When FORE! is not good enough

Even after six years, the sound of a golf ball cracking down against the concrete of Commonwealth Boulevard in Douglaston still causes John Hristopoulos to jump.
“Let’s go see what damage there is now,” the father of three said, running to the front of his property to find the cause of the loud bang - a ball sliced to the curb in front of his home.
Every day, especially weekends, from the first tee time until dusk, balls seem to fall from the sky, said Hristopoulos and his neighbor two doors down, Robert Burns. Generally, the neighbors believe, the balls are sliced by right-handed golfers teeing off from the final hole at the Douglaston Golf Course.
“We’ve become experts,” Hristopoulos said, explaining that humidity stops the ball from flying too far but when the weather is warm and dry, their trajectory is much further and higher - over the 50-foot-high, tree-lined fence that surrounds the eastern side of the course.
Although residents said they have dealt with the golf balls for years, they recently decided that they were sufficiently teed off. Hristopoulos and Burns spoke at the last Community Board 11 meeting, wrote letters to the Parks Department, and alerted Douglaston Golf LLC, which operates the course, to complain about the barrage of balls. On Wednesday, May 23, the residents are scheduled to meet with the course’s management to see if they can broker a compromise.
Burns and Hristopoulos want the fence bordering the 18th hole to be raised or the tee-off box to be moved, so that it does not sit on the top of a hill. In addition, they would like a patch of the fence, which is directly in front of the Hristopoulos’ house, to be raised above its current height of about eight feet.
A manager at the course, who would only give his name as Jason, said on Sunday, May 20, “It’s a situation that we’ve been dealing with for some time.”
“They [the balls] come so fast and so hard that God forbid someone gets hit in the head,” said Hristopoulos’ wife Nikie, who added that the couple’s then 13-year-old son, Dimitri, was hit in his calf last year while playing soccer outside in the yard. The impact left the athletic teen with a welt that lingered several weeks, she said.
“If it was the front of his leg, it could have very easily broken a bone,” Nikie said.
“Now we’ve learned; we stay inside the house,” she said. “We have to wait until it gets dark to barbecue.”
“Sometimes they come in every 15 minutes. One could come in, and then you could get a break for a half-hour. Then you might get one after the other,” Burns said. “You park your car in your driveway, you are asking for damage.”
So far, Hristopoulos said that his family has spent nearly $20,000 in repairs to their home, cars, and backyard furniture. They even replaced the home’s original door, which had stained glass panes on the front and side, with a $3,700 fiberglass one. Both sides of the door have thick six-inch-wide glass panes but just a month ago, a ball flew through the bottom of one of the panes.
Hristopoulos opted to wait a while before replacing the glass, and two weeks later a second ball, cracked a hole in the top of the same pane.
“If we replace it, in a month it’s going to be broken again,” Hristopoulos said.
Burns said that he has been lucky in that none of his windows have been smashed in the two decades that he has lived in the neighborhood, but the balls have struck cars in his yard, left pockmarks on the side of his house that face the course, and cracked the shingles on his roof.
Burns’ neighbors joke that a meteorite shower dented his aluminum siding - but Burns knows the cause of the marks are not otherworldly. He has collected a half-full garbage can of golf balls in his backyard, which on Sunday, May 20 had a sprinkling of balls that Burns believed had dropped down since he had last cut his lawn a few days earlier.
“We have so many golf balls; we will never run out,” Hristopoulos said.
Nikie’s mother, who loves to garden at her daughter’s home in Douglaston, even made a rather sweet deal with a passerby, who lives in Long Island, loves to golf, and has a stake in a bakery.
“My mother gives him the golf balls in exchange for cannolis,” Nikie said.