Inside Comments: Steve Turcotte

If you lose your ball this guy might find it

I’ve known golfers who have worked hard to find golf balls during their rounds of golf. They find time to

hit their shots, but sometimes seem more interested in finding balls off the course to refill their supply.

And then there is Dennis Stiles. Stiles, who lives in Yuma, Ariz., is a golf ball hound. I have never seen

anything like it. I have played a couple of rounds with him, and he is a solid 10 handicap, but he is a scratch player when it comes to looking for golf balls around the course.

This is something he has done wherever he plays and is something he is quite good at. During a round we played in Yuma, he picked up 45 golf balls and he said he normally looks a little harder than he did this day. He recalled one day a while back when he went for a walk on the golf course and came away with 250 balls.

Some courses are easier than others to find golf balls. On courses which have no trees or no scrub brush, finding golf balls is like finding a needle in the haystack. At other courses where there is ample amount of desert, finding stray golf balls is easy stuff.

You will see Stiles driving his golf cart during a round of golf, pulling up to his ball and then hitting it.

Then he will take off for the sides of the fairway with his ball retriever in hand doing his thing. As we looked for errant balls during this round, Stiles walked through the desert like it was no big deal. “Aren’t you scared of the snakes,” I asked. “Not really. I think they might be scared of me.”

He also owns a Polaris RZR off road vehicle that he drives around the edges of the local golf course to

look for balls during the time he isn’t playing. Dennis and his ball retriever always seem to find the right place to look.

It is all like a scavenger hunt. Or an Easter egg hunt as he puts it. He has found all kinds of different golf

balls from the top of the line Titleist Pro-V1’s to Top Flites. He has amassed hundreds of balls in a storage

shed and put them all in bags and egg containers. When his friends from out of town head to Mesa to snowbird for the winter, one of their first stops is at Casa Stiles to get some golf balls.

Put it this way, Dennis Stiles will never have to pay for a golf ball again. Even if he loses shot after shot

during a round of golf, he has an endless supply.

“It’s been a funny hobby,” Dennis said. “It’s always fun to have a look for golf balls whether I’m playing or not.”

Steve Turcotte is editor of Inside Golf Newspaper. He can be reached at sdturcotte@comcast.net.