“I pulled 5,802 balls out of here last week,” Lamb said, pointing to the body of water that separates the 18th tee box from the green at Red Hawk Golf Course near Pinckneyville. “I got another 991 yesterday.”
While the number is stunning it is hardly a course record. The first year Lamb “fished” this hole he scored more than 11,000 balls; the next year it was 9,000 and 7,000 after that.
“It keeps going down because I am clearing it out,” he said.
Fear not, however, that Lamb’s Good Again Golf Balls will ever suffer a business setback. For, as a long as there are bad golfers – and the world has is more than an overabundant supply – the number of balls that unintentionally wind up in a watery graves will continue to occur at an astounding rate.
Lamb alone rescues more than 280,000 balls annually, he said. Cybergolf, an online news and information source for golfers, estimates that more than 300 million balls are lost by shankers and yankers each year.
Lamb is an avid golfer. Soon after the family business – Reynolds Monument Co. – was sold in 1999 he retired and envisioned spending his golden years as a golf course rat. He quickly learned the meaning of the expression, “Too much of a good thing...”
“I thought I’d play golf every day,” he said. “But I got bored with it.”
His restlessness set his mind’s wheels turning. While on a regular evening stroll with his wife on the Gambit Golf Club in Vienna he noticed how many lost balls rested among the trees, bushes and tall grasses off the fairways.
“I thought, ‘If there are that many back in the woods there has to be a lot more in the water,’” he said.
Lamb’s curiosity drove him to become SCUBA certified. Diving, after all, is the most common way to recover submerged golf balls. The experience of diving for balls, however, didn’t impress him.
“I only did it once and thought there had to be an easier way,” he said.
Lamb then employed a roller contraption, similar to the one he uses today, attached to two tractors. Wenches would pull the roller across the bottom of the pond.
While the method did indeed retrieve balls, it wasn’t very efficient so Lamb’s wheels began turning again. That’s when he came up with the idea of towing the roller behind a Waverunner.
“I am the only one who does it this way,” he said.
Lamb demonstrated the process on cool sunny morning at Red Hawk recently.
The roller consists of three dozen plastic discs evenly spaced the diameter of a golf ball from each other. Pins and bolts insert between the discs serve to stable the roller, as well as catch and hold balls as they are raked in.
In hip waders and winter gloves, Lamb lowers the Waverunner into the water. He then attaches to the vessel via a long rope.
The retrieval process is rather mundane. Lamb sputters along at no more than idle making pass after pass in “hot spots.” He goes at a slow pace so the rollers have a chance to sink three or four inches in the muddy bottom.
“Anywhere on the course there is water to the right, there is going to be a lot of balls because golfers slice the ball,” he said. “The left is dead water.”
Lamb makes three loops before bringing the craft ashore. It was test run to see how rife with balls the pond might still be after his large haul a week prior. He tugs on the rope to pull in the roller. Like the “Deadliest Catch” the anticipation of seeing what he snagged is high drama.
“About 100 balls,” he said.
That’s not great but he’ll add another 800 balls to his collection later.
The balls are taken back to his home where Lamb said the real work begins. He will sort them by brand and condition. Those in salvageable shape will be cleaned and sold as used (“experienced” as they say in the business) balls at the pro shop. Others will be cleaned, striped and destined for the driving range.
The restoration process is laborious. The balls will be run through a washer four times, dipped in muriatic acid and then given a chlorine bath. Lamb devised a counting table that holds 600 balls. Once full, he pushes a lever to release them into large bags.
“Getting them is the easiest part,” he said in describing the post-catch work.
For those curious, Lamb said that Top Flight and TiTech are the most common brands he’ll find. That makes sense since they are considered to inexpensive, low-end balls used by hackers and duffers. The most coveted ball is the Titleist ProV1 that can cost as much as $65 a dozen new.
Lamb has different arrangements with different courses regarding his service. Dan Breslin, co-owner of Red Hawk, said he will buy back the balls, paying Lamb for the recovery and restoration. Breslin will then resell the balls to his customers at a profit.
Neither Breslin nor Lamb would discuss the nitty-gritty details of the business side, but Lamb did stress, “I am not doing it for the money.”
Some course managers don’t want the balls back so Lamb pays them for allowing him in, he said.
He will sell those balls to other courses, wholesalers and even package some to distribute to a handful of area retailers.
The volume of balls Lamb can find in a particular body of water can measure two things: the quality of the golfer the course attracts and/or the difficulty of the hole.
At 150 yards, all-carry from tee box to green, number 18 at Red Hawk can be a golfer’s nightmare. Breslin said as many as 30,000 rounds of golf are played on the course in a year. With Lamb recovering about 7,000 balls from the pond each year, it’s likely that one of every four shots from that tee box ends up in the soup. Those who have painfully experience a good round of golf go south because of that hole would say that ratio is low.
When Lamb finished at Red Hawk he packed up his rig and dropped it off at another course. He’ll start retrieving again the next morning. He gives little thought to the fact that every ball he recovers has a story behind it that ends the same way. Namely, two strokes added to some poor sap’s golf score.
