Picking up a Ball in Play

[mvmac]

You bet. Funny story:

Hooked my tee ball on the first hole the other day and it ended up just in front of an adjacent green. Old guy ball hawk type walks up to it as I'm getting close and I'm getting ready to say something when he goes to steal it, but he just looks at it and says loudly in an old codger voice "SNELL. SNELL?!?!?! What is that? Did your kids buy you those for Christmas?"

Ha, another good reason to play Snell balls.

[Golfingdad]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mvmac

Ha, another good reason to play Snell balls.

Better believe it ... its even in my review :

Quote:

Aesthetics

The ball looks sharp to me.  A two-toned cursive "Snell" logo along with a simple alignment line with the model name - not unlike a ProV1.  Some might not like the size of the Snell logo - it is bigger than most ball text - but I do like it. Anything that helps distinguish my ball from the masses, and thus lowers the chance that Joe Sunday Hacker will mistake my ball for his and walk off with it is a plus in my book.

[sjduffers]

Some people are not necessarily looking to snatch a ball, but are completely clueless as to where their own ball went.  To wit: yesterday a par 3 is alongside a par 5 going in the other direction. I am playing the par 5 and my ball lies smack in the middle of my fairway (not to the left side where it would be closer to the par 3). The par 5 tee box is way further back up the hill beyond the par 3 green, so my ball is just about even with the par 3 tee box, maybe 15 yds or so in front of it.

This dimwit tees off, gets in his cart (which is to the right of the par 3, so completely across the par 3 hole from where the par 5 is), and starts driving across the hole to the left, heading straight to my ball, which again is maybe 15 yards in front of his tee box, but 30 yards further left. As I am walking down my fairway and see the whole scene unfolds, I gesture at him the "no, don't you dare sign, it's mine" and he loops around, looks some more and comes back to it again. Same sign. He still gets down, examine it and finally leaves it alone, drives back to his right (closer to his own hole) and finds his ball, next to a tree that he must have hit on his tee shot, and is maybe 10 yards in front of his tee box, at least 30-40 yards away from where he was looking first!  Unbelievable.

So, he looks where he sees a ball, not where his ball is likely to be. It's like the old joke of a guy looking down on the ground nearby a street lamp. His buddy asks: "did you lose something here?" He replies: "No, I lost it over there, but the light is better here!".  Rimshot!

[Duff McGee]

Did you walk back to the tee box and hit 3 off the tee?

[SavvySwede]

Was playing with @billchao today and we let a single play through after we had teed off on the ninth hole. The hole is facing into the sun and the single proceeds to play the ball I had just put on the right side of the fairway, somehow not seeing his ball lying in equally good position on the left side of the fairway. To make matters worse I was playing a prov1 and his ball was some low end Nike ball. Unbelievable.

[sjduffers]

Did you walk back to the tee box and hit 3 off the tee?

Are you talking to me (post just above yours)?  Because if so, why would I? I said he eventually left my ball alone.  Even if had picked the ball up and drove away with it (he was in a cart and I was walking), I would have witnessed him picking up the ball and he would have been an outside agency taking the ball.  Rule 18-1 clearly states the case: replace the ball (substitute a new one if necessary, as per Note 1) and no penalty.

I think you may be a little too hung up on the lost ball thing...

[big stoke]

Are you talking to me (post just above yours)?  Because if so, why would I? I said he eventually left my ball alone.  Even if had picked the ball up and drove away with it (he was in a cart and I was walking), I would have witnessed him picking up the ball and he would have been an outside agency taking the ball.  Rule 18-1 clearly states the case: replace the ball (substitute a new one if necessary, as per Note 1) and no penalty. I think you may be a little too hung up on the lost ball thing...

Pretty sure this was adressed to the OP.

[Duff McGee]

Are you talking to me (post just above yours)?  Because if so, why would I? I said he eventually left my ball alone.  Even if had picked the ball up and drove away with it (he was in a cart and I was walking), I would have witnessed him picking up the ball and he would have been an outside agency taking the ball.  Rule 18-1 clearly states the case: replace the ball (substitute a new one if necessary, as per Note 1) and no penalty. I think you may be a little too hung up on the lost ball thing...

Why would you think I was talking to you? You just said it would make no sense and I didn't quote you.....

[sjduffers]

To be fair, you didn't quote anybody so it's pretty hard to know who you are responding to when you say you... and since i was describing a situation in the post just above your reply/question, it was not unreasonable on my part. That said, my apologies and carry on.

[InTheRough]

That would make it essentially the same thing. Did he look at it at all? BUT- It was a 3'some. The one guy playing from our fairway, and the other two going to two balls in their fairway. So I figured they were all poking around the area looking for that guys ball before going back. And where that guy was playing from was nowhere close to where mine was heading.

