PRINEVILLE —

I glance over when my 72-year-old playing partner, Nelson Haas, suddenly jumps a chain-link fence with the spryness of man a third his age.

Haas is on a familiar hunt.

You see, Haas can’t remember the last time he bought a golf ball, or even if he has EVER bought a golf ball.

That might not be that hard to believe if Haas was an occasional weekend hacker. But that is hardly the case.

The retired church pastor plays more golf than a workaholic tour pro.

In 2003, he set the assumed national record for most rounds of golf played in a single calendar year with 648, a feat chronicled in both The Bulletin and Golfweek magazine. And as of last week, he had played golf 125 days this year, nearly all at Meadow Lakes Golf Course in his hometown of Prineville.

With as much golf as Haas plays, if he regularly bought new golf balls he might spend enough money to square the California budget. That makes his ball retriever the most valuable piece of equipment in his golf bag.

With 60 years of golf under his belt, Haas is a true ballhawk.

You know the golfer who starts his round with three golf balls in his bag and ends up with two dozen? That’s Haas.

Only he’s better than that.

At last count, the friendly golf nut has found nearly 7,000 golf balls already this year. His best single-day ball haul ever is 329.

“I love to play golf and I like to find golf balls,” Haas says. “And I actually pay for my golf by selling golf balls.”

How does he do it?

Well, Haas wades in lakes — reaching elbow-deep in muck — jumps fences and hikes river banks of Meadow Lakes each day. Haas then cleans each ball he finds with a simple bleach-and-water solution and a scouring pad.

He then sells the finished products outside of Meadow Lakes property, at $5 a dozen, to just about any cost-conscious golfer ready to tee it up.

The real gold mines are the premium balls, such as Titleist’s Pro-V1s or Nike’s Platinum golf balls, for which he asks a buck apiece. That can turn into a nice chunk of change, considering he found 550 Pro-V1s last year alone. And a pretty good deal for balls that cost about $45 a dozen brand new.

“Thankfully, I find and sell enough golf balls to pay for the golf,” he says.

I played nine holes with Haas at Meadow Lakes recently, and the human golf-ball magnet came away with 16. And that’s without really trying, he tells me.

A solid golfer (he shot a 5-over-par 40 in the nine holes I saw) with the physique of a man decades younger, he walks the course playing and searching.

After the third hole, a par 5, he jumps the fence running parallel to the left side of the fairway that separates the course from a narrow canal.

Haas returns from his expedition and continues the round after realizing that the area has been picked clean. Through five holes, the pickings are slim.

But then we reach the lake protecting the green on the par-4 sixth hole.

Haas gets on his hands and knees in the knee-high reeds surrounding the water and starts pulling golf balls out like weeds from a garden. The grand total: five homeless golf balls in a span of about two minutes.

“Some days I stick my hand in and get four balls with one reach,” he says with a straight face.

He loses his approach shot into that same body of water, but there is a silver lining.

“I didn’t find my ball, but I found a Nike Platinum,” he says. “So I came out ahead.”

The hot streak continues when we reach the Crooked River, which bisects the fairway on the ninth hole, and Haas grabs a few more.

Walking over a footbridge, he stops, gazes toward the banks of the river, and somehow spots a pink ladies ball.

“There’s one right there,” he proclaims.

You might think that Meadow Lakes would have a problem with Haas picking ball after ball from the course.

But not so, says Lee Roberts, the course’s head golf professional.

“He’s a likable character,” Roberts says of Haas. “He goes round and round (the golf course). And he has played with everybody.

“I don’t look at it as a detriment at all,” Roberts continues. “He does really well on it. And it probably offsets his ($835 annual) pass for the year.”

One way Haas makes it OK is by donating the majority of his findings to the junior golfers who play the course regularly.

Every so often at Meadow Lakes, Haas dumps hundreds of golf balls into a plastic trash can reserved for the donated balls.

“That’s how it works for us,” Roberts says. “I think it works both ways. That’s been really nice.”

And while Haas finds thousands of balls, it is nothing compared with what the course finds.

Each year, the city-owned course hires divers to rummage the facility’s 10 lakes for golf balls.

The haul each year is generally between a 25,000 and 30,000 balls each year, Roberts says. Many of which are resold in the course’s clubhouse.

“He does fine for himself,” Roberts says. “But there is an unbelievable amount of balls that he can’t get because of the color of the ponds.”

Despite all that searching, Haas tries not to slow the pace of play, which might irk his fellow players, which in turn could upset the officials at the course.

“I try to avoid slowing anybody down,” he says.

To do this, he plays as if golf had a shot clock. Haas claims he once played an 18-hole round at Meadow Lakes — covering the course’s some 6,000 yards — in less than two hours.

After all, it takes time to play golf and go hunting at the same time.