Searching for golf balls in the trees just got easier

July 16, 2006
by BUZZ McCLAIN
Special to the Star-Telegram

Cha-zing!
Ah, golf. The sound of titanium (your driver head) on Surlyn (the ball's plastic coating) is one of the most satisfying and easily identifiable sounds in the world. Nothing else sounds like the smack of a golf ball -- after a great backswing and follow-through -- right dead on the sweet spot of the club head. A smack that sends your ball two football fields away to land in the middle of the green fairway.
But wait: There's something not quite right. The sound is a bit off. You know right away you've come through the swing with the club head open, missing the sweet spot. Oh, no! Disaster! You spot the ball sailing, sailing uncontrollably to the right, toward the tall oaks that border the fairway.

And it's gone.
In "the old days," that is, last week, you and your golf partners would spend the legal limit of five minutes looking for your lost ball so you could play it again. If you don't find it, it costs you a stroke and you have to go back and hit another one. Now let's bring in Chris Savarese. The former California construction project manager-turned-software guy spent from 1993 to 2002 playing golf and talking with golfers about finding lost balls.

Finally, in May 2002, he "had the guts to quit my real job and pursue this idea I'd had for years and years," he says.
The idea was RadarGolf.

There's no radar involved, nor are there satellites, although his Ball Positioning System -- BPS -- echoes GPS. But like Global Positioning System, BPS is technology dedicated to finding things -- specifically, your golf ball.
And it works.

I took RadarGolf out on a test drive. I drove the RadarGolf ball as far as I generally hit a drive with my King Cobra F/Speed, but I rushed it, and it went right for the tree line.

I took the hand-held RadarGolf detection device out of the bag that's clipped to my golf bag and turned it on. With my friends laughing, I wandered into the trees about where the ball went in and with a straight arm waved the rectangular handheld unit until it slowly beeped and the LCD screen displayed strong signal strength. (It begins working about 100 feet from the target.)

If I moved in the wrong direction, the beeping slowed down. It was a bit of like playing "hot, cold, hot" with a child. When I was right on the ball, the device let me know, and I peered into a bush to retrieve it. My friends stopped laughing. Genius. I felt a bit self-conscious walking around with a beeping thing in my hand, but I saved the stroke and sped up the game. Which was Savarese's idea all along.
"The real technological breakthrough was how to put the [radio frequency] tag in the ball, making it durable enough to endure hitting with a club and keeping the quality of the ball high," he says.

Intuitively you think the center of the core would be safe. But the middle of the ball, as it turns out, was the worst place to put the chip. So instead they found a way to put the tag on the surface of the core. "We put a tiny microchip on opposing sides of the core and then basically painted on an antenna," Savarese says. The antenna is a special conductive material "that is totally able to move with the ball."
I can attest that the ball flies as well as any mid-price ball. Savarese says, "We believe our ball is as good or better than a lot of two-piece (core and cover) Surlyn balls on the market today. We have better spin characteristics than a lot of those." (The next step up are what the pros use, three-piece balls with high-tech covers.)

RadarGolf fetches $249.95 for the system -- the hand-held, a dozen balls and two Shield-It pouches for keeping your spares nearby without interfering with detection. Another dozen balls is $39.95. You can get RadarGolf at RadarGolf.com, golf retailers, and the Sharper Image -- but not at many pro shops.

"The pros are slow to adapt to technological changes," Savarese has discovered, pointing out that soft spikes and metal heads for "woods" took years to become accepted. "We're at the pioneering stage of a brand new category, and it's going to take some time," he says.

His intention all along was to develop the system and then license it to the Top Flites and Callaways of the world, which may come in due time. But meanwhile, he's been approached by companies that make range finders, those devices that use lasers and/or optics to determine distance from the hole. Which makes perfect sense: one gadget that lets you find your ball then tell you how far you have to hit it out of the rough.

RadarGolf is a great idea, and I intend to use mine on every round. But I'm going to use a "regular" ball on par-threes and close-in shots -- with my opponent's permission (that's the rule) -- to save wear and tear on the RadarGolf ball.
For Savarese, there's one drawback to RadarGolf: his game. "I was a 17 handicap," he says, "so I was never very good; but I'm worse now, because since I started RadarGolf, I never get out to play."