The bombardment has continued for 15 years, and Bill and Dorothy Abbott, both 75, have taken to wearing hard hats when they venture outside of their Naples, Fla. home. That’s because their house is being pelted with golf balls from the neighboring Stonebridge Country Club; a neverending reign of terror that began when the course was built seven years after the Abbotts had purchased their house in 1988. Mrs. Abbott got hit with a ball once (Kramer: “Is that a Titleist?”), and the roof and windows are pock-marked. In their basement shelter, Mr. Abbott plays a mournful tune on a harmonica, as golf balls echo and ricochet off of the roof and siding. Will there be no end to this damn war?
For more than 15 years, the Abbotts say they’ve gotten nowhere. They’ve talked to the club managers and sent dozens of letters through the years. They’ve talked to lawyers, and they’ve talked to Collier County sheriff’s deputies, too.
Still the golf balls keep coming.
“I did meet with the general manager at the country club,” said Cpl. Ron Turi of the Sheriff’s Office’s North Naples community policing unit. “Unfortunately, it’s a civil situation.”
Several attempts to reach Stonebridge General Manager Doug Brown on the phone and via e-mail for comment were unsuccessful.
But according to a Sheriff’s Office incident report from last June, Brown told Turi that he didn’t have any long-term solutions. He said he’d been working with an architect to change the landscaping, but didn’t know if that would eliminate the problem.
If the Abbotts think that they have it bad, try living next to a driving range; like I did for several years when I was growing up. The range had a giant mesh screen that supposedly kept balls from straying into the nearby homes, but the screen was always full of holes, and many golfers were so inept that they sliced shots completely over the netting. So instead of an occasional ball or two on a weekend like Abbotts endure, we would get a shellacking of 10-to-20 incoming rockets per day. My brother and I actually made some good money collecting the balls and selling them back to the range, but that was scarcely payback for the pain and shellshock of living in a war zone.
Eventually one of our neighbors got hit — damn Barkley! — and sued the range. They went out of business about a year later (the range, not the neighbor). And peace finally came to the valley.
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What The? Couples Home Hit By 30,000+ Golf Balls [SportsbyBrooks]
Homeowners battle golf balls and golf course [Naples Daily News]
Thud, crackle, pop: Dozens of errant golf balls rain down on, damage Naples home [Naples Daily News]
