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 have felt he hit a hole-in-one when one day his dog, a cavapoo named Marlo, emerged from the bushes with a pristine tour-grade ball on the puppy’s first visit to a local London golf 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 £3.50, 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.
As an advertising and branding agent, Jefferson leapt at the chance to turn Marlo’s abilities into a force for good after he heard of a donation drive to promote the prevention of litter from lost golf balls.
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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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