Millions of players are devoted to the game of golf. For a select few, their allegiance became a consuming passion.

In the surface, they seem to have little or nothing in common. Matty Reed, 90, retired after 45 years as an engineer with Southern Pacific Railroad. Bob Smith, 68, of Rochester, Minn., has been the proprietor of a "ma and pa" floor covering business for 47 years. John Gleason, 72, of Boynton Beach, Fla., retired to the southland 16 years ago after running a family insurance business in Ohio for 32 years. Mark Zukerman, 33, of Carmel, Ind., is president of his own firm, a development and consulting service.

But when you scratch the surface, you discover each is a titan in his corner of the golf memorabilia field. Each has, or believes he has, the largest private collection in the country of his particular golf-related interest. You could call Matty Reed the King of Clubs. He's collected at least 30,000 of them over the last 70 years. "Or 40,000 or maybe 50,000," he says with glee. "I dunno, I lost count some time ago."

Bob Smith is in the process of cataloging his 30,000 golf balls. "I think I've got the biggest collection in the U.S.," he says. "But if somebody has more than 30,000, well, God bless 'em."

John Gleason may be the leading authority on amateur golf in the United States. He has a large research library and voluminous reports on every U.S. Amateur and Walker Cup ever contested. His file cabinets have file cabinets.

Mark Zukerman, an admitted Johnny-come-lately to golf, believes he has the country's largest private collection of scorecards -- 1,950 already cataloged and another 250 in waiting. "I'm not as interested in being No. 1 as I am in finding collectors with whom I can trade," says Zukerman.

Do these four really know why they do what they do? Or is it why people climb mountains ("because they're there")?

The "Club" House

Matty Reed and Mildred, his wife of 68 years, live in a modest bungalow about a mile from Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas. Mildred has one rule: "She doesn't like me to clutter up the place with clubs," Matty says.

Right. A small home. Maybe 30,000 or 40,000 or 50,000 clubs on the premises. No clutter? No problem.

"It's hard not to clutter," he concedes, and to that Mildred concurs. "Putting up with all these clubs over the last 68 years? Well, it was okay, I guess, until about the last two or three years. Now there's too many of 'em around and it's getting on my nerves."

The back room of the house is stacked with countless golf bags, each packed with clubs. Behind the home, a garage has become a warehouse -- rack upon rack upon rack, where the clubs are sorted by make and year. "Unless it's an off brand, I can tell the year a club was manufactured the minute I see it," he says.

If the garage no longer is for cars, then a half-bath inside the bungalow no longer is available for its intended purpose. It's a repository for much of Reed's putter collection. "How many?" he questions. "I don't know. Lost count after I reached 3,000."

Reed claims to have won nine straight amateur events in 1930 and 1931 alone, and perhaps two dozen tourneys overall in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. But he didn't contemplate a playing career because, in Texas golf, things change rapidly.

It seems that Matty's frequent opponents in those days were a couple of Fort Worth youngbloods named Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson. "I won a buck or two off them at times, but they were real good," he says. "I remember playing in a state amateur with Hogan that he won. He made 13 birdies in two days."

Hogan and Nelson turned pro. Reed didn't accompany them. "It was the Depression; times were tough," he says. "I might have joined them, but I had a job (with Southern Pacific) and they didn't. Pro golf didn't pay much then, so I decided I was better off as a railroad engineer." And a club collector.

Every pro in the Fort Worth area knows where to find the King of Clubs. And the PGA tourists know about Matty's club house, too. Several appear at his door to browse or buy during the week of the Colonial. Reed delights in telling how Ben Crenshaw, who's been a visitor almost annually, arrived early one Saturday morning during Colonial week and still was examining clubs 35 minutes before his starting time. "He shot a 68 that day, without hitting a practice ball," Reed says.

Matty sticks close to home these days, having given up his last regular playing opportunity: the Friday morning scrambles at Willow Springs Golf Club. And he certainly isn't hustling on the club market. "I'd never sell or trade some of my old MacGregors or Tommy Armours. They are worth more to me than money," he says. "Still, if someone wants to pay me a visit and I'm still spry enough to get around, I might be able to work out some kind of a buy or a sale or a trade."

Does he worry about the future of his collection? "My two sons and three grandchildren can do with it what they want, I guess," he says, "but I hope they won't sell it off. I'd like for Ôem to continue it. I put in a lot of time over the last 74 years on this."

The Guy's a Real Card

The postmark on the envelope was from a nearby state, not a foreign country, but Mark Zukerman previously had been told of the letter's content and he eagerly shook it out onto his desk. There it was: a scorecard from the Diplo Club in Boyeros -- a suburb of Havana, Cuba.

"It was my first scorecard from Cuba and, gosh, was I glad to get it," says the nation's premier collector of such memorabilia. If Zukerman gets one other club's scorecard from Cuba, he'll have the entire set. And maybe that will come in tomorrow's mail. "Nothing would shock me anymore," he says.

Zukerman took up golf eight years ago, and, not surprisingly, was hooked immediately. So, he thought, it would be a good idea to keep a scorecard from every course he played.

"But because I have to work for a living," he explains, "I realized my new hobby wasn't going to be all that time-consuming, considering I'd only been able to play 40 or 50 courses. So I put out the word to friends and my father's friends: ÔWherever you play, bring me a couple of scorecards from that course.'

"All of a sudden, they started coming in droves. So instead of setting modest goals I set a target of 2,000 cards by the year 2000. But as 1997 began, I was already past that."

Zukerman's scorecards are kept in alphabetical order, by course name, and stored in plastic sleeves, similar to baseball card collections. As he files a scorecard, he adds to his computer data base the club name, location, pertinent course information and whether he has played it.

