The Seven Stages of Looking for a Lost Golf Ball

You follow through one-handed and lean listlessly to the left as you watch your ball sail wayward. If you were in a tour event, you’d have every marshal on the tee emphatically pointing their yellow signs to the right in an effort to avoid an injury. Another marshal would track it down in seconds, throw a flag in the ground, and make a reassuring gesture toward the teebox. You’d give a signed glove to a bloodied patron, hack it back into play, and be on your merry way.

But, as evidenced by this shot, you’re not at a tour event. The ball sails right, disappearing from sight at an alarming rate. You hear a distinct thwack of a tree in the distance. Leaves drop off 6 different branches, diverting your attention away from a potential falling ball. A flock of birds flutter out in a frenzy like they’re fleeing the scene of a crime.

In many ways they are.

Stage 1: Reassurance

Your sinking feeling is temporarily buoyed as your playing partner chimes in. “I’ve got eyes on it.”

You shrug and nod with an apprehensive optimism, remembering the lost ball quad he took two holes prior.

Stage 2: Anxiety

The cart ride up to the search zone is a long 2 minutes. You talk about anything you can to take your mind off the task that ensues. Your kids. Baseball. Your kids’ baseball team.

Then you pull up to the approximate landing zone, and reality sets in.

Stage 3: Panic

You both step out of the cart and scan the fescue along the tree line. Nothing.

Panic starts to set in like my mom in a shopping mall in 1997 when I hid in the clothes rack in Filenes and she had management make an announcement on the PA system.

If only it were that easy.

Stage 4: Analytics

After a fruitless search that’s flirting with the three minute limit, you start to do some math. This is where you both thought it was headed, but you definitely hit it further than this. Opening the face and bailing out like Billy Zane in Titanic definitely won’t take any distance off your stock.

Let’s check the trees 30 yards up.

Stage 5: Delusion

When you can’t find your ball in the spot it actually went, you start convincing yourself of some insanely positive outcomes. Before you know it, you’re checking even further up. 50 yards. 75. You laugh to keep from crying. Check the greenside bunker. The hole. Because you never know.

But you do know. Deep down, you know it’s over. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you, your playing partner halfheartedly assisting with the search, and the group waiting on the tee can all move on.

Stage 6: Denial

But you can’t move on. You head back to the original spot you started looking as reality starts to wrap its cold, hairy arms around you. Kick some grass and traipse over the same spots you walked over 6 times just in case your ball wants to make an appearance this time.

Stage 7: Acceptance

After a grueling search, you call it. It’s gone. The ball belongs to the trees now. Or the fescue. Or the leaves. Or the burrow of a small animal. Hope they play Vices with 2 blue dots.  

You drop a new ball and hit your shot to keep things moving. Snap hook into the trees. As you walk back to the cart angrily, your buddy assures you that he has eyes on it.

Two Inches Short is a place where amateur golfers can unapologetically be themselves. It’s where we can all relate to the greatest game ever played at a level we can all understand.

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