What it’s like to run out of balls in the middle of a professional tournament

For most Tour pros, the idea of running out of balls during a tournament round is borderline laughable.

For one thing, professionals have a basically unlimited supply of balls, and they have caddies to oversee their stock and ensure they have an appropriate number on hand for each round.

Perhaps most importantly, Tour pros are pretty good! They lose balls fairly infrequently, relatively speaking, and when they do, it isn’t usually by the dozen.

But on this week’s episode of Off Course with Claude Harmon, three-time European Tour winner Nick Dougherty explained just how easy it is to find yourself without enough balls to finish the round.

“I’m one under after six holes. I’m playing on an invite at the [Dimension Data Pro-Am in South Africa], near the end [of my competitive career],” Dougherty began. “It’s a hard course. It’s one of the those courses where it’s fairway, but it might as well be out of bounds on the edge of the fairway because the grass is [thick]. You don’t find it.

“So I’m one under after six. But I’m literally standing on every tee — I can feel my hands. Because at any given moment — what happened with my game, for people who don’t know — it was like a yip off the tee. And it would go 80 yards right,” he continued. “It was a humiliating shot to hit. And it started to leak into my iron play by the end.”

Dougherty said the shot would come up three to four times a day, all of them lost balls.

“I’m not good enough to give away that many penalty shots,” he said.

Despite Dougherty’s strong start in the first third of his round, he said things started going downhill. He had an 11 on one hole and a 9 on another. Eventually, he was 15 over par as he stood on the 16th tee.

“I thought, there’s one thing I can’t do, and that’s shoot in the 90s,” he said. “And I’m not one for pulling out. I don’t want to do that.”

The 16th hole was a par-5, and Dougherty hit his tee shot in the junk.

“So that’s at least a double coming my way now,” he said.

Dougherty’s caddie then announced that Dougherty was on his last ball.

“This wouldn’t be so bad if this went in that thick grass again, because I could just walk in,” Dougherty said he remembered thinking. “I didn’t do it on purpose, but I remember as I hit it, I saw it soaring off. There was a relief that came over me, which in itself is sort of scary. Because I was like, I’m disqualified, I’ve run out of balls. Because I was. I couldn’t complete the round. The referee, he didn’t even know what to say to me. I said, I’ve run out of balls, but I came out with quite a few.”

For more from Dougherty, including why he thinks mental-health discussions are so important, and the hardest part about transitioning from player to analyst, check out the full interview below.

Golf.com

As a four-year member of Columbia’s inaugural class of female varsity golfers, Jessica can out-birdie everyone on the masthead. She can out-hustle them in the office, too, where she’s primarily responsible for producing both print and online features, and overseeing major special projects, such as GOLF’s inaugural Style Is­sue, which debuted in February 2018. Her origi­nal interview series, “A Round With,” debuted in November of 2015, and appeared in both in the magazine and in video form on GOLF.com.