Andy Tullis / The BulletinJim Brown shows off his extensive golf ball collection at his house in Sunriver. Brown has been collecting logo balls since the late 70s.

Almost 40 years ago, Jim Brown’s golf ball collection started innocently enough.

The Sunriver resident, now 69, retired to the Central Oregon resort from his job as deputy director of the Oregon State Revenue Department about 15 years ago, but he and his family had been coming to Sunriver since the late ’70s.

Brown and his son would take walks on the resort’s golf courses in the evening, looking for lost golf balls.

“It was almost like an Easter egg hunt,” Brown recounted, “and he (his young son) really enjoyed it.”

Finding the mementos sporting the logos of various golf courses near and far led to Brown’s obsession, and he added, “just a few” to his collection over the past four decades.

“It just started at that point and eventually I had enough to start displaying them,” Brown recalled.

He now has exactly 569 golf balls in his collection, most adorned with the logo of a different golf course.

“I know the number because I counted them this morning,” he laughed.

The balls are prominently displayed in what Brown calls his “golf cave” at his Sunriver home.

A little help

Friends began to find out about his collection and would go out of their way to bring him golf balls from courses they played.

“The most unique one I’ve got is probably from a retired judge friend of mine who went to Russia,” Brown said. “He brought me back one from Moscow Country Club.”

He estimated about a dozen friends who regularly add to the collection.

“They will go on a trip, come back and say, ‘I’ve got something for you,’ and give me a ball … because they know I am addicted to them.”

Brown has collected many of the balls himself, from rounds played at courses in the Caribbean, California, Oregon and Washington and more.

He cited PGA West in La Quinta, California, and Bandon Dunes as some of the more famous courses he has played (and got a ball from), as well as many of the best courses in Palm Springs, California, where he and his wife spend about a month every winter.

Trips to major professional tournaments, like the LPGA Tour’s Kraft Nabisco Championship and the AT&T National Pro-Am at Pebble Beach, have netted more prizes for the collection.

“I haven’t played Pebble Beach yet, but I have four or five balls from there,” Brown said.

Autographed balls

Brown has volunteered as a walking scorer at many of the big tournaments hosted at Sunriver’s Crosswater Club, including NCAA championships and the Jeld-Wen Tradition, which led to more items for his collection.

During one of the NCAA championships in the early 2000s, he and his wife hosted a dinner for the men’s team from Western Florida University. Among the players was a young man named Kevin Warwick, whose dad had a golf ball collection of his own.

“He was amazed at my collection and said his dad collected logoed balls,” Brown recalled. “I asked him if his dad had one from Pebble Beach and he said ‘No.’”

Brown gave the college golfer a ball from the famed California course for his dad and two weeks later got a surprise in the mail.

Warwick had played at the U.S. Open at Beth Page Black in 2002, and he sent a golf ball from the tournament to Brown.

“That is my most prized ball in the collection,” Brown said.

Volunteering at the Jeld-Wen Tradition for the four years in which the Champions Tour major was held at Crosswater (2007-10) allowed Brown to start an autographed collection, too.

He gathered 37 autographed golf balls, including one from his favorite golfer, Gary Player.

Also in the collection are the balls from his two holes-in-one, one in Palm Springs and the last one at his current home course, the Woodlands at Sunriver.

Brown is still collecting balls anytime he goes to play a course for the first time, but with ball racks on all four walls of his golf cave, space is becoming an issue.

“I’m running out of room,” he laughed. “My wife is saying she doesn’t know where I’m going to put them.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7868, kduke@bendbulletin.com