PRESS RELEASES
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Interview presented by Emily Hathaway |
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| Emily: | "Good morning. I am sitting with Glenn Berger, a “Most Dangerous Job” holding man who makes a living from golf balls. Thank you for being with us today Mr. Berger. Please tell us, how do you get your golf balls"? |
| Glenn: | "I dive into lakes at golf courses and retrieve them. Some people call them lake balls because they are used and have spent some time under water." |
| Emily: | "Then, what do you do with the balls you have retrieved"? |
| Glenn: | "I take them back to my warehouse, clean them up, sort them and sell them as wholesale used golf balls My main focus is selling the used golf balls wholesale internationally. I got into this business at an early age selling cheap used golf balls to my neighbors on the golf course. Then I realized I could sell cheap used golf balls in bulk to people on the internet. Now instead of having bulk used golf balls for sale in bags of six hundred I find my customers requesting containers shipped overseas full of 200,000 used lake balls." |
| Emily: | Wow, so you get the balls from all over the place. That’s terrific. Tell us, Mr. Berger, what makes it a “Most Dangerous Job”? |
| Glenn: | "That’s not an aspect I enjoy discussing. But, people always ask, “Aren’t there alligators?” Yes, obviously my job has some drawbacks that would prevent the average man from creating his own start up company. I encounter alligators on a daily basis. I am frequently charged by fish, stabbed by crustaceans, cut up by debris, and shadowed by the big guys. Older alligators tend to understand what I’m doing there. We have a history. It’s the younger alligators that nose, or poke, or nip at me trying to determine if I’m lunch. But, if you want to recycle all the golf balls from the waterways, there are certain roadblocks you must overcome." |
| Emily: | "That sounds like a job I would not like to try. What’s the worst thing that has ever happened to you while retrieving lake balls"? |
| Glenn: | "I’ve had alligators get tangled in my dive gear. I’ve gotten tangled in debris at the bottom of man made lakes. Very often I am contacted by courses to help them retrieve golf carts or player property. Once, I had hooked a cart to a cable/wench system and they didn’t wait for further instructions before trying to hoist it from the water. The cable broke and I nearly lost my head." |
| Emily: | "Incredible! Obviously you’re sitting here in one piece so it all worked out. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today. That is a very interesting career you have fostered." |
Bustin Balls, Golf Balls |
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November 19, 2010 |
By Orlando Salinas Five times a week, Berger puts on scuba gear, an oxygen tank, and a healthy dose of bravado. It’s time to dive. His routine includes a steady circuit of golf course lakes around Florida. The 6’8 Berger really does look like one tall ninja, spending up to 60 hours a week groping in the soft, deep mud, scouring for little white golf balls. It may sound silly. A grown man, ex-military, making his money by retrieving wayward golf balls. On this day, we followed him to the Pelican Preserve Golf Club in Fort Myers. It didn’t take long before Berger disappeared under a cloud of bubbles, his employee working as a spotter, walking around the lakes edge looking for any gators or snakes. Greg Villanueva tells me gators have gotten close to his boss. The smaller ones are the most curious, bumping and nudging Berger as he crawls on his knees, scooping up as many balls as he can. I noticed that golfers on the course don’t quite know what to make of a man with an scuba tank on his back, wading into that nasty, murky lake that they just hit their ball into. The golf pro tells me he gets calls from people who think they’ve seen some sort of monster walking near the green. Berger says he gets a lot of that. |
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After several hours of diving, we head back to the ‘bustinballs.com’ warehouse. The rolling door slides up, and inside I see what turns out to be an efficient use of space. Several dozen heavy duty plastic bags, jam packed with golf balls stacked as high as the ceiling. Berger and Villanueva start unloading their days haul from the back of an old pickup. Bags are opened, and nearly 4,000 golf balls roll out onto a skinny wooden shaft, sounding like 4,000 small claps of white thunder. The getup looks like a hodge-podge of pinball-machine size stations. One is used for sorting, one for washing. Another uses a pulley system to lift the golf balls up and over into another wash station. At the last table, I see Berger dumping a milk crate size box of mostly white balls, and then he begins sorting the days booty by hand. Some are too discolored or sliced and are worth only 2 cents. Others are in near mint condition and Berger says he’ll get $2 for those. Last year, Bustinballs.com retrieved nearly 2 million balls from many different golf course lakes around the state. |
October 4, 2010
| Radio Station interview with "Dwyer & Michaels in the morning" (2Dorks.com) and Glenn Berger discussing the golf ball recovery business |
- Sunday, September 5, 2010
| Golf Ball Hunter Thrives on Gaffes of Tiger Woods Wannabees | ||||||
| By Jeff Klinkenberg Times Staff Writer
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| The Golf Ball Man wades in again. His bubbles soon stream up from the bottom, 20 feet down, where he's crawling on all fours in almost black water, feeling ahead with his hands. As he searches this golf ball purgatory he's hoping for the wonderful, dimpled feel of a Titleist and not something, you know, scaly and toothy. He's more likely to be hurt by poisons than by ornery reptiles. Polluted runoff tainted with pesticides, herbicides and various heavy metals washes into golf course ponds every time it rains. Berger tries to keep his immune system ticking by taking megadoses of vitamins. He keeps ear infections at bay with cotton swabs dipped in isopropyl alcohol and white vinegar. He never misses a chance to take a long, hot shower. |
Berger is married to an understanding woman. They have a child. Berger likes to cook and used to support his family as a chef. He thinks there is more money in golf balls than meatballs.
