Bluffton man has reason to worry about hurricanes: 15,000 golf balls in his attic
For golf ball collector Doug Coupe of Bluffton, hurricanes present a unique worry.
Coupe has around 15,000 golf balls on narrow, custom-built shelves lining the walls of the attic in his Belfair home.
When Hurricane Matthew was honing in on the Lowcountry in October 2016, Coupe wondered a little about what might happen in the event his home was damaged.
“I thought about it, I said, ‘Man there could be golf balls everywhere,’ ” he told The Island Packet on Friday.
Coupe has been collecting golf balls with logos on them for several decades.
Some of them come from courses he’s played — “486, or something like that,” he said.
Others are ones friends and family members have given him from their travels, such as Russia, Australia and China.
He has a whole section of balls with logos you might find in a supermarket.
A few of the golf balls have signatures: Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Jay Sigel among them.
“Sadly, the day Arnold Palmer died, that ball increased in value significantly,” Coupe said.
He said he doesn’t know what his collection might be worth overall.
Anyone who would want it would have to be “another crazy person like me,” he said.
How did his collection start?
Most of the balls in Coupe’s collection are ones that he found himself.
He’s lived along a golf courses, first in Vermont and then in Bluffton, and started wading into marshy areas to find his errant balls and others left behind by other golfers.
“If I found ... a ball with a logo, I just tossed it in a bucket. No plan to do anything with it,” he said. “Then, all of a sudden I had all these balls.”
Over the years, he tried various “rag-tag” ways to display this accidental — and growing — collection.
Four years ago, when Coupe and his wife, Vivian, moved into their current home, they tasked their builder with creating a display. The builder got so excited about the project that he surprised the couple with a small putting green and a wood-burned sign over the door reading “Golf Ball Hall of Fame.”
Vivian explained that the golf balls start out with a trip through the dishwasher, and then they are hand polished if needed.
Finally, if a ball has a unique logo, it’s given a home on one of the walls, resting in a hand-carved divot.
Doug leaves spaces so he has room for additions but sometimes he has to do some rearranging.
“It keeps him busy,” Vivian said.
When vendors come to the home to make repairs, Doug likes to show them his collection.
“They see thousands of homes .... all over the island and in Bluffton,” he said. “They’ve never seen anything like this in their life.”
This story was originally published April 26, 2019 at 4:02 PM with the headline "Bluffton man has reason to worry about hurricanes: 15,000 golf balls in his attic."
