Iraq insurgents could get shelled by local golf balls
For most of us who play golf, our biggest fear is hitting a ball
out-of-bounds, in the water, or into an unplayable lie.
For our soldiers in Iraq, the biggest fear is attempting to
retrieve them. In fact, most of the time it’s not worth it,
especially those golf balls that were hit into the range of enemy
fire or the ones that landed near a makeshift bomb or mine.
Iraq insurgents could get shelled by local golf balls
For most of us who play golf, our biggest fear is hitting a ball out-of-bounds, in the water, or into an unplayable lie.
For our soldiers in Iraq, the biggest fear is attempting to retrieve them. In fact, most of the time it’s not worth it, especially those golf balls that were hit into the range of enemy fire or the ones that landed near a makeshift bomb or mine.
When our soldiers have found some spare time that is about as close to golf as they get; one good whack and forget about looking for it.
That was the case until some local Hollister residents from the Ridgemark community found out after tuning into the radio golf talk show Hooked on Golf that the little white balls were a hard commodity to come by in Baghdad.
The couples first told the story to Ridgemark Head Pro Chris Branon, who then told Ridgemark General Manager Eric Deitz.
“We have 1,117 homes here,” Deitz said. “We figured everyone and their brother has a bucket of golf balls in their garage. So we came up with a goal of donating 50,000 golf balls to our troops in Iraq.”
Before long the goal had been met, as the idea of sending golf balls to our troops in Iraq spread like wildfire throughout the Ridgemark community, and in what seemed like the blink of an eye the local story had captured the attention of the national media.
“It really mushroomed when the San Jose Mercury did a story on it,” Deitz said. Before long I had national news crews all over the country talking to me.”
When other people heard about the idea, they started donating golf balls in droves. At one point San Jose Municipal Golf Course set up a golf ball drop off area, and they were so inundated that they had to stop doing it shortly thereafter.
“It was overwhelming,” Deitz said. “But it was a natural for this community. This community always comes together.”
In a short amount of time the goal of rounding up 50,000 used balls was surpassed by nearly 100,000.
The next concern was how they were going to ship so many golf balls overseas.
“I’ve had a good relationship with people at Titleist for a long time. They agreed to donate all of the packaging to ship the balls in and DHL agreed to handle the shipping for free,” Deitz said. “It would have cost $35 a box just to ship them over there.”
In all, some 480 boxes containing 300 balls a piece were shipped. Many of them haven’t arrived at the undisclosed location in Baghdad yet, but they will soon.
“Part of the reason we decided to do this was because we knew they could hit the golf balls only once because they were hitting them in sniper-infested areas,” Dietz said. “Trying to go out and retrieve balls in a situation like that is pretty tough. But everywhere you go, no matter where you are, there are a lot of golf nuts out there who love the sport and we thought this was a great way to give them a small sense of being back home.”
Inside each box is a small flier that reads: Thanks from the residents of San Benito County and the City of Hollister. There is also a Ridgemark logo on the flier as well as the logo of all the armed forces.
“We just wanted to say thank you from the community,” Deitz said. “A lot of the balls were logoed with everything from our logo on them to Pebble Beach. Maybe they’ll hit them at the enemy.”