I happened to play Northampton Valley on Saturday, 9:06 tee time. My playing partner and I were playing from the blues and both ended up right around that same spot. I was right under it and the other guy was just right of it in the 12th rough. It took about 4 minutes of searching to find the other guys ball as it was sitting down in the rough. Their fairways are close together so you are going to get a lot of people in the same area. It could just be they thought your ball was theirs or it could be that yours was somewhere further back or up. I hate losing a ball in an area where I know it could be found but there have been numerous occasions where we thought someone else might have hit our ball only to find it a minute or so later. In fact that is what happened with the other guys tee shot on 11 on Saturday. We found it after we thought the other guys might have played it.

Love the greens at Northampton Valley. They are such a nice pace for a public course. I don't think there is anything semi-private about them anymore. What I hate is their tee times are 8 minutes then 7 minutes. They pack them in like sardines which makes for a very long round. We had a 5 hour round Saturday with a lot of waiting. We got paired up with 2 guys that shouldn't have been their on a Saturday morning and eventually fell behind. That led to me and the other guy rushing shots trying to keep pace with the group in front of us. Finally on the last par 5 we were done before the other guys had even made it to the green and they said "do you guys want to just go ahead'? Which we gladly took them up on.

High five from Southeastern PA!

Unfortunately people picking up other players balls must be an epidemic around here.  A few weeks ago i had someone pick up my ball that was about 2 yards off of my fairway while i was about 30 yards away waiting for my friend to play his shot.  I had to yell at him that it was mine when he started to pocket it...just crazy

As a side note i've played Northhampton Valley once about 2 years ago and will never go back again.  Greens and layout were great but pace of play was so bad that it took us 5 and 1/2 hours to play 16 holes when we had to stop because it was too dark.  there are too many great courses in the area to put up with that kind of crap

[Duff McGee]

To be fair, you didn't quote anybody so it's pretty hard to know who you are responding to when you say you... and since i was describing a situation in the post just above your reply/question, it was not unreasonable on my part. That said, my apologies and carry on.

I may be an old man in Internet years, but in my day when someone doesn't quote it means they are responding to the op.

[iacas]

I may be an old man in Internet years, but in my day when someone doesn't quote it means they are responding to the op.

The assumption is often that you're responding to the person above you (the post above yours), not to the OP.

Please quote when possible. Which is almost always. If the quoted post is long, trim out any unnecessary parts from the quote.

[Strandly]

I just had some old fart steal my ball right in front of me today, first time it has ever happened.

#17 short par 4 I hit a driver to about 100 yards out.  The old guy was putting and must have saw or heard my ball.  He drove back over to it and looked at it and then grabbed a club and hit it onto the green and putted out.  He saw me looking around in the area where he grabbed it so he quickly took off and went to the next hole and teed off really fast.

I dropped a ball and thinned it over the green so I picked up and went to try and catch him on the next hole.  He obviously realized he took my ball, or knew that I knew he took my ball, and suddenly played faster than he played all day.  When I got to the green on #18 he was heading out into the parking lot and I lost him for good.

I mentioned what happened to the guy in the pro shop and he was cool about it and gave me a replacement ball.  heh  It was still pretty ridiculous though, I wanted to ask this jackass what he thought he was doing...

[Mac62]

During the winter months we get inundated by "snowbirds" (winter visitors from the northern states and Canada, mostly senior citizens), and they're like locusts...they pick the course clean of any and all balls they can find, sometimes while they're still moving.  If you hit a shot and your ball is out of your sight for even a few seconds, there's a good chance that it won't be there by the time you get to it - it'll be in some snowbird's pocket.  Basically if you're not standing directly over a ball with a club in your hand, they consider it fair game.  We've caught them doing it many times, and they're usually very nasty and confrontational about it.

Most of them have a lot of money (they either own second homes here or drive down in big Class A RVs), but they're the tightest bastards I've ever seen.  Our course stocks each cart with 4 tees and 4 bottles of water - if the cart guys aren't standing right there to catch them, the snowbirds will fill their pockets with tees and load their golf bags up with water bottles.  Then they'll go steal range balls off the driving range and use them for the par 3 water holes, because apparently sucking up every unattended ball on the course isn't good enough.  They're so tight there's even a running joke amongst the service industry people in town (waitresses, etc.) - "Know the difference between a snowbird and a canoe?  A canoe will tip once in a while!".

