By Lon Horwedel
Special to WeLoveAA/Dexter
Every year from Nov. 15 to March 15, Leslie Park Golf Course in Ann Arbor closes to golfers, but opens for hikers, skiers and, most importantly, dog walkers.
The sprawling back nine, loaded with ankle busting hills and bisected by the serpentine Traver Creek, twisting and turning its way along three of the fairways between two large par 3 ponds, is the perfect nemesis to every errant golf shot struck between the months of April and October.
Enter our family dog, Arlo. He’s not exactly the brightest bulb in the pack, but buried somewhere deep in his doggy DNA is the real knack, or should I say “nose” for finding lost golf balls.
In the first few weeks after the course closed, Arlo would just pick up the easy ones in the shallow rough along the fairways, but as the winter progressed, so did his skills. By February, he was hitting the swamps along the creek, or delving deep into the woods searching for any stray Titleist, Calloway, Taylor Made or Wilson. Sometimes he was even pulling them out from under a foot of snow.
I’m not sure why, but right off the bat I was curious as to how many golf balls Arlo might “rescue” by season’s end, so I started putting his daily haul into a large shopping bag in our basement. I figured at the end of the winter I would clean up the good ones and put them into play, the bad ones I would toss, and the ones in between I would give back to the course for their practice net.
Not every day was a hunting day. Some days Arlo just wanted to walk, or chew sticks, or play with his other dog buddies on the course. But some days he was definitely laser focused on finding golf balls. One day in late December he raked in 29 on our three mile walk. That seemed pretty impressive, a record that would surely stand, we all thought. We all thought wrong. On a gloomy, misty morning, February 28th, Arlo went into total “beast mode” and collected an amazing 49 balls. It was the stuff of legends!
On March 15, I counted up his entire body of work from the winter. The final tally: 372 golf balls. Most were newer balls, your typical Pro V-1’s and Calloway Chrome Softs, but he also managed to unearth a quartet of balls, three Top Flites and a Faultless, that were at least 40 years old, and possibly closer to 50. I think about that a lot. Those balls had been sitting in the woods on that course for more than four decades until a 100 pound mutt came sniffing! I’m not sure if that makes me happy, or sad?
On March 16, I decided to return to the course with Arlo and all the balls he found for a little photo shoot by the 12th green. He seems very proud of his bounty, don’t you think?
