Americans lose 300,000,000 golf balls a year, and I'm partly to blame

I took up golf three years ago. My doctor told me I didn't have enough frustration and insanity in my life.

Actually, I wanted to better understand a sport I cover sometimes. I wanted to do something that involves at least a little exercise. (I walk 99 percent of the time I golf.) And I needed a new world to conquer after winning countless tough-man contests.

What I quickly found out is what they tell you about learning a foreign language. It's a lot easier when you're younger.

As a round-hole, square-peg kind of person, teaching set-up and form to me is like giving marriage counseling to Larry King. It doesn't take. I absorb things verrrrrry slooooooowly.

For instance, that deal about keeping your eye on the ball until after you've hit it is something I think I just accepted the other day after three years of this lunacy. You know what? It seems to help.

Oh yeah, the golf balls. What I did quickly learn about golf is it would have been idiotic for me to spend good money on them when I was just going to hit them into places where human beings have never ventured.

This New York Times blog piece by Bill Pennington resonated with me. Pennington wrote:

No one knows for sure how many golf balls are lost each year worldwide, though the total in the United States is estimated at 300 million. Hundreds of thousands of golf balls are lost or abandoned every day in lakes, ponds, forests, wetlands, deserts, backyards, gardens, parking lots, cemeteries, on rooftops and at the bottom of woodchuck holes.

Just yesterday, I deposited one in the lagoon in front of the No. 6 green at the Jones Park course in Cedar Rapids. It really made me mad, too, because I actually hit a great (for me) shot. Which means it got airborne.

It felt so good as I blasted it from the fairway skyward to the green. I was half-expecting my first career eagle. Or at least a chance at a bogey. But the ball must have hung up in the wind (yeah, right) and landed just short of the bank in front of the green.

I thought I had the lagoon cleared. I may have said something out loud after the shot. Something, you know, Tiger Woods-ish. Which is the only way I'll compare my game to his until both of us are in nursing homes. Not even then, really.

If I'd had a playing partner, I would have used better self-discipline when it came to blurting my disgust. I'm used to going out on the course alone to save myself the vast potential for embarrassment, but I find I play a little better when I have a partner. I slow down, have a little (PG-rated) conversation, and enjoy the experience more. If you're in Eastern Iowa, have a delightful personality, and can pretend to look the other way when one of my shots terrifies a grazing goose or someone on a neighboring fairway, let's play.

Of course, that flies in the face of my well-crafted image as a troubled loner. So forget I said it.

Now, about the lost golf balls thing. I don't lose nearly as many as I used to. So that's progress. But still, I "misplace" them here and there. So I buy recycled golf balls. Someone who lives on the same side of town as I do often has bags of them on his front lawn for bargain prices, like $10 for 30 of them, and they're 30 balls of the same brand in good condition.

It's so much easier to recycle when you're getting a good price, isn't it?

There was more I had to babble about this, but I've lost my train of thought. That oil spill thing ... very troublesome.