[RayG]

"Did you walk back to the tee box and hit 3 off the tee?" Technically... no. And I was wondering how long it would be before someone asked. Informal match, and it's understood on a weekend morning with plenty of folks playing you don't go back and stack up the next few groups because of someone else's idiocy. At least I did add a stroke- least I could do at the moment.

[Grumpter]

High five from Southeastern PA!

Unfortunately people picking up other players balls must be an epidemic around here.  A few weeks ago i had someone pick up my ball that was about 2 yards off of my fairway while i was about 30 yards away waiting for my friend to play his shot.  I had to yell at him that it was mine when he started to pocket it...just crazy

As a side note i've played Northhampton Valley once about 2 years ago and will never go back again.  Greens and layout were great but pace of play was so bad that it took us 5 and 1/2 hours to play 16 holes when we had to stop because it was too dark.  there are too many great courses in the area to put up with that kind of crap

I haven't fully given up on it yet. I told the guy that I played with that next time we are scoping out the online tee times to find a spot that isn't so crowded. For this particular round he wanted early morning so we were stuck. Going forward I would rather wait until later in the day, pay less and have a shorter round. At this point I rarely ever play a course that doesn't have an online booking system. I want to see how far apart their tee times are and how crowded it will be.

[Gator Hazard]

During the winter months we get inundated by "snowbirds" (winter visitors from the northern states and Canada, mostly senior citizens), and they're like locusts...they pick the course clean of any and all balls they can find, sometimes while they're still moving.  If you hit a shot and your ball is out of your sight for even a few seconds, there's a good chance that it won't be there by the time you get to it - it'll be in some snowbird's pocket.  Basically if you're not standing directly over a ball with a club in your hand, they consider it fair game.  We've caught them doing it many times, and they're usually very nasty and confrontational about it.

Most of them have a lot of money (they either own second homes here or drive down in big Class A RVs), but they're the tightest bastards I've ever seen.  Our course stocks each cart with 4 tees and 4 bottles of water - if the cart guys aren't standing right there to catch them, the snowbirds will fill their pockets with tees and load their golf bags up with water bottles.  Then they'll go steal range balls off the driving range and use them for the par 3 water holes, because apparently sucking up every unattended ball on the course isn't good enough.  They're so tight there's even a running joke amongst the service industry people in town (waitresses, etc.) - "Know the difference between a snowbird and a canoe?  A canoe will tip once in a while!".

About a month ago we were playing on our home course.  The ninth hole is a long par five (long for me), with a blind landing fairway.  You walk over a bridge across a small spring stream to the tee box and there are a ton of trees and bushes on the right hand side.  The fairway begins basically where they are.  So the idea is to get the ball fading into the blind spot in the middle of the fairway.   We teed off, and were on our third shots (well, what should be your third shot, think it was like my 4th or 5th).  Because of the layout it is wise to lay up because you would have to hit a 3 wood or a 5 wood perfectly to clear the small moat in front of the green.  However, even if you are fortunate enough to clear it, there is not a lot of room behind the green so you could lose your ball.  It is maybe 2PM on Saturday and this old fat dude is walking along the spring stream on the right hand side and picking up balls wherever he sees them.  No regard for the people playing (and off the tee no less who may not see him and could have plunked him because they do not expect him to be there), just walking along, in between golfers, ball retriever in hand, getting balls.  Its not close to closing time, he is not a golfer, he is not a person who is just out for a nice walk on a golf course.

That amazed me, I am all for lost balls and honestly I have not bought pack of balls yet being that I live on a course but I could not believe that this guy somehow thought it was okay to just walk the golf course picking up balls right in the middle of play.

[Grumpter]

That amazed me, I am all for lost balls and honestly I have not bought pack of balls yet being that I live on a course but I could not believe that this guy somehow thought it was okay to just walk the golf course picking up balls right in the middle of play.

I can't believe people think it's OK to wander the course when people are playing. We ran into a couple of kids fishing on a course pond on a busy morning. We called the pro shop but they didn't do anything about it. Crazy. It's all fun and games until some kid gets hit by a ball. I'm sure the course would get sued and in todays society the parents would think the course was to blame (which in this rare case I might partially agree since the course did nothing about it).

Earlier this year on a league night a guy had his small/young kid playing in the middle of the fairway as we pull up to the tee box. We yell at the guy to get off the course and he takes his kid sssllllloooooowwwwwwlllllllyyyyy off to the side of the fairway where we yell to him again that they need to move. They were right in a popular spot to miss the fairway. The guy still didn't get it. One of our opponents happened to be a guy that worked at the course and he finally had to drive out and 'convince' the guy he needed to move the F out of the way and get his kid away from the course. The guy with the kid was not happy but what the F was he thinking?