‘I know I’m crazy’: The world’s wildest golf museum defies belief

“I’m crazy. I know I’m crazy,” Bob Zokoe says, pointing toward the proof of his insanity.

It’s a breezy afternoon in Brooksville, Fla., an hour north of Tampa, and Zokoe is standing on a gravel road that he has christened Cart Path Lane, though there isn’t a golf course anywhere in sight.

Behind him is a warehouse, several airplane hangars-worth of concrete-enclosed storage, every cranny of it crammed with the byproducts of one man’s (take your pick) hobby, would-be business, decades-long obsession. 

Spry at 75, with a sun-ruddied face and a shock of white hair, Zokoe (rhymes with loco) rolls open a metal security gate and steps through a doorway. Inside, the air is cool and dry and still, climate-controlled to preserve the building’s contents: a dizzying assortment of golf-themed miscellanea, spanning a century of the game. Arranged in aisles of glassed-in cabinets, the items have been grouped into more than 250 categories, named, numbered and digitally archived.

They include belts, birdhouses and bobblehead dolls, coffee mugs and candleholders, light fixtures and lawn ornaments, training aids, towels, tees, cocktails trays and on — more than 40,000 objects, not counting the golf clubs, balls and tees which Zokoe has amassed in quantities so great that he’s lost count, dating from 1910 to 2009. The timeframe is intentional. It represents, in Zokoe’s view, a century of American dominance in the game, starting with the rise of Walter Hagen and ending with the twilight of Tiger Woods.

If a product was manufactured and brought to market in that window, and it had something to do with golf — an Alien wedge, an artisan head cover — there’s a good chance Zokoe has acquired it, possibly online but more likely at a flea market, yard sale or salvage shop, rarely paying more than $10 for any single purchase.

“I don’t go out and buy expensive stuff,” he says. “I basically collect stuff that people wind up with after their parents die.”

The result is what Zokoe believes is the largest collection of golf memorabilia on the planet, a claim he hopes that Guinness Book of World Records might verify someday if it ever gets around to investigating his haul.

Whatever its standing in the meantime, the collection has a name. Zokoe calls it the American Golf Museum. What compels him to curate it is another matter.

“I’ve asked myself that a lot over the years — why do I have such a passion for this? And the answer is, I have no earthly idea.”

Other aspects of his story are not in doubt. 

***

ROBERT THOMAS ZOKOE WAS born on Aug. 20, 1949, in Grand Rapids, Mich., to golf-loving parents who put a club in his hands when he was still young enough to be playing with a rattle. As a boy, Zokoe spent long hours whacking balls into a cornfield, honing a swing that got him down to single digits but never gave him hope that he could earn a living in the game. After high school, where he competed as an alternate on the golf team, Zokoe enrolled in Michigan Technological University to study mechanical engineering, a discipline that became his trade. His work in the oil industry paid the bills but did not, Zokoe says, provide a deeper sense of purpose.

As years wore on, he prayed for hobby to go along with golf — a low-cost pursuit that could keep him occupied year-round.

“I knew as I got older, I was going to need to stay busy or I would go nuts,” he says. 

In 1999, while stationed in Glasgow, one in a string of overseas assignments, Zokoe received a putter-shaped paperweight as a 50th birthday present. It came from his wife, Susan Marie, but to Zokoe it seemed almost heaven-sent. Up to that point in his life, he’d collected knickknacks here and there. Clown figurines. Disney paraphernalia. But he’d never found the practice all-consuming. Now, he embraced it with a convert’s fervor, seeking out golf curios wherever his work or travels took him: silverware and gadgets in England and Scotland; postcards and figurines in Spain and France; a handmade beer-can golfer in South Africa.

Back in the U.S., Zokoe found even richer hunting grounds. Salvation Army and Goodwill stores ranked among his favorite spots to rummage, but few outposts were off limits in his search for odds and ends. Online browsing brought him into contact with other golf merchandise collectors. The world is filled with them, though most focus on a niche — ball markers, bag tags, scorecards and such. Zokoe’s interests were all of the above. If his budget was modest, it helped that his tastes were also frugal. Nor did it hurt that he did a lot of shopping on senior-discount days. Only rarely — as in the case of an elaborate art piece fashioned from a tangle of twisted golf clubs — did an item cost him much more than a Happy Meal. 

At a glance, it might have looked like he was hoarding. But Zokoe was more regimented than that. Every purchase was photographed, labeled, cataloged and boxed for storage, a system that worked nicely until that storage started running out.

By 2008, Zokoe’s basement in Michigan was overflowing. He and Susan Marie had also become snowbirds, decamping to Florida in winter. Late one night, Zokoe was jolted awake by a florid dream, the details of which he has trouble recounting, except to say that it sparked a firestorm of ideas, which he scribbled in the darkness on scores of Post-Its and pasted on the headboard of his bed. Within days he managed to decode his notes and determine what the dream was trying to tell him: He should find a property and build a golf museum. A quest began.

“In our conversations, my wife equated it to Noah talking to his wife about the ark,” Zokoe says. “She’d say, ‘Noah, you’re crazy. Why are you doing this?’”

