Randon Thoughts About Some Golf Stats

According to the website golfplayed dot com, there are 38,864 golf courses in the world, and of those, 16,752 are located in the US. Japan is in 2nd place with 3,169 courses. Scotland, widely agreed to be the birthplace of golf, is in 10th place with 614 courses. That's about 1 golf courses for every 200 square miles in the US, every 500 square miles in Scotland, and every 35 square miles in Japan.

An estimated 1 to 2 billion golf balls are made annually. That's roughly 25,000 to 50,000 balls per course, per year. Where do they all go? The folks in the golf subreddit, the best experts I know, say: driving ranges, water hazards, golf bags, garages, Bigfoot. Perhaps the #1 answer is; Yeah, I don't know either, that's a whole bunch of golf balls.

How many golf carts are there in the world? Or perhaps I should ask, after searching and searching for even one estimate: why is no one willing to answer this question?  But I see that the golf cart industry is about $2.5 billion a year and growing. At $5,000 to $15,000 a cart, that's hundreds of thousands of new carts a year. 

Hundreds of thousands a year. That's a lot.

Golf carts have been selling well since the 1950's. I'd say there have to be millions of golf carts out there. Not necessarily mostly on golf courses full-time either, because is there room for all of them on golf courses? Not all at once. I've seen a lot of golf carts on movie lots, in movies about movies.

And here's where I start to get paranoid: I've been paying rather close attention to electric vehicles for about a decade now. I had never been one of those Who-holds-back-the-electric-car guys until now, when I think about all those big shots playing golf, the guys who call the shots, riding around in millions of electric golf carts for the past half century or so. Electric, because almost all golf carts are electric, because golfers, just like the rest of, would rather not be bothered by the noise and stink of internal combustion.

All those big shots playing all that golf, riding around in those constant reminders that electricity provides perfectly good, reliable transportation, all the way back to the Eisenhower administration...

 

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Colorful Little Icons on Golf Balls

I've been in 46 of these 50 United States -- all but Hawaii, Washington, Idaho and Maine. And so I've seen a lot of messed-up stuff. 

But I honestly do not know whether I've seen a city with more mobile homes per capita than Anchorage, Alaska. Lots and lots of huge, luxurious houses, and lots and lots of huge trailer parks. I haven't seen Anchorage in 16 years, so it might look completely different now, who knows. Not me, is who. 

Anyway. In the middle of the night about 20 years ago, I was walking through a large empty lot in Anchorage. Why was I walking through a large empty lot in Anchorage in the middle of  the night? Well, to tell you the truth, i was doing my job. It was a messed-up job. I don't want to talk about that job right now. Maybe after the election. Please vote the straight Democratic ticket. Thank you.

So, I was waking through this big empty lot in the middle of the night, but not in the dark, because it was around the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and in that time of the year in Anchorage the sun does set, but it doesn't stay down for very long and the sky doesn't get completely dark. And I was thinking to myself, Well, I wonder if this is where they're going to put the next big trailer park. And that was when I found a golf ball. 

It's a Wilson TC2 Tour golf ball -- I still have it, I'm looking at it right now -- standard white golf ball, except that on one -- what do you call a corner of a sphere? -- except that in the middle of one ordinarily empty white space, it has a colorful little icon bearing the name of a local golf course, on a little outdoors-y picture suggestive of golf. 

What was it doing there? Well, just now, 20 years later, it has occurred to me that they could have been planning to put up a golf course there, and not a trailer park. According to Google, an 18-hole golf course typically covers 120-200 acres, and can be as small as 30 acres if all of the holes are par 3. That lot was at least 30 acres. Trust me. I grew up in rural northern Indiana, in relatively flat land sectioned into 1-mile, 640-acre squares. I'm autistic. I can calculate acreage.

So for 20 years I've been picturing various ways the golf ball could have gotten there. Maybe there was a golf course just over a stand of trees next to the lot, and maybe somebody hit a bad slice. Or maybe someone got mad and deliberately hit a ball out of the course. Google says that the all-time longest drive is over 550 yards and that lots of players can hit a ball over 300 yards. Making it actually rather easily explainable how golf balls can get all sorts of places. I have no idea where that empty lot was. For all I know it could have been right next to a golf course.

Or maybe, I've been thinking to myself over the decades, some big shot was flying over Anchorage in a helicopter, and tried to hit a mobile home resident with a thrown ball. Or maybe he just accidentally dropped a ball out of the helicopter.

But maybe, I'm thinking to myself now, it got there because they were about to put a golf course there.  

Years later, I had moved to a Midwestern city, and I found a golf ball on or near the sidewalk within a few blocks of my home. It's a Nike Mojo 4 Star. And it too has a colorful little icon in a place the manufacturer had left blank, in this case the icon of a local of a utility workers' union. 

And in this case the nearest golf course is more than a mile away, so this little ball has more splainin to do than the first one.

But wait -- let me search for driving ranges on Google Maps... Aha! More easily splainable now! But wait some more... Seems most or all of these driving ranges are indoor. I don't know anything about golf, almost.

These 2 balls, until several days ago, had been about the extent of my 21st-century experience of golf. Are Wilson TC2's and Nike Mojo 4-Star's good golf balls? I don't even know enough about golf for the Google results about these golf balls to tell me whether they're good or bad or expensive or cheap. I have no frame of reference. I have learned, just now, that Nike stopped making golf balls years ago.

Since these were the only 2 golf balls I had seen up close in the 21st century, I assumed that this meant that these days, golf balls all have fascinating colorful little icons put onto them by someone other than the manufacturer. Also, I had done searches for used golf balls on Amazon and seen still more fascinating colorful little icons. 

And so -- the other day I went into the local used -sporting-goods store and bought a plastic box of a dozen used golf balls. 

Why? you ask. Do you always know know why you do everything you do? If so, you and I are very, very different. But yeah, it was partly because I was looking forward to a fascinating little rainbow of those colorful icons. 

I shoulda dug through the bin of individual balls next to the packaged ones. On most of the 12 balls I got, 11 Titleist Pro V1 and Titleist V1X, the big empty white space is left empty. A couple of them have what looks like magic marker stripes in one quadrant -- maybe because "Oh look we both brought Titlesists marked 4" ? -- and 2 of them have decidedly drab, uncolorful little corporate logos, so drab and uncolorful that  you could miss them on your first look. No way you could miss the logo for the golf course or the one for the utilities workers' union on the golf balls I've had for years.

So which is the rule, and which is the aberration -- the 2 golf balls I've had for years, each with a colorful logo, or the 12 I just bought, very much less colorful?

How many times must I tell you that  I DON' KNOW NUTHIN BOUT NO GOLF?! You tell me which is the aberration.

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