hackl, who grew up playing golf on courses around Princeton, now lives in central New Hampshire, and is a member of Bald Peak, Yeamans Hall, Pine Valley, and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.
Hackl: “It is an indication of the vast disparity of wealth in this country that golfers in some places can hit seven-dollar balls into woods and thickets and not even bother to look for them.”
There is less to it than that. Golfers have egos in the surgeon range. They hit a drive, miss the fairway, and go looking for the ball thirty yards past where it landed. When their next drive goes into timber and sounds like a woodpecker in the trees, there is no way to know the vector of the carom, so they drop another ball and play on. It must be said, in their defense, that various pressures concatenate and force them to keep moving, no matter the cost in golf balls. The foursome behind is impatient. A major issue is how long it takes to play. It is infra dig to cause “undue delay.” In the Rules of Golf, there’s a five-minute time limit on looking for lost balls. The rule may be unknown to some golfers and by others ignored, but five minutes or less is what most golfers give to finding lost balls. The rest are mine.
You get off your bike, pick up a ball, and sometimes are able to identify the species it hit. Pine pitch makes a clear impression. Tulip poplars tend to smear. An oak or hickory leaves a signature writ small and simple. A maple does not leave maple syrup. At your kitchen sink, you can tell how long a ball sat on the ground by the length of time required to take the ground off the ball.
With felt-tip pens and indelible ink, golfers decorate balls to individualize them beyond the markings of the manufacturer. If more than one player is using a Callaway 3 HX hot bite or a Pinnacle 4 gold FX long—or, far more commonly, there’s a coincidence of Titleists—you need your own pine tree. Some golfers’ graffiti are so elaborate that they resemble spiderwebs festooned with Christmas ornaments. Golfers also draw straight, longitudinal lines that serve as gunsights in putting. It is possible to mark a ball with a ballpoint pen, but some golfers actually believe that the weight of ballpoint ink, altering the pattern of flight, will affect the precision of their shots. It is tempting to say that the prevalence of this belief is in direct proportion to handicap.
In the frenzy of marketing, golf balls are sold in such complex variety that golf’s pro shops are not far behind fishing’s fly shops, where line weights and rod weights and tip flex and reel seats are sold in so many forms for so many different capabilities and so many different situations that people’s basements are forested with tackle. And, as with fishing equipment, the spectrum of subtlety in golf balls includes price. The difference is not among manufacturers but within the product lines of manufacturers. You can buy a dozen Titleist DT SoLos for less than twenty dollars. I know a golfer who has spoken as follows about looking for a wayward ball: “If you don’t find yours but find another of the same quality, you’re even. If you find a ball that’s not up to your standards, you leave it there for a lower class of golfer.” How he happened to get into the woods in the first place was not a topic he addressed. He reminded me of a pirate in the Guayas River near Guayaquil. With six other pirates, he came off a needle boat and over the stern of a Lykes Brothers merchant ship. They were armed mainly with knives. One of them held a hacksaw blade at a sailor’s throat while others tied him to a king post. A pirate pointed at the sailor’s watch, and said, “Give me.” The sailor handed over the watch. The pirate looked at it and gave it back.
With felt-tip pens and indelible ink, golfers decorate balls to individualize them beyond the markings of the manufacturer. If more than one player is using a Callaway 3 HX hot bite or a Pinnacle 4 gold FX long—or, far more commonly, there’s a coincidence of Titleists—you need your own pine tree. Some golfers’ graffiti are so elaborate that they resemble spiderwebs festooned with Christmas ornaments. Golfers also draw straight, longitudinal lines that serve as gunsights in putting. It is possible to mark a ball with a ballpoint pen, but some golfers actually believe that the weight of ballpoint ink, altering the pattern of flight, will affect the precision of their shots. It is tempting to say that the prevalence of this belief is in direct proportion to handicap.
In the frenzy of marketing, golf balls are sold in such complex variety that golf’s pro shops are not far behind fishing’s fly shops, where line weights and rod weights and tip flex and reel seats are sold in so many forms for so many different capabilities and so many different situations that people’s basements are forested with tackle. And, as with fishing equipment, the spectrum of subtlety in golf balls includes price. The difference is not among manufacturers but within the product lines of manufacturers. You can buy a dozen Titleist DT SoLos for less than twenty dollars. I know a golfer who has spoken as follows about looking for a wayward ball: “If you don’t find yours but find another of the same quality, you’re even. If you find a ball that’s not up to your standards, you leave it there for a lower class of golfer.” How he happened to get into the woods in the first place was not a topic he addressed. He reminded me of a pirate in the Guayas River near Guayaquil. With six other pirates, he came off a needle boat and over the stern of a Lykes Brothers merchant ship. They were armed mainly with knives. One of them held a hacksaw blade at a sailor’s throat while others tied him to a king post. A pirate pointed at the sailor’s watch, and said, “Give me.” The sailor handed over the watch. The pirate looked at it and gave it back.
by John McPhee, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Phillip Toledano
