The Used-Club King

Leigh Bader likes to say he is in the toy business.

Like many things he says (and he says many things), this is both clever and slyly profound.

Bader also could say that he runs a hugely successful sanitation and recycling business, since he built a multimillion-dollar operation from the notion that one man's trash is another man's treasure.

What he does is sell golf equipment.

And Apple sells computers -- true as far as it goes, but woefully inadequate at describing its influence.

Bader's Q rating may be zero among average golfers, but anyone with a turncoat set of irons or malevolent putter in the basement should know his enterprise.

His personal and professional back story merits a Hollywood screenplay and business-school case study, respectively. Here is the abridged version: Golf-crazy kid from a peripatetic family goes from glorified janitor at a small Massachusetts country club to general manager/head pro in five years.

With business partner Joe Ricci, the two invest $4,000 to stock the closetlike, 240-square-foot pro shop at Pine Oaks Golf Course, a scrappy nine-holer a touch too far from Boston to be called suburban. Six years later, they own the entire facility.

A quarter-century on, Joe & Leigh's Discount Pro Shop now covers 8,000 square feet, making it the country's second-biggest on-course store -- attracting loyalists who drive in from Maine to the Berkshires to shop there -- and the pair employ more than 60 people between their retail and Internet operations.

A New Club Kingdom

It is Bader's online used-club business that has transformed him from an influential retailer to "visionary," in the recent words of Golf World magazine.

Pine Oaks has long since had a dedicated trade-in area called the "Swap Shop," which now generates close to $1 million in annual sales.

Back in 1998, an employee named Alan Sullivan -- an obsessive collector of Anaheim Mighty Ducks memorabilia entranced by an upstart online auction site called eBay (EBAY Quote) -- suggested to Bader that they list some languishing trade-ins for sale there. They ended up selling their entire used stock in a mere six weeks.

On Jan. 1, 2000, Joe & Leigh's incorporated a separate e-commerce company called 3balls.com (the name alludes to the three-globe English pawnbrokers' symbol).