"Now I'm far enough along so that I can specialize. Like, I have Pebble Beach cards from three or four different generations -- same course, different cards. And I'm trying to get all the scorecards from Golf Digest's top 100 courses. And I'm just starting to expand my international collection."

Zukerman does have one problem: finding people with whom he can trade. Ideally, Zukerman would like to find another "pure" scorecard collector or two. He's not sure there's anyone out there, but in case there is, he offers an incentive.

"I've got 500 duplicates available for trade."

The Paper Mountain

You remember amateur golf, don't you? In recent years, before Tiger Woods, it received scant attention from the national media. "Tiger rekindled interest in the amateur game and I am absolutely delighted," says Gleason, whose mission -- a difficult one -- is to keep it rekindled.

For years, Gleason has been working on a manuscript to "tell the history and preserve the traditions of amateur golf in America." He had hoped to finish it by 1994, in time for the 100th anniversary of the first Amateur the next year. He didn't. A new target date? Perhaps the year 2000, when the 100th Amateur will be played. But now, Gleason is turning his attention to researching the history of the Walker Cup.

So what gives? It isn't that Gleason's archives aren't bursting at the seams. Or that his enthusiasm for amateur golf has flagged one iota. But time is working against him, blocking his path to his goals. "My energy levels are running down," he concedes.

Forty-eight years ago, Gleason was the captain of the Tulane University team and envisioned a career as a golf journalist. That changed with the sudden death of his father and the need for him to take over the family insurance business in Cleveland.

"From a golf standpoint, things were kind of on hold in my life," he says. "That is, until 1954, when I went to Grosse Pointe, Mich., and saw Arnold Palmer beat Robert Sweeney for the U.S. Amateur title. That was my first stimulus to do what I'm doing now." The second came years later when he read Herbert Warren Wind's The Story of American Golf. That made Gleason think his destiny was to write the definitive history of American amateur golf.

When he moved to Florida in 1980, Gleason took his hobby -- a collection of 800 golf books -- with him. And the "hobby" quickly evolved into a second career. He collected clipping after clipping about the Amateur and Walker Cup, the courses where they were played, and a variety of anecdotal material about the participants. Many files contain in-depth reports from The American Golfer, a magazine that ceased publication more than 50 years ago.

You might expect 100 years of files on championships, clubs and players to be piled in Oscar Madison-like disarray, but Gleason's mountain of paper, some of it evident in every room of his condo, is impeccably maintained. Each paper, each file, is precisely where it's supposed to be.

Gleason has no dearth of material -- and others know it. "I get calls all the time from people with questions about amateur golf," he says. "It's flattering they'd ask me, but I still hope to publish the results of my research. So why should I give away this information before I can use it? I still want to publish someday. It's not about making a lot of money. I really love amateur golf and I want others to be able to share this love."

Thousands of Ways to Have a Ball

Last fall, Bob Smith was wandering around a course near his Minnesota home when he was surprised and pleased to discover a somewhat-frozen Pocahontas peeking out from behind a bush.

Lovingly, tenderly, he picked her up and carried her to his house to thaw out.

Delores Smith, Bob's wife of 47 years, didn't care a whit about the new gal. She wasn't even jealous of her. After all, she knew Bob soon would stop ogling Pocahontas and put the newcomer in an egg carton.

"I have about seven dozen Disney logos in my golf ball collection," Smith says. "But until that day, I didn't have a Pocahontas."

Smith says he learned the true value of golf balls when he was a caddie at the same Soldiers' Field municipal golf course where he now hits and hunts for them.

"In 1939, if a caddie couldn't find his golfer's ball, it was a good bet he'd get sent back to the pro shop and not get paid," he recalls. "The reason was simple. A new top-notch ball cost 75 cents then. A caddie got paid 60 cents a round. The ball was worth more."

Smith started collecting balls back then but quit in the 1940s -- for about a week. "I needed money," he remembers, "so I took all of my golf balls to a driving range and sold 'em for five cents apiece. But I couldn't break the habit. A few days later, I started a new collection."

And it kept growing and growing. "I used to keep the balls in regular egg cartons, but that took up too much space," he explains. "So I made a deal to get commercial restaurant egg cartons. They hold 30 apiece, not a dozen. And I use a lot of barrels, too."

As with anyone who owns 30,000 of anything, Smith's hobby has acquired certain facets and quirks. He doesn't keep or acquire duplicates because he is "in the business of collecting balls, not trading them."

He also claims to have personally "found" 98 percent of the balls in his collection. "There were exceptions," he adds. "Like Branch Rickey once came to the Mayo Clinic and gave me some baseball logo golf balls when he was in town. And Dr. Phil Brown at Mayo's has given me a couple of hundred balls -- some from the collection of his grandfather (noted golf course architect A.W. Tillinghast)."

Smith now is developing sub-collections within his collection, such as Pocahontas and her Disney kin.

"I have an 18-dozen collection of Jack Nicklaus signature and commercial balls and a near-complete collection of Titleists -- each model in all numbers. I'm very fond of my ÔIndian head' series -- nearly 200 balls with Indian head country club logos. And I'm partial to the old signature balls of the 1930s and 1940s, like the Johnny Revoltas, Lloyd Mangrums, Johnny Bullas, Ky Lafoons and the Turnesas."

And what is Mrs. Smith's take on all this? "He's earnest and ardent about his collection; he's always trying to perfect it," she says somewhat sympathetically. "So I can't really complain about what he is doing. But, yes, there are some days when I just can't stand it. The golf balls have taken over our house."

Though he plays only once or twice a month, Smith maintains a low handicap. Of course, no one's ever told him he has a problem keeping his head down.

"When I'm on a course, it's always down," he admits, "looking for balls."