Golf Balls... The Other White Gold

Now you're probably wondering why I call golf balls white gold. If you think about it for a minute golf balls are white, but how does it relate to gold. If you read on you'll see that golf balls can truly be considered white gold... well at least to me and my brother.

In my last post, Scrimpin For Golf Balls I ended with a statement that me and my brother had created an ingenious device for getting used golf balls that could have made us millions. How do I know it could have made us millions? We had found out about 20 years later that a guy had made his fortune from selling experienced golf balls, and he did it the way we did 20 years before.

After we decided that scrimpin for golf balls was too much work for a relatively small reward, we had to come up with a better way and we did. One Saturday morning we went trashing digging and I found an old TV antenna that gave me an idea. I told my brother that we should make a rake to dredge the bottom of the lake for the golf balls. This way we wouldn't have to go in and we could get the used golf balls in the deep part of the lake that we couldn't get by hand.

So we went home and got out a hacksaw, drill, hammer, and screw driver. We also went to the nearby fishing and tackle shop and purchased two of those loose green-fishing nets. I started to create a long skinny rectangle measuring about 4 feet by 8 inches with the parts from the antenna. I then added two additional pieces that extended from the sides to the 3-foot center rod I added. The finishing touches were the two green fishing nets that we attached to the frame with tie-rods, and a 100-feet of that thick yellow nylon rope we borrowed from the golf course one night. We were now ready to give it a try.

We headed out the next night to the golf course with our new golf rake and a fishing gunnysack, which we were sure we'd fill up with golf balls. We dropped the net in the lake and walked around the lake until the rope wouldn't reach anymore and we started to dredge the lake. When the net reached us we were pretty anxious to see what how many golf balls we got. We pulled it up and it stunk like something rotten because we had dredged up so much mud. We had to shake the net in the water to rinse the mud off the balls in the net. After about 30 seconds of rinsing we pulled up the rake and there it was, white gold. This is what me and my brother called the white shimmering golf balls glowing in the net because they were all wet, which made them all look brand new. To us it was gold because we saw dollar signs when we saw all of those golf balls. That night we came home with about 300 golf balls and the gunnysack was pretty heavy.

We dredged the local golf course for about a year, but we then moved and had to find another golf course to dredge. We found one that was close and it had easy access in south Huntington Beach. The first night we dredged this new golf course was a night I still remember because on our very first pull we got close to 200- hundred golf balls! We continued for another 45 minutes and had to stop because our gunnysack was full to the brim. We pulled in over 800 golf balls in 45 minutes and that’s what you call WHITE GOLD!

The beauty of this small business was that there was absolutely NO waste. The brand new balls we sold by the dozen and the others we through into a big giant tub that we would accumulate until we got to 1000 golf balls. We did this because we sold these for 10 cents a piece to a guy who stripped them and resold them to the golf ranges.

So you can see that had we continued on we could have made millions. We would have contracted with all of these golf courses to dredge their lakes and sell the good ones back to them to be sold as experienced golf balls in the pro shop, and the remaining golf balls as range balls or shag balls.