At his warehouse he dumps the day's harvest into a machine, which conveys balls along a kind of an assembly line where they are bathed with bleach, water, a degreaser and a series of chemicals. After the balls dry, Berger sorts them according to value. Shelves in the warehouse sag under the weight of heavy bags. |
Near the front door are cardboard boxes bulging with golf balls ready to ship. "I'm good at math," Berger says. "Time is money. I don't eat breakfast. I don't eat lunch. They take time away from hunting golf balls. My personal best is 17,000 balls in a single day. You can eat a big dinner after work." Assuming you're not eaten for dinner at work. |
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"Don't tell me about the alligators," the Golf Ball Man often tells golf course employees. "I'd rather not know." He's joking. In the winter, alligators often crawl out of the pond to sunbathe on the fairways. "If they're out of the water I feel safe about going in." |
He looks for alligator-shaped silhouettes in the middle of the pond. If he spots a nearby floater, he raises his arms above his head and shouts. Usually the alligator flees. If the alligator merely sinks out of sight he'll try another pond. |
Experts tell Berger that Florida's rarest large reptile is actually more timid and less aggressive than its alligator cousin, even though it is larger — crocs can exceed 16 feet — and looks toothier. At Hammock Bay Golf and Country Club, on the edge of the Ten Thousand Islands in Collier County, crocodiles occasionally bump him on the back with their snouts. He's not sure whether they want to be friends or eat him. "I just try to not to think about them," Berger says. "I just focus on picking up golf balls." |
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Berger has found chairs, tables, umbrellas, bird skulls, dead fish, lawn mowers and golf carts. He finds a good number of golf clubs, probably flung into the water by hapless hackers who shanked their balls and lost their temper. Berger is fond of foul-tempered, impetuous golfers. He gets $50 for a $300 Scotty Cameron Titleist putter if it's in good shape. He seldom actually sees a club on the bottom because of the near-zero visibility. As he crawls along, feeling with his bare hands, he simply touches them. One time he picked one up, felt a rusty shaft and tried to break it in half. Later, at the emergency room, the doctor tried to repair the severed finger tendons. |
Years later, his right hand remains a semiclaw. But the bad hand still works. It picks up golf balls. And when the damaged fingers touch something unusual, Berger knows it. A few years ago, while scouring a water hazard next to the 17th hole at the St. Petersburg Country Club, his hands touched something that felt like a tire. The tire, it turned out, was attached to the rest of the car. "I thought about putting my hands inside that window.
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Then I remembered an old friend who has been doing this work for years. One time he put his hands inside the window and touched the body of a suicide. You don't want put your hands inside the window of a submerged car." |
| Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at klink@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8727. | ||
- Sunday, April 29, 2007
| Watery game of lost and found plays out on links | ||||||||
| BY CHRISTINA REXRODE Times Staff Writer
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Lasolas - ISSUE 26 | SEPTEMBER 2006 - The Magazine of Fort Lauderdale |
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| Click each image to view the article - Each page will open in a new window. |
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