Diving for dollars

Ball retriever extraordinaire Mike Gerstner profits from your misery on the golf course. Never mind the gators and snakes lurking about.

By LOGAN D. MABE

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 28, 2000

[Times photos: Fraser Hale] Diver Mike Gerstner hauls a bag of recovered golf balls out of the lake on the 17th hole at the Bloomingdale Golf Club in Brandon. He works with about 60 golf courses up and down the Suncoast to retrieve the errant spheres.

TAMPA -- Mike Gerstner emerges from the black lagoon, grasping 1,000 pellets of white gold, 1,000 dashed dreams. The water fronting the 17th green at Bloomingdale Golf Club in Brandon is shallow and clear today, so it's easy pickings as Gerstner scuba-cruises the lake bed, where it seems that every square foot holds another dozen golf balls.

For 25 years Gerstner, 46, has plumbed the dank, dark depths of Tampa Bay's golf courses salvaging the results of the saddest of all golf shots. It is his living, this scavenging upon the miscalculations and misfortunes of the errant golfer.

Gerstner, owner of a small company named Tampa Bay Underwater Service, is a longtime player in the highly competitive, highly guarded, highly profitable used golf ball market. He scours the water hazards of about 60 golf courses up and down the Suncoast for the balls, which are considered "lost and abandoned property" by the law. Then he sells them on the worldwide open market, anywhere from 10 cents a ball for low grade range balls to $20 a dozen for top of the line Titleists.

In an average year, Gerstner will turn over 3-million golf balls, harvesting a crop whose seeds are sown by woeful hackers everywhere. While he won't disclose his annual income, it's a tidy sum that helps finance his weekend auto racing (Gerstner's "other car" is a Ferrari 308 GTS) and restorative getaways to Amsterdam.

Gerstner's suppliers are the ones who will spend upwards of $3 for a pristine, fresh-out-of-the-pack golf ball and then proceed to knock it into the nearest body of water.

But lucrative as it is, the business end of Gerstner's growing business holds no fascination for him. "I'm going to let my partner take care of all that other stuff," he says, slipping easily back into the still ball-ripe lake. "I'm just going to go swimming."

Counting fingers

Yes, it all started with swimming. Instead of college, Gerstner went to the Diver's Training Academy in Fort Pierce in 1972. There he learned how to make a living underwater bywelding, planting explosives, doing oil rig work.

After graduating, Gerstner went to New Orleans, where he learned underwater labor is difficult, dangerous and undesirable. He heard bracing stories of working in pressurized diving bells 800 feet below the surface, of mishaps in the ocean that claimed divers' lives, of aging, wheelchair-bound aquamen whose cartilage had gone al dente from the years spent in the deep.

"After talking to them, swimming with alligators in freshwater lakes in Florida is like a vacation compared to swimming in the North Sea in 40-degree water with a 300-pound hard hat on," Gerstner says.

Partner Vernon “Bud” Messier reaches down to retrieve balls at the Bloomingdale Golf Club. He searches the shallow water near the banks, using his hands and toes to snatch balls off the bottom.

So he returned to Florida, hooked up with a veteran ball hawk named Johnnie Gram and has been diving for triple bogeys ever since, gators, snakes and turtles notwithstanding.

"It's just a job hazard," Gerstner says of the alligators that share his world. They are no worse than a big dog to a mail carrier, he says.

"Most times when they bite, they don't hang on. They're scavengers, you know. If you're going to make money, you've got to go swimming with them. And personally, I like snakes. I used to catch them when I was a kid. They've been getting a bad rap since Adam and Eve days. But now a turtle got me one time. You know a turtle head feels just like a golf ball, except a turtle will take your finger off."

It is Gerstner's good fortune that after a quarter-century in the business, he retains all his fingers and toes. And the exertions of the work keep him in fighting trim.

Gerstner has the luxury of being able to eat a double steak burger and fries for breakfast and burn it off by lunch, if you don't count the stuff that must still be in his arteries. He gets to wear his hair in a longish, almost shag-length cut. His wardrobe is scruffy chic, jeans and polo shirts bearing the name of his company.

And his eyes have, at times, a mischievous twinkle. Unless he's talking about business, which can drain them of color.

"I'm getting kind of burned out," he says.

Lost and found

Wildlife aside, getting the golf balls is pretty simple. It's not like you have to outwit them -- sort of like an underwater Easter egg hunt. Gerstner prefers diving for them in the spring and summer when the water is cool and comfortable. His parter, Vernon "Bud" Messier, is a "shallow hunter," who works the banks of lakes.

The siren call of the water hazard A great debate rages as to whether a recycled or "experienced" golf ball is any good.

Messier wades into the water and collects balls with his hands and feet. As the water deepens, he uses his toes to snatch balls off the bottom.

"Foot hunting, I can get about 700 balls an hour," says the 50-year-old Messier. "Probably 1,000 an hour hand hunting. In a year's time, I can get half a million balls by myself. Not bad for an old man. I haven't had anybody keep up with me yet. Not even the kids. I'm not bragging; it's just a fact. I'm just fast."

