Three Hundred Million Golf Balls

     In July of 2013 I read an article by John McPhee called "The Orange Trapper" in The New Yorker.  Anything written by John McPhee gets my attention--and if it's in The New Yorker, still one of the meatiest, most literate publications in America, so much the better.
     You can never tell what McPhee will write about, and the unpredictability is part of what makes wandering around with him so much fun.  You just never know what's going to get a share of his attention, which then claims a share of yours.  He's written famously about Princeton basketball star Bill Bradley long before he became Senator Bill Bradley.  He's written about the Jersey pine barrens, cattle rustling, Alaska--all New Yorker pieces that worked themselves into twenty-eight books to date.  One of them in 1999, Annals of the Former World (on geology), won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. And he's been teaching a course that has evolved into Creative Nonfiction at Princeton since 1975.  
     "The Orange Trapper" turned out to be about lost golf balls.  The title is actually the name of a ball retriever golfers use to fish their balls out of ponds and lakes--or perhaps to reach balls resting beyond a fence and just sitting there waiting for someone to rescue them.  McPhee is 85 now and gave up the game of golf sixty-one years ago, when he was 24, though more recently he began stopping by fences separating golf courses from public roads in order to pick up abandoned balls.  Thus his need for an orange trapper.
     I am a duffer and play golf just to get out from behind my desk for a few hours a week.  Sometimes I surprise myself with well-struck balls and accurate putts, but mostly I just like being on golf courses.  I'm happy there, grateful that the game is in my life.
     McPhee's essay taught me two things.  First, that there is a program called First Tee that has taught the game of golf to more than seven million mostly inner-city kids--who need golf balls.  Second, that golfers lose their balls at the rate of three hundred million a year.  (At one hole surrounded by water at TPC Sawgrass in Jacksonville, Florida, golfers put nearly three hundred balls a day into the water.)  To keep up with the demand, Titleist, the manufacturer of what McPhee calls "the Prada golf ball," makes about a million balls a day.
     And so for the past two years, I've been rescuing golf balls around my home course, Scotland Yards  in Dade City, Florida, and giving them to the First Tee kids--over five thousand so far.  And counting.  Happily, I've already worn out two orange trappers.