Royce Turpin saw a pack of football cards for the first time in 1981, football Hall of Famer Joe Montana’s rookie year.

“My cousins, who were die-hard [Los Angeles] Rams fans, would rip open packs looking for Montana cards,” he says, “and burn them in hopes of jinxing the game when the Rams played the 49ers.”

Turpin says that card helped push his interest in baseball cards from casual to connoisseur: “When we finally saw what’s Montana’s rookie was worth, it is probably what woke me up to seriously collecting.”

After working at golf courses for most of his life, he was approached by the owner of Sharp Corners, a sport card collector’s haven, in 1996. “When I bought the store I said I’d do it for 10 years,” he adds, “and now I’ve been here for 13.”

Despite a dwindling demand for collectibles and the steroid controversies that chase baseball’s sluggers, Turpin thinks his niche will survive.

“IT’S ABOUT THE HERO SIDE OF ATHLETES AND THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SPORT THAT WILL NEVER GO AWAY.”

“[Card collecting] is one of those things that is going to live forever,” Turpin says. “It’s about the hero side of athletes and the historical significance of the sport that will never go away.”

Long-time customer Scott Van Lone, a manager at Brittania Arms in Monterey, has an enthusiasm for collecting that hasn’t gone away since he was young.

“As a kid, I remember playing with them and organizing them by teams of my favorite players,” he says. “Opening packs reminds me of being a kid at Christmas.”

At the store, brightly colored boxes of glossy cards are still crammed neatly to the ceiling on the far wall – just as they were years ago as I spent afternoons after middle school trying to complete the set of 1987 Donruss baseball cards.

I still remember nabbing a Greg Maddux rookie card from a pack of ’87 Donruss – the trembling excitement of holding the coveted card, the care with which Turpin and I put it straight into a screw-held, hard plastic case. The card is still in my collection, neighbored by Will Clark and Kirby Puckett rookie cards of the same era.

Years later, life-size cardboard cutouts still welcome customers to the tiny shop, only instead of Mark McGwire and Ken Griffey Jr., it’s Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. Looking in the case for familiar cards, I see a duplicate ’87 Maddox rookie card selling for $10 in Turpin’s case.

“People would rather pull a rookie card out of a pack than buy it from a case,” he says, adding that he stocks around 200 different packs of sports cards – and customers have pulled more valuable cards out of packs than he has sold out from the case. Van Lone once pulled football’s Tom Brady’s rookie card out of a pack, and Turpin once pulled out a ’02-03 Upper Deck Michael Jordan.

“The odds were 1 in 130,000 to get that card,” he says of the $1,800 card. “It came in the last three packs I ever carried of that card.”

Owning a sports card store can be dangerous for the collector in Turpin. He illustrates this point: In 1996, he sold his coveted 1968 Nolan Ryan rookie card for $900.

“It hurt,” Turpin admits. “But helped me realize that if you are going to own a successful card store, you have to let some good stuff go.”

He calls it a “catch-and-release” business model, and says a 1912 Ty Cobb card – the most expensive card he has ever had in the store, before it sold for $4,300 – is the only Cobb card to be rated by the Professional Sports Authenticators, a company that grades sports cards on their condition.

Other collector’s pieces are still in the store. Turpin shows me an immaculate 1968 Mickey Mantle card.

“In sports cards it’s not possible to be any cooler than Mantle,” he says, with a grin.

Although classics have their place, Turpin says card companies are doing inventive things with their current products, like adding slivers of a baseball bat or basketball and an authentic autographic to one-off cards.

“Every year, the sports card industry creates stuff that is just amazing,” Turpin says. “You never stop being surprised with the things they are doing with sports cards today.”

Clearly the state of his ongoing passion for collecting cards resembles that of the cards in his case: It’s in mint condition.

“This is more fun that anything I’ve ever done,” he says.

SHARP CORNERS, located at 81 Soledad Dr. in Monterey, is open 11am-6pm Mon-Sat. 647-9278.