About Us
The story of Golf Reloaded
Meet Walt
He is 70. He built this in his garage because he got tired of bending down.
He could have gone pro
Walt started carrying golf bags at age twelve. A dollar a round. By nineteen he was the best player at his course, and everyone knew it.
He almost turned pro. A sponsor was interested. Older men used to drive out on Sunday mornings just to watch him swing.
Then his father died. Walt had a mother and two sisters to look after. So in 1977 he took a job at a machine shop instead.
He stayed 38 years. He made metal parts that had to be perfect the first time — no second chances, measured to a thousandth of an inch.
He never complained. He married Marian in 1982. He won his club championship three times.
And every Saturday for 38 years, he was at the driving range by seven in the morning.
Then his back gave out
Four years ago Walt had spinal surgery. Two vertebrae fused. Six screws.
The surgeon said he would play again. The surgeon was right. Walt still has his swing.
But nobody warned him about the bending.
It is not the swing that ends your session. It is picking the ball up. Over and over.
So Walt counted. That is what he does when something is wrong — he stops guessing and measures it.
"I counted. Sixty-eight times in one hour I bent over to pick up a golf ball. That's not practice. That's yard work."
He came home and told Marian he was done with the range. She said he would be miserable within a month.
He lasted eleven days.
Eleven tries
The first one was made of cardboard. He cut it at the kitchen table with a craft knife. It held four balls. It jammed on the second one.
The second one jammed too. So did the fifth. So did the ninth.
He filled a whole notebook with drawings. Side views. Top views. The little gate that releases the ball, drawn three different ways.
Version eleven worked.
He built it in his garage, in a vise older than his grandson. Steel, bent by hand.
You tap the gate with your club head. One ball rolls out and sits at your feet. You never stand up. You never touch the ground.
He hit a full bucket that Saturday at seven in the morning. He came home and said nothing about it. Marian says that is how she knew it worked.
The day at the market
He built nine more. He thought other men his age might want one.
He paid eighteen dollars for a spot at a Saturday market. Blue tablecloth. A sign he wrote himself on a flattened cardboard box, because a printed one costs money.
HOME-MADE GOLF BALL RELOADER — $69
Sixty-nine dollars was not a marketing number. It was the cost of the steel plus his hours. He would not round it up. Rounding it up felt like asking for something.
He sat there from eight in the morning.
Just after two, a younger man picked one up. He turned it over. He asked if Walt had made them himself.
Walt stood up to answer him. Yes. I made them myself, at home.
The man put it back down hard. The balls scattered across the table.
"Nobody's going to buy this crap."
Then he walked off with his coffee.
Walt sat back down. He stayed until four, because he had paid for the spot until four.
What it cost him
Walt will not talk about this part. So Marian will.
The surgery took most of what was left after 38 years of factory wages. Whatever the insurance did not cover, they paid.
Those nine units were close to everything he had free to spend that year. Good steel is not cheap, and Walt does not know how to buy the cheap kind.
He came home with all nine. He sat in his chair with them on the rug around his feet.
There is a shelf of trophies behind that chair.
"He stood up when he answered him. That's the part I can't get past."
Cole, his grandson
How Golf Reloaded started
Cole had filmed the whole afternoon. He posted it that night without asking.
By Monday there were eleven messages from strangers asking where to buy one.
Walt does not use email. Cole took the calls. Then more calls. Then a man in Ohio who wanted four — one for himself and three for the group he plays with on Thursdays.
Walt built them in the garage, one at a time. Marian drove them to the post office in a laundry basket.
He built 41 that way. It took him most of the autumn. He charged sixty-nine dollars for every single one, because that is what he had written on the cardboard.
Around number thirty, Cole told him this was not a hobby anymore.
The name was already on the sign. A golf ball reloader — you load it once, and it reloads the tee for you, one ball at a time.
Cole registered Golf Reloaded that week. Walt had one condition: his name was not going on it. He said nobody buys a golf product from a man called Corrigan.
Walt's eleventh drawing is the one we build from today. Same column. Same gate. Same rule — you do not bend down.
He still checks the first unit out of every batch. There is a bucket in his garage of the ones that did not pass.
What he wants
Not your sympathy. He would honestly rather you kept it.
We asked him what he wanted out of all this. He thought about it for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then he said:
"I'd like to walk onto a range one day and see one sitting next to a mat that I didn't put there."
Seventy years old. Three club championships. Six screws in his back. Eleven drawings.
He just wants to see one he did not put there himself.
Built to Walt's eleventh drawing
See what he built