January 30, 2023

Finding a Golf Ball

You want to find displays and examples of pure unadulterated joy? Then you sir, should make your way, this is not the time to diddle daddle, to your nearest golf course. Once there, do not waste your time watching any golf. Golf, as we have all come to know, is the devil’s work. A curse for which there is no cure. What happiness you will find will be ephemeral at best and soon to be replaced with a dark, dark period of un-abatable despair.

No no you fool, stay away from the marked 18 holes. The place you want to be is beyond the stakes. Those out of bound stakes, no doubt driven by Satan himself, which announce that a penalty shot will be added to your score. Find a spot near those stakes. Maybe bring a chair and find a piece of shade. Near the woods, near the pond, near the heather which is as tall as your head. In Arizona or Nevada it will be snake infested desert, and in Northern Ontario it will be outcropping of Muskoka rock.

You’ll have to be patient. But it will happen.

The golfer who measures his day not by his score, but by the number of balls he found. Look! This one has found so many he has had to use his hat as a carrying case.

Look at his smile. Look at his grin.

He has found the mother lode.

This man here has taken out his favorite club, his elongated ball retriever and has, while holding up the group behind him mind you, rescued 7 balls from the murky waters of the man-made pond.

Seven.

He now cleans them off gently and diligently to near their original shine.

“Two Pro V’s” he announces with the same joy and pride he used to announce the birth of his twin boys.

Along with the twin boys, the man owns 9 apartment buildings in Manhattan. But the rent income is earned.

This is found money.

And finding a golf ball, or two, is a golfer’s inalienable right.

Now, I don’t go looking for balls. I don’t go fishing. If the ball is there, right on the bank of the pond, ok, I’ll bend over and pick it up. But I’m not foraging for Calloways in the woods.

I’m not judging.

I like a free ball as much as the next guy. But I aint risking a tick bite or, if we are to believe the Florida news reports, alligator bite for it.

I like to play fast. I’m not crazy about a golf partner who spends ten minutes in the field looking for his ball and then another ten looking for others.

But I’m not judging. There are all kinds.

I thought I’d seen them all. And then Aryeh came to town.

Aryeh is my niece Shoshanah’s 6-and-a-1/2-year-old son. Along with his 4-and-a-1/2- year-old sister Yael, it appeared that his absolutely favorite thing in the world to do was to go on a golf cart ride. We would go several times a day, stopping every time at the free soda fountain located near the golf shop. Now the kids were not supposed to drink soda. They knew they were not supposed to drink soda. But that didn’t stop them from filling up their cups. We would then drive, the kids imploring me to take the long way. Yael would say “the very, very, very long way.”

Every time I started to make my way back to the house, the kids would point to their cups, whose contents, despite constant slurping, never seemed to disappear, and they would say they could not show up holding this illicit contraband. We would then drive around some more before driving back to the house where, while Yael was on the lookout for her parents, Aryeh would dispose of the evidence into the big grey garbage bin.

Then, hot and sweaty, they would put on their floaties and jump into my pool.

With two cups of sprite and diet coke in them and what appeared to be bladders the size of a grape, there would now be the constant refrain of “I have to make.” Followed by my cries of “don’t pee in my pool!!”

We weren’t fooling anyone, the parents knew what was going on, but they decided to pick their battles.

This became our routine and the kids never failed to ask for soda even though they knew it was forbidden fruit.

I asked Aryeh what he would do if I offered him non-kosher food, and he was quick to point out, in his own poignant way, that eternal damnation was worse than a mid-life bout of diabetes. “So, you wouldn’t take the non-kosher food?” I asked. “Of course not. But I wouldn’t just say no. I would say that I wasn’t hungry because I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

Didn’t want to hurt my feelings but he was ok with my eternal damnation.

Their favorite cart ride was the one we would take driving on the fairways of the actual golf course. They instinctively understood that driving on grass, sometimes with them taking control of the steering wheel, was somewhat more illicit that just driving on the side of the road.

Sometimes, while driving on the course, we’d come across some golfers, and I taught them to observe quietly. They were fascinated by the pre-shot rituals and at first laughed at the practice swings - assuming the golfer had missed the ball. They liked to guess who would hit the best shot based on their stance and practice swing. “The man in the pink shirt is best,” Yael would say. Then Aryeh, ever observant, noticing the golfer was playing with a pink ball, would ask if shirt and ball were supposed to match.

We would then drive by with both kids complimenting the group with a yell of “good job!”

We didn’t watch the putting and Aryeh said it was impossible to get the ball into that small hole.

He was not wrong.

They asked if I was as good as those men and I said I was better. “Really,” they said, bug eyed.

On number 7 I decided to show them. I was wearing slides and a t-shirt and I explained that I was not really supposed to play wearing this. Aryeh, the budding Talmudic scholar, wanted to see me play and argued that I wasn’t really playing. After all, I didn’t play the first 6 holes.

I crushed a drive and the kids were delighted. To tell the truth, I was too.

A 4 hybrid and then an 8 to the edge of the green. The kids leapt out of the cart and retrieved the ball and handed it to me.

In my head, I told myself I had made par.

We drove past the tee box on 8 on the way back to my house. Right next to the drop zone, which Aryeh insisted I explain - complete with the notion of a penalty stroke when hitting the ball in the water - we came across a white Titleist.

“Look Aryeh,” I said pointing to the ball, “there’s a ball.” It took him a second to find it, but then he saw it. He stood over it.

“Pick it up,” I said.

He picked it up. I could see it was a Pro V 1. Score!

“What should I do with it?” He asked. “Just throw it into my bag,” I said. “We’re keeping it?” He asked.

“Yes,” I replied, “it’s ours. We found it.”

Then he looked at me. The look on his face was a combination of pain and disappointment.

“No Uncle Ronnie,” he said, “we can’t take it. This is someone’s ball. They lost it. We have to make a sign.”

Now this was a smart kid. A very smart kid. He understood the concept of drop zone and penalty stroke. I only had to explain it to him once. But there was no explanation that would convince him that it was ok to keep the ball.

And so I said “ok.”

When we got back home he asked for a piece of paper and a pen. I said, “let’s go for a swim first.” He said “No. You have to do the mitsvah before doing anything else.”

I said “ok”. I got him paper and pen.

“Uncle Ronnie,” he asked, “is English left to right or right to left?” I said “left to right.” And then he wrote the sign.

‘Ball found near drop zone on hole #8. Please call Ron Zevy at…’ And he added my number.

“Shall we say what kind of ball it is?” I asked. Again, he looked at me with disappointment.

“No Uncle Ronnie,” he replied, “only the true owner of the ball will be able to describe it.”

Then we got back into the cart and taped the sign on a tree near hole number 8. Nobody called.

It was a free ball.

But it was much more fun finding it yourself.

The End.