The average golfer greets an errant tee shot with the kind of phrase a family newspaper must replace with asterisks and ampersands.
Jeff Spriegel Sr. cheerfully welcomes any wayward golf shot.
Hooks. Slices. Flubs that splash into water hazards and mishits that skip into thick rough. Spriegel embraces them all because without them he couldn’t do something he loves nearly as much as playing the sport:
Hunting for lost golf balls.
The lanky Kenmore resident stalks Sheridan Park Golf Course in the Town of Tonawanda, collecting dozens of golf balls daily and 20,844 for the season.
“Everybody makes bad shots,” Spriegel said from a seat in the clubhouse. “Even the best golfers.”
He scoops up whatever he finds during his regular morning round before he returns for an afternoon collection effort focused on the most fruitful areas to search.
Spriegel bags the balls and brings them home to clean them, dry them and pack them up in boxes that can fill much of his basement and garage.
He does it all before, about once a month, ferrying the boxes downtown to volunteers from Bunkers in Baghdad, a Buffalo-based charity that ships donated golf balls and equipment to service members and veterans worldwide.
Of course, there are plenty of ways to support a worthy cause that don’t require this much time and effort.
Spriegel’s wife said she understands why some might see his ball harvesting as a compulsion.
“The collecting is just who he is — part of who he is,” Kim Spriegel said.
The 69-year-old has played golf since he was 9 years old, when it offered a chance to bond with his father, Clyde.
“I had that undivided time with him,” Spriegel said.
He said his mother, Shirley, carded a hole in one at 79 and, more importantly, demonstrated the value of public service as an active volunteer.
Spriegel, a retired school psychologist, said he can’t remember ever buying new golf balls to use because he plays with what he finds or those he receives as a gift.
There’s a competitive side to his scrounging, with friends egging him on to find more balls in a round or a day.
“It’s just a nice distraction for me and now it’s got a mission, which is part of why I enjoy doing it so much,” Spriegel said.
Most of the time, Spriegel ferrets out balls from Sheridan Park, a challenging public layout off Sheridan Drive. Weather permitting, he plays seven mornings a week.
Spriegel keeps an eye out for lost balls while waiting for his playing partners to hit. This usually turns up a couple dozen balls.
After finishing 18 holes, Spriegel goes back for a solitary, dedicated search that focuses on the likeliest spots along the course.
“You’ve got to be kind of like a mountain goat to get to some of the spots I go to to get golf balls,” he said.
For example, at hole No. 1, Spriegel points out a sloping thicket of small trees and bushes on the left side of the fairway. He once found 89 balls in one day there.
“So 89 guys started their day with the hopes and dreams of a good round,” Spriegel said, “And it’s ruined instantly on the first shot.”
Farther down the first hole, on the right, is a marshy area with shoulder-high reeds and grasses.
On a chilly recent morning, Spriegel, wearing his signature orange hooded sweatshirt and baseball cap, stood along the edge and reached in with an extendable ball retriever to pluck out first one ball and then another.
He keeps a first-aid kit in his bag to help with the scratches and cuts he gets.
Spriegel credits familiarity with how golfers play the course, clear vision and a willingness to spend hours at the task. He jokes that he can see one if just a pair of dimples on the ball are visible.
For one ball he pulled out of a murky water hazard, Spriegel quipped, “That was probably a dimple and a half.”
Spriegel is a prominent figure at Sheridan Park. Other players give used balls and clubs to him to donate to Bunkers in Baghdad and course employees fully support what he’s doing, said Dallas Ford, a town recreation attendant.
Spriegel sells some of his balls to friends and playing partners to help pay for supplies such as bleach, Magic Eraser cleaning pads and gloves.
He reuses the bags golfers use to hold ice and cans of beer because, Spriegel said, they’re perfect for retaining about 100 golf balls.
Spriegel estimates he collected about 20,440 golf balls this season, as of Monday, with a one-day record of 784.
Spriegel fills his car with bags of muddy balls before taking them out at home for cleaning.
“It’s sort of like that old show, ‘Sanford and Son,’ where the dad had that car and there was all that junk,” Kim Spriegel said.
Before they’re cleaned off in the basement sink, the balls have a distinctly unpleasant odor that Kim Spriegel compares to unwashed hockey equipment.
Boxes of balls also take up a lot of room in her basement. But she said she’s learned to accept the time her husband devotes to golf ball collecting.
“I am happy he does it. I do occasionally feel almost a little jealous. ‘The golf balls are getting a lot of attention today and I don’t feel good today,’ ” Kim Spriegel said, laughing. “He is dedicated to getting that job done.”
That job is supporting Bunkers in Baghdad, the charity founded in 2008 by Joe Hanna, a lawyer and Goldberg Segalla partner.
Hanna said he was inspired after seeing soldiers stationed in Iraq hitting golf balls on “60 Minutes” and, later, reading in Golf magazine that this is a favorite form of stress relief for them.
Over 15 years, Bunkers in Baghdad has collected 14.8 million used golf balls and 1.5 million clubs and distributed them to military members and veterans in all 50 states and 79 countries.
“We’re just sending them a slice of home,” Hanna said.
Hanna highlighted the contributions of Dick Nelson, a legally blind veteran in Jamestown who has taken in, washed and donated about 300,000 balls and 25,000 clubs over the past dozen years — “He is phenomenal,” Hanna said — along with Spriegel and other dedicated donors.
This is a transition time of year for Spriegel, with most Buffalo-area courses shutting down for the season.
But Spriegel doesn’t let that stop him.
He spends much of the winter in Largo, Fla., in a condo on a golf course.
Yes, Spriegel said, “I do the same thing in Florida.”
He snagged 14,000 balls during last year’s snowbird sojourn. Between the roughly 250,000 balls he’s collected up here, and 40,000 he’s taken in down there, Spriegel is pushing 300,000 balls in all.
It’s something he can’t imagine stopping.
“I have a chiropractor, a massage therapist, a doctor, a urologist, an eye doctor,” Spriegel said, “and I go to them, and I say, ‘Let’s start out by letting you know that your job is to keep me on the golf course.’ “
___
(c) 2023 The Buffalo News
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
