Collecting Classic Clubs

Jeff Ellis‘ golf collecting story began with trophies–not ones he bought, mind you, but ones he earned for winning the Pacific Northwest Golf Association’s Junior, Men’s and Men’s Mid-Amateur championships. Since then, the 52-year-old Oak Harbor, Wash., native translated his passion for the game into the most comprehensive collection of antique golf clubs in the world. It encompasses the entire history of the wood shaft era, from circa 1600 up to the 1930s–some 750 water mashies, wooden niblicks, heavy irons, cleeks, scrapers and assorted other historic clubs easily worth, collectively, several million dollars.

Many collectors I meet develop a scholarly passion for their material, but few more than Ellis. Because he had ventured into uncharted territory, with no books to read and no other collections to model, he began to research antique clubs, digging up information that had been lost to the golf world, in some cases, for more than a century.

With a historian’s zeal, Ellis sniffed out every club patent ever submitted in the U.K. and the U.S. prior to 1935 before penning the definitive book on the subject, The Clubmaker’s Art: Antique Golf Clubs and Their History, along with a second volume, The Golf Club: 400 Years of The Good, The Beautiful and The Creative. Long a dealer in collectible clubs, Ellis has twice exhibited his personal collection at the PGA Show in Orlando. I talked to him about the historic “weaponry” of the game.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Fine Collectibles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.