Sid Cooper Jr.
In October, 1980, I met a golf professional by the name of Pat Sutton. At the time he was the assistant pro at Riverside Country Club in Portland, Oregon, where my wife and I had just become members. About two and a half years later he became the head professional, a position he still holds today. Pat had been a collector of golf memorabilia for some time and, as we became good friends, he got me interested in collecting. I started out collecting classic clubs. Never being one to do things halfway, I jumped in with both feet and by 1982 or 83, I had the den in our home nearly full with about 2500-3000 classic clubs.
My wife wasn’t too keen on the idea of having a room full of bags of old golf clubs so, except for a few of my nicest clubs, the collection was moved to a rented storage room. In 1984, I joined the Golf Collectors Society and through members that I met continued to add to my collection. A year or so later, my club collection relegated to being in a storage room, I decided to sell it and go in another direction. Over the next couple of years, I sold or traded my entire club collection.
I have always had a fascination with Ben Hogan and so I began to collect Hogan related items, especially art work and photos signed by Hogan. From the mid 1980’s until the mid 1990’s I sent many items to Mr. Hogan for his autograph and they always came back signed in a short period of time. I also started collecting other signed artwork by artists such as Graeme Baxter, Kenneth Reed, Walt Spitzmiller and LeRoy Neiman. About fifteen years ago I had the opportunity to acquire LeRoy Neiman’s “Golf Champions” signed by all six golfers on their likenesses and by Neiman in the margin.
Liking autographed items, I began looking for signed golf books, both old and new, and for autographed golf balls. My signed ball collection contains around 300 different balls with about 80-85% of them coming from my wife who has been a volunteer walking scorer at numerous PGA and LPGA tournaments for over 25 years and the players usually give her a signed ball. Since Tiger Woods doesn’t sign golf balls any more, I feel fortunate to have gotten a couple of balls signed by him when he still an amateur at the 1996 U.S. Amateur held here in the Portland area.
My book collection numbers between 300-400 books with about 95% of them signed either by the author or the golfer who is the subject of the book. Since we moved into a new home last year, I am still working on my office/golf room and my book and ball collections are still in containers in a storage room as is most of my artwork.
In the mid 1990’s, a friend of mine gave me about a dozen golf tournament money clips and thus began the next addition to my golf memorabilia collection. I currently have 521 money clips in my collection (just counted ‘em last week!!). While most of the clips are from golf tournaments, I have a few non-golf clips such as a 1940’s or ‘50’s clip with a picture of Hopalong Cassidy on it and a clip from the 1940’s from a nationally known restaurant in Portland that went out of business in the late 1950’s. This clip is very politically incorrect today.
One of the best things I have done related to collecting golf memorabilia was to join the Golf Collectors Society. Not only have I made many new friends and done a lot of buying, selling and trading with other members all over the world, but the knowledge I have gained about golf collectibles from other members is invaluable. I look forward to many more years as an active member of the GCS.
Sid Cooper