***

AS WITH HIS COLLECTING, Zokoe was strategic in his real-estate search. The land, he decided, would have to be in a golf-rich locale (Florida fit that bill), along the I-75 corridor, which ran through Marco Island, where he and Susan Marie owned a condo, at a price that wouldn’t strain him and with acreage enough for the ample showcase he had in mind.

Five years and 400 site visits later, Zokoe hit pay dirt in five-and-a-half grassy acres in Brooksville, on high ground just off the interstate, some 30 minutes from what was then World Woods and is now Cabot Citrus Farms. In 2014, Zokoe started construction on a 2,500-square foot concrete warehouse, which, when it was finished, he had little trouble filling. In 2019, he tacked on an addition that tripled the structure’s original size. Access to the property was by way of a gravel road. At its entrance, Zokoe posted a street sign — Cart Path Lane — and registered the address with the city.

Any reservations his wife might have harbored didn’t stop her from helping him. In their expanded space, she and Zokoe set about unpacking boxes and organizing items. It was painstaking work. Zokoe kept close track of their progress. On Feb. 22, 2022, at 2:22 p.m., he noted in his records, the couple celebrated the installation of 222 display cabinets. 

Zokoe’s vision was rounding into form. But it still was unfinished when fate interrupted. In the summer of 2023, Susan Marie died suddenly. Zokoe was bereft.

In his grief, he let the project languish. By the time he got back to it, he had fallen behind schedule by about a year.

Now, though, he says, the museum is “pretty much ready,” though how and when he’ll show it off is TBD. For now, he’s thinking that he’ll welcome visitors by invitation and appointment only, with a soft opening targeted for February of next year. At the outset, at least, tours will be self-guided, which, Zokoe estimates, should take an hour or two.

“Or maybe a little less,” he says. “But you’d have to be moving pretty fast.”

To walk the space is to wander through a wonderland of Americana. Along with categories, the exhibit is arranged in a rough chronology, starting with the past and moving toward the present the farther back it goes. A clear dividing line comes after 1950, a watershed period in the game, brought about by a confluence of forces. One was the ascension of Arnold Palmer. Another was the rise of color TV.

“And don’t forget plastics,” Zokoe says.

The professionalization of the game coincided with its commercialization. Materials changed. The leather in golf bags gave way to nylon and polyester. Handmade swing aids became factory-molded. Pushcarts switched to aluminum from steel. As the means of production shifted from small shops to assembly lines, so did the marketing around it.

“I remember watching TV back then and just being bombarded with it,” Zokoe says.

Zokoe eyes this all through a nostalgic lens. He speaks romantically about the bygone glory days of amateur golf, a time when craftsmanship also reigned supreme. Though he can’t pinpoint a favorite item in his collection, he’s partial to the artisanal and idiosyncratic; an array of golf balls with hand-carved faces holds a warm place in his heart. Ditto an assortment of bug-eyed caddie figures, and a trio of golf-playing, ceramic snowmen statuettes.

Change isn’t always synonymous with progress. The American Golf Museum gets that point across. But lamenting what’s been lost isn’t Zokoe’s main intent. His goal, he says, is to shine light on a demographic that doesn’t get due credit for its role in the game.

“Golf has a lot of museums and a lot of halls of fame,” Zokoe says. “If you go to them, you’ll learn a lot about certain players or maybe certain country clubs. This is different. Everyday golfers making us who we are as an industry. I’m celebrating the men and and women who buy all this stuff.”

Assuming they don’t sell it. Or leave it behind.

***

THAT LAST PART ISN’T LOST on Zokoe. The clock-tick of mortality counts down for everyone. Zokoe wants to leave a legacy. He hopes to be remembered. He’d also like to keep his own memory sharp. His penchant for meticulous-record keeping extends beyond golf memorabilia to the mundane events of daily life. Every day for the past 25 years, Zokoe has documented what he’s done, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, by taking notes on index cards and snapping photographs. He stores those records in hardbound volumes, which are stacked on shelves near the museum entrance. Pick a date. Any date. In a few page-flips, Zokoe can tell you what transpired. On Feb. 22, 2006, to name one randomly selected day, “Bob folded clothes” and “attended the Detroit boat show.” It’s all written down, with images as supporting evidence. 

“Otherwise,” Zokoe says, “I’ll forget.”

Which reminds him. On many days in recent years, Zokoe has contemplated the fate of his collection. What might happen to it after he’s gone? He has three adult children, but he wouldn’t dream of saddling them with all his possessions. In his ideal world, a golf association or organization would partner with him to help manage the museum, or replicate the concept in other cities. Perhaps a wealthy patron could come aboard. 

Though Zokoe swears he isn’t in it for the money, he concedes that he might entertain a buyer. “Everyone has a price,” he says. But he’d only sell his trove in its entirety, with the promise that it would be kept intact.

How much would he ask? That’s hard to say. Harder still because the value of his assets is ever-changing.

“Of course I’m still collecting,” Zokoe says. “I just picked up something else earlier today.”