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

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.

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 favorite, 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.