Together, Gerstner and Messier can pick a lake clean in less time than it takes to play nine holes.

In the wintertime, the men turn to "rolling," a mechanized method of retrieving balls. Using golf carts, Gerstner goes to one side of a lake and Messier to the other. Then, a large, rolling ball-grabbing device is lowered into the water and pulled across the lake floor by a motorized cable that stretches between the two carts. It is effective but boring. Gerstner reads the newspaper while he's doing it.

Whether diving or rolling, Gerstner and the four diving crews he employs have exclusive contracts with about 60 golf courses from northern Pasco County to eastern Polk County down to Sarasota. Gerstner makes separate deals with each course. For some, he'll provide nearly new balls for resale in the club's pro shop. Others require a regular supply of driving range balls. Gerstner tries to barter for diving privileges to avoid paying cash.

There's usually a course to do every day, and no shortage of golf balls. At any one time, he'll have between 1-million and 1.5-million balls on hand.

The real trick is turning all those dimpled beauties into cash.

Dollars and dozens

Gerstner used to do almost all his selling on the wholesale market. He would move tens of thousands of balls at a time, vending them to processing plants that did the sorting, packaging and retailing.

"There used to be four or five large processing plants fighting for our balls," he says. "Now, there's only one trying to (do something very naughty to) us in the (very sensitive part of the body)."

That's part of the reason Gerstner is going retail. Or, more accurately, e-tail. Operating out of a four-car garage on his five-acre spread in Seffner, Gerstner is in the process of joining the dot.commerce world market.

Now, rather than selling the balls in bulk to large distributors (many of them in Europe), Gerstner and a handful of employees are cleaning, sorting, grading and packaging them for the direct resale market. And this is where things get creepily secret.

For instance, when the muck-laden balls first hit the plant, they're soaked in large hot-tub-sized vats for two days to loosen the dirt before going into a $4,000 ball washer. What's the cleaning solution? Gosh, he'd love to tell you, but he can't. It's one of those "If I tell you, I'll have to kill you" deals.

Same goes for Gerstner's nifty ball-sorting device, "that Dr. Seuss looking machine," as the guys like to call it. The CIA doesn't give guided tours of the code room, and Gerstner doesn't allow photographs in the sorting room. A competitor might benefit from his ingenuity, erasing whatever edge Gerstner has been able to get after 25 years in the business.

"The market's gone fragment," says Randy Best, a part-time ball hawk who works a handful of courses in the suburbs outside Tampa. "Everybody's scrambling for their own deal. It's like any recycling business; it's feast or famine. It's more like a cottage industry, except for the major players."

Gerstner knew he could never be a major player on his own. He likes the diving end of the business too much to focus on the making-millions-of-dollars end. So this year he took a partner, Scott Henry, a 30-something advertising and marketing whiz who left a promising career at a Tampa advertising agency to join Gerstner.

"I'm good at getting them," Gerstner says, "but that's why I got Scott: to get rid of them."

The aim, Henry says, is to "hit a whole new customer base, to expand the business tremendously."

They still move major quantities of wholesale balls, like the shipment of 500,000 Gerstner sent to a French dealer a few weeks ago.

But the big money, if it comes, will depend on the UPS man. He's the guy handling the 50-ball and 100-ball orders of AAA-rated, hardly-ever-hit beauties Gerstner and Henry are moving via the Internet.

But that's sort of secret, too. At least for now. It'll be another month or two before Gerstner and Henry will be ready to splash into the cybersurf.

A three-pack of Gerstners

On a recent Friday, Gerstner is set to deliver a van full of golf balls to his shipping agent in Town 'N Country. He's sending 15,000 of them to a new wholesale customer in London. The deal will net him about $5,000, a tidy sum to be applied to his imminent retirement.

During lunch at a busy Hooters restaurant on Hillsborough Avenue, Gerstner becomes expansive on that subject. He figures he's got about five more years in the lakes and ponds until his wife, Lou, retires from her executive position with GTE Corp., now Verizon Communications.

"I'm going to be traveling the world," Gerstner says excitedly. "I'll call Scott from France or Spain every now and then. I'll be seeking thrills. I'm going to find the most dangerous stuff I can and do it. Swimming with gators, racing cars, you name it."

And then, as he ponders the ultimate retirement -- death -- Gerstner becomes even more animated. "Did you see the new Austin Powers movie?" he asks. "Well, I'm going to get frozen!"

Say again?

"No kidding. I am getting frozen when I die. Me, my wife and my son are all going to do it. I've already paid for it," Gerstner says.

As Gerstner extols the virtues of cryonics and tells of the amazing Cryonautics Institute in suburban Detroit and spins the fantastic tale of the never-ending future that lies ahead of him, everything begins to make sense. The realization is like finding that last perfect white ball at the bottom of a crystal clear lake.

The ball hawk is going to recycle himself.

"I figure if there's a one-in-a-million chance, I'm going to take it," Gerstner says, his eyes electric with possibility. "Why? Because I love life."

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