The scuba diver who fights alligators and murky waters to rescue your golf balls

A general view of the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass on March 14, 2024 in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida - one of the holes Jim Best scuba dives to find golf balls. (Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Jim Best admits that he’s not the best golfer, but he does spend most of his time on some of world’s best golf courses.

He says he struggles to keep his ball on the fairway, and yet he’s made his living from the game. He’s got tremendous feel around the greens – but not in the way you might be thinking, and he’s usually about 15 under, but we’re not talking about his scorecard.

That’s because Jim Best is a diver who finds your lost golf balls and turns them into a lucrative business.

At one stage, he was working at 65 courses up the Eastern seaboard of the United States, salvaging up to two million balls a year. He’s since pared it back to less than a dozen courses, but TPC Sawgrass – site of the Players Championship – has always been his favourite, especially around the 17th hole and its iconic island green.

“I get a lot of balls out of there,” he explains to CNN Sport, saying that annually he can salvage around 70,000 balls from that particular body of water alone. “I mean I go there, and I make money, like a harvesting a crop, like a field of corn.”

It’s a career that began almost by accident. While studying at the University of South Florida in 1993, he was cycling along a cart path when he spotted some lost balls in the woods. He found enough to fill his backpack, washed them in his sink and then sold them to the golf shop across the road from his apartment.

“So that’s how I fed myself! I’m like, ‘Dude, I got dinner for the whole week in just a couple of hours!’”

Best graduated and went to work in the cell tower business, but he kept hawking balls on the side, selling them wherever he happened to be working: “Every single body was interested in cheap product, so in ’98, I decided I wanted to give this a go.”

He got himself certified as a diver and entered into contracts with various golf courses for the exclusive rights to salvage their balls.

Above the waterline, the iconic 17th green of TPC Sawgrass looks idyllic, but it’s much less so beneath the surface. Best says the murky water can be full of tannins and algae and, once he’s started reaching for balls on the bottom, the disturbed silt reduces visibility dramatically. Fortunately, he knows the topography at the bottom just as well as the golfers can read their putts above him on the grass.

“Once you do it a few times, your mind sees it without seeing it. It’s anywhere from six to 15 feet deep and maybe 20 feet in the middle, and there’s little hills and stuff like that,” he tells CNN.

He’ll bring a couple of oxygen tanks to each dive and spend between five and six hours in the water, sometimes bagging as many as 6,000 balls around the 17th alone. “But you never get them all, ever,” he says. “I don’t care how good you are.”

Balls that are missed are unlikely to be of much use when they are eventually recovered. Best says that around 10% of his recovery gets trashed because the water permeates the membrane of the ball, causing the gases inside to expand.

Once he’s dived every single body of water on a course, he’ll return to his warehouse to wash and sort the balls by make, model and quality. Everything will then be sold – unless he’s stumbled across a famous ball.

In 2005, around the time that Tiger Woods won the fourth of his five Masters titles, Best found one of his balls at TPC Sawgrass. “It was elation,” he recalls of his emotions when he saw the markings denoting the player many consider to be the greatest of all time.

Gracing his collection is another of Tiger’s golf balls, found at Doral, one from Rory McIlroy – marked RORS – a couple from Phil Mickelson, and balls that he believes once belonged to Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. Arguably his most treasured find, though, is a Titleist Pro V 1x marked with the number 45.

“I’ve got President Trump’s ball; it’s marked Donald J. Trump in red letters, I don’t know how that gets eclipsed,” Best says. “I mean, you may not like President Trump, but it’s just the fact that there’s only one of him.”

A watery grave for your golf ball is an Aladdin’s Cave for Best. Along with the thousands of balls he’s able to recycle, he’s also stumbled across cellphones, cameras, sunglasses, sunhats and even putters. “I’ve gotten five or six Scotty Cameron putters,” he beams. “They’re just flung out there!”

While he can’t be sure exactly how some of the other items found their way into the water, it’s a safe bet that the clubs were tossed in a fit of anger. “It’s just a bit of rage,” he posits, “and then I’m sure it’s a bit of remorse when they get to the clubhouse!”

Based on where in the water he retrieves the balls, Best estimates that most players only just miss the green, and he’s had more than a few close shaves of his own. “A few years ago, there was an 11-foot and a nine-foot alligator around the green where I was diving. I worked as long as I felt OK and they were staying at bay; if they got too curious, I got out.”

However, while diving at other courses, he hasn’t been so fortunate. He says he’s been bitten on the ankle by a “four-footer.”

“I was 18 (feet) under when he grabbed me. Their teeth are very, very sharp, especially the little ones, like a Doberman Pinscher with sharper teeth and a stronger bite.”

On another occasion, he says that an alligator “bum rushed” into his oxygen tank and “busted his mouth up.” But his biggest “Oh crap” moment came in 2007 at Florida’s Innisbrook Golf Resort, when he says a 14-foot alligator raised its body out of the water on the Island Course and began growling, with its body reverberating and water flying off its back.

Best’s dive buddy Pascal was diving underwater, oblivious to the danger. “Totally the (most scared) I’ve been in my life,” he says, “The hardest thing I had to do was get back in the water and get my guy out. I almost didn’t do it, but I was like, ‘Either I’m a real man or I’m not.’”

So, the next time somebody’s tee shot splashes into the water at 17 at Sawgrass, remember this: while it might signal the end of a player’s challenge for the tournament, it’s likely just the beginning of a whole new adventure for that little ball and the man who might find it.

Article written by Don Riddell, CNN