What Kind of Golf Ball is the Best Ball for Me?

            Man. Is that a loaded question.

They’re all loaded questions, it seems.

            …

On the other hand, it might also be true that the equation for finding the best ball, per your own personal game, is far simpler than has occasionally been reported.

            Sure. A professional club and ball fitting, by revealing which ball spins in which way and reacts to which club, given your own particular swing tendencies, might get you three to five, possibly even ten, extra yards on your best drives. Or keep you slightly straighter on your worst.

            But the greater truth here is, we’re human. And we do and think things in rather predictably human ways. And if we can accept that length and accuracy are not all that’s on our minds when we buy a golf ball. Nor is it all that’s at stake when we take out a glistening new ball, place it on the tee, and attempt to bash it to hell and gone. We might possibly find ourselves a better way.

            My father-in-law, in a conversation about which direction this blog might go, mentioned a fascinating statistic to me. The week after Tiger Woods first switched from his traditional Nike ball to a Bridgestone ball (the B330-S at the 2016 Hero World Challenge), sales for that ball went through the roof. The CEO of the company mentioned in a press conference that even before the ball was put into play that Tiger had made their investment per his endorsement worth it to the company. A transcendent player had spoken of their ball as the best. That’s all it took. And the ball sold more than it ever had before.

            Tiger’s swing isn’t my swing, though. Or yours. It isn’t really even that similar to any other guys swings on tour. The statistics that define a swing, between any two given players, will always be different. Like fingerprints or retinas. At the core of it, swings are more akin to biology than technique.

            So why did we all rush out and buy that ball?

            I’m not going to answer that question.

I mean.

It’s not like I know the answer.

I’m not saying I know the answer and I’m not going to tell you.

What I’m saying is that I don’t know the answer, maybe no one really does, and that I don’t think the answer really matters.

            Because of these things:

            Between the gifts and the donations and the balls I’ve found on the course/beach/barn/flower beds, I haven’t bought as many balls as one might expect per how often there is a golf club is in my hands, and, because of that, I’ve found a rather happy relationship with the balls I own. A happy equilibrium. Equally with the ones I use for practice around the house, the ones I play on the course, and, because the joke is literally right there, the ones the Good Lord gave me.

            Flashback. Six years ago. Father’s Day.

            We live three blocks from the Puget Sound and, six years ago, we happened to own the world’s greatest dog. His name was Clifford. His ashes are in a cherry wood box that sits in the highest place of honor in our home, the center of our largest piece of furniture, a handmade bookshelf. (I have found that if you own enough books that the only way to fit them all somewhere is to commandeer a wall in your house and just build a monstrosity.) Also, as a clarification regarding my dear Clifford’s distinction in my house and in my life, I would add that my beloved grandfather’s ashes are in a small potted cactus on the opposite side of the room.

            That sounds crazy.

I’m not a lunatic.

            …

            I can’t back that statement up with any evidence.

But I would argue that I’m not a lunatic with this. There is a genuinely meaningful story behind the cactus. And my grandfather’s ashes, along with my dog’s, are the only two sets of ashes in our house.

            I just really loved that dog is all I’m trying to say.

            And as such, befittingly, the best dog in the world was taken to the best dog park in the world. Practically daily. A park that was and is in an area of beach, mostly fenced off, on the sound. I say mostly fenced because you can’t fence off the ocean. Not in the summer. Not on the sound. Because the shore is fairly steep where the tide rolls in and out often. Meaning that, when the water level drops a few feet in the fall, or the winter, or the spring, the distance away from the shore the water travels is relatively small. If the shore were a vertical drop, the water wouldn’t move away from the shore at all. Steep equals a little. Flat, a lot. You get it. For most of the year it moves in and out forty or fifty yards, at most. But in the summer, when the tide drops quite a bit more, and the water level just a bit farther, the relative flatness of the sound’s next tidal zone comes into play. The water rushes away from the shore, then, for what has been described quite accurately as nearly a mile. The moral of the story is this. You can’t build a mile-long, mostly submerged, fence for dogs in the amount of time you have when the tide rushes out like that, with no budget or scuba gear, in a vain attempt to keep labradoodles from running amok on the next beach over. Because who cares. Who needs that kind of hassle? How could that endeavor be worth anything to anyone?

            You can, however, in the meantime, walk with the world’s greatest dog a very long ways farther than usual, because, at that time of year, on Father’s Day, in June, the beach can virtually go on forever.

And if the beach goes on forever, you might walk far enough to find over two-hundred top shelf golf balls. Just laying there. Nestled in the sand. Like some unbelievable fantasy. Like Narnia. Or Oz. If the munchkins were aerodynamically engineered and had names like Titleist and Callaway.

Well.

Maybe you can’t.

But I did that day. Because there had, I learned later, been the night before, a few select players from the local private school’s golf team who had hit balls from the deck of one of their parent’s yachts into the dark distant shore. They had made a game of hitting hundreds and hundreds of ProV1s and B330s and Pentas, and on and on and on, off into the banks of the extended and abandoned dog park beach.

It took me five trips in cargo shorts, filling my pockets and Clifford’s poop bags with golf balls, before the beach was clear of balls.

Back at home, it took two five-gallon buckets to hold my treasure.

That was six years ago and I still haven’t run out of balls.

Thanks in large part to my family and friends and neighbors who periodically drop off more and more balls, in response to my renowned love of the game, to refill whatever may have gone missing, or broken, or just gotten too worn and old.

Which leads me to my final report and thoughts.

The joy you recover by relieving yourself of any worry for a lost ball is tremendous.

And though you might not be able to just go out and find hundreds of golf balls laying on the beach for free. (Just in case you wondered, the difference between each of the different brands I found that day was negligible. Even amongst the new balls I owned already, bought later, or received as gifts. Furthermore, the only factors I’ve ever noticed to make a remarkable difference on performance were, in this order, poor strikes, age, temperature of the ball/environment, and finally the original intended quality of the manufactured product.) The end of the thought is this: You can absolutely alleviate the tension that arises when you lose a $4 or $5 ball in the blackberry bushes/swamp/lake/houses/parking lot/highway/et al. And that is such an important piece of information.

Because pain in the game should be avoided. On every level. At any tier. Always.

Bottom line?

If you take into account the number of rounds you play per year. Multiplied by how many balls you regularly make unplayable per round, either by loss or bouncing off the pavement/tree trunks/golf carts/grounds crew. And you then divide that number by how much money you actually want to spend on something that isn’t going to last forever anyway…

You might find balance.

The best balls for the least amount of money right now, I truly believe, are the recycled balls you can find on Amazon. They’re perfectly good balls. With the old trashed covers removed, and replaced with shiny new ones. I’ve bought the ProV1s multiple times and have never been disappointed. But you can find practically any top shelf style you can think of. And your worry about losing a ball nearly goes away entirely.

If we’re going to maximize our enjoyment of the game, then losing our worries should be our top priority.

Someday we might be the kind of people who truly don’t care if $5 goes sailing irretrievably into the center of a hazard. And if that’s you now then that’s a wonderful truth to know, God bless you, and I can’t wait until that’s me too. But if it’s not you now, like it’s not me, then we should always look for ways to be happier with our balls. Because our balls, however temporary, are important to our joy. And our ability to enjoy the greatest game that has ever been.

Amen.