NickyDorfel straps the oxygen tanks to his back, pulls the goggles over his eyes and walks into the lake. He keeps going until he’s fully submerged.
It’s a competitive field but this is right up there with the weirdest things you’ll ever see on a golf course.
Over the next few hours, he scours the lakebed retrieving lost golf balls. In a good day, he’ll recover hundreds.
Today, though? Today is a great day.
It’s the Wednesday of the Soudal Open at Rinkven International Golf Club near Antwerp and whilst Ryan Fox, Sam Horsfield, Nicolas Colsaerts and Co. are preparing for the tournament, Dorfel and his dive partner Martijn Doorn are salvaging more than 3,500 balls from lakes dotted around the course.
It’s all in a day’s work for the 33-year-old Dutchman. The owner of lakeballs company Golf-Square – headquartered in Raamsdonksveer, around an hour’s drive south of Amsterdam – Dorfel dives around 170 courses per year, mainly across Belgium, Holland, France and Germany. He cleans up, too. In a typical year, he’ll find close to one million.
• “My grandfather, Bobby Jones”
He and his team take the balls back to their factory, clean them up, sort them into one of approximately 300 different types – based on brand and condition – and sell them on their website. It’s a shrewd and slick little enterprise and, for Dorfel, it neatly combines two of his biggest passions.
“I grew up close to a golf course so, from about the age of 12, I was always there, playing every chance I got,” he says. “When I was 18, that’s when I first took an interest in scuba diving.”
Around the same time, he took a summer job at GolfbaanLandgoed De Kurenpolder, a popular club south-east of Rotterdam. In his time there, Dorfel found hundreds of balls in the water, which planted a seed.
Two years later,…
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