How 150 golf balls wreaked absolute havoc on this golf course

It was supposed to be a helicopter drop. It turned into a helicopter flop.

Early Sunday morning, at Legacy Golf Club at Lakewood Ranch, in Bradenton, Fla., everything seemed to be going as planned. The tee sheet was booked for an outside event, an annual shotgun scramble for 144 players, and the course had been whipped into primo condition. As part of their preparations, superintendent Mark Patterson and his team had taken the extra step of painting a giant X on the driving range.

This add-on task was nothing new to Patterson. In his long career as a superintendent, he’d been party to dozens of helicopter drops — popular prize-giveaways in which a helicopter drops a motherlode of golf balls toward a target. Each ball is marked to identify its owner. The owner of the ball that lands closest to the center of the target — in this case, the center of the X — wins.

“They’re usually good fun,” Patterson told GOLF.com.

Unbeknownst to Patterson, he was about to witness a helicopter drop unlike any he’d witnessed before.

Shortly after 8 a.m, with the field gathered and ready for an 8:30 start, a whirlybird appeared overhead. But rather than hover over the course, it circled around, buzzing the grounds.

“It looked to me like the pilot was showboating,” Patterson says.

To Patterson’s further consternation, when the helicopter finally came to a standstill in the sky, it wasn’t over the driving range. Instead, it hovered above the 9th green.

At this point, Patterson was filming on his iPhone. In the video, you can hear him ask: “Did he just drop those on the green?”

He did.

From a height of about 100 feet, upward of 150 balls plunged onto the putting surface, creating a moonscape of mini-craters.

Superintendents are accustomed to repairing damaged turf. In this case, though, Patterson says, the impact on the green was the rough equivalent of “three days of a busy play,” with marks that ran as deep as an inch into the ground, double the depth of the depressions caused by most approach shots.

With the shotgun about to get underway, there was little time to waste. Patterson corralled three of his staffers and got busy tending to the badly pockmarked green, a frantic repair job that they paused regularly to let groups play through. Adding to the awkward comedy of the scene was the presence of another novelty act. As bad luck would have it, the tournament organizer had also hired someone to camp out on the 9th tee with a golf ball-launching air cannon, firing long-range shots that each group had an option of using in its scramble. The 9th at Legacy is a par-4 of 420 yards, which put the green within the cannon’s reach.

“So we’re working to repair the green, stopping to let groups go through, and I’m working at the same time as the spotter, making sure we don’t get hit,” Patterson says.

Lifestyle

The day wore on, and the tournament continued without injury or further incident. But Patterson knew that his work on the 9th green wasn’t done. Sure enough, come Monday morning, the green was mottled with yellow marks — signs of stress and compaction that the maintenance team relieved with small-tyne aeration and light topdressing. 

By then, Patterson’s irritation had given way to mild bemusement. He wasn’t sure how the wires had gotten crossed with the helicopter pilot. But he also wasn’t interested in tracking down the aviation company either.

“Not relevant,” Patterson says. What was done was done.

In the meantime, though, he’d spoken with the tournament organizer, who apologized profusely and paid $500 to cover the extra maintenance work.

By midweek, the 9th green at Legacy was fully healed. No long-term harm, but a lesson learned.

“I think we’ll have to give it some careful consideration before we ever have another helicopter drop again,” Patterson says.