ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lost Balls is a unique and colorful look at the game of golf from the perspective of the undercelebrated wayward shot. Charles Lindsay’s photographs offer a humorous and inquisitive foray into the hazards where golf balls are lost—rough, woods, deserts, and wetlands—as well as unexpected encounters with wildlife on and off the green, including rattlesnakes, grizzly bears, raccoons, and more. An avid golfer with plenty of experience losing balls, Lindsay photographs his way to the heart of the game with a light touch and an eye for telling details. In the process, he discovers balls lodged in cacti, submerged in swamps, and lost for over a century. He also uncovers a lexicon of curious words printed on the balls themselves: Intruder, Floater, Pluto, Revelation, and many others.

“My perspective on the game is not the one seen in books and calendars of players with perfect swings on impossibly great courses in exotic locales. Not the straight-down-the-middle approach. Gigantic hooks and pushes take me into ankle-deep muck, far from the fairway, fighting the sagebrush, dodging the poison ivy, and looking for a white orb as round as the moon and equally uninterested in my predicament. The six handicap of my youth has grown huge through decades of neglect. The concept for Lost Balls evolved from the depths of this realization, not so much a sharing of misery as a celebration of it. “

Lindsay even comes face-to-face with what is possibly the world’s oldest golf ball—unearthed from an early-sixteenth-century trash heap alongside a primitive club—and the infamous spot in the tall grass where Tiger Woods lost a ball that cost him the 2003 British Open. The photographs in Lost Balls were made at both revered and obscure courses in North America, Scotland, England, and Ireland, including Pebble Beach, Bandon Dunes, Sanctuary, Bethpage, Yellowstone Club, Fossil Trace, St. Andrews, St. Enodoc, Royal St. Georges, Carne, Old Head, Ballybunion and many more.