An eagle-eyed pooch has become an expert at finding lost golf balls in London, so much so that he’s helping provide golf charities with the balls they need to teach kids around the world.
Charles Jefferson must feel like he had hit a hole in one when his puppy, Marlo the cavapoo, emerged from the bush with a flawless tour-grade golf ball. This was on Jefferson’s first trip to London’s local course.
Jefferson, a top-level amateur golfer for four decades who used to work with the European Tour, realized that a retrieved mint condition Titleist Pro V1 retails for around PS3. 50, and that his Marlo might have a unique ability for finding lost balls.
He spent the next six years walking up and down courses with Marlo, watching and chatting, and getting out in the open air.
Between Mitcham Golf Club and Wimbledon Common Golf Club, Mr. Jefferson and Marlo filled dresser drawers with golf balls, but rather than a single instance of selling around 600 to a mate, he never had any interest with the “retrieval market” a cottage industry that’s cropped up around recovering golf balls.
Jefferson, an advertising and branding agency, jumped at the opportunity to make Marlo’s talents a positive force in the world. He heard about a drive to prevent littering from golf balls lost.
The DP World Tour was seeing if they could fill a 20-foot long shipping container with second-hand tour-grade balls, with the intention of then sending them to Kenya’s Junior Golf Foundation, the South African Disabled Golf Association, the European Disabled Golf Association, the UAE’s Chicks with Sticks, and India’s Golf Foundation.
CNN estimates that 300 million golf balls get lost every year, and the United Arab Emirate’s DP World Tour hoped to encourage shooters to recover at least a tiny fraction of these for charities.
As Jefferson’s agency was helping with the branding, all eyes in the department turned onto him. He promptly dumped 600 more of Marlo’s finds in the container to make an admirable dent in its 200,000 capacity.
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