It is a tiny card shop, Clark Sports Collectibles, in a residential area set hard against Ames’ business district to the east.

Step inside and the walls are lined, no, overwhelmed, by sports cards and memorabilia.

Above the entry way, next to the clock, is a framed, autographed picture of Yankee great Mickey Mantle, smiling off into the distance and young, right hand leaning on his bat, left hand on his hip, hat brim set loosely on his head – the better to see through his blue eyes.

Cards from all sports are on the table in boxes down and to the right of Mantle. Cards are beneath glass that stretches halfway around the place, like engagement rings in a diamond store.

Todd McFarlene, a man rich from comic books, and his successful sports caricatures line a portion of the right wall.

Along the left, Starting Lineups’ less successful sports caricatures stand mid-swing or mid-throw behind plastic that hangs below banners reminding patrons of the Twins’ World Series win in 1987 and the Bears’ Super Bowl win in 1985.

The same framed Mantle picture is on the opposite wall, above Doug Clark’s counter, the owner of the shop. This one is for sale: $275.

And it is in this shop, on these cards, below these caricatures, where the correlation to the games themselves lie; for however many sports are fun, they are equal parts business.

And however much collecting sports cards and memorabilia is fun, it too, is equal part business.

Next to the cash register, a card of former Cyclone Jamaal Tinsley asks kids to part with $40.

But this is the problem. Kids aren’t taking $40 cards home. Adults are.

“I think everyone is a little concerned with the graying of the industry,” says Rich Klein, a price guide analyst for Beckett, the nation’s premiere magazine for those who buy, trade and sell sports cards.

EBay has helped age the collectors into adults with business interests. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars worth of profit can be made from having the rookie card of someone playing phenomenally.

At Target, college-aged men crouch and scour the ranks of cards, mostly sports-related, hoping to find one, perhaps a well-scouted rookie, who will profit them.

At Wal-Mart, grown men run their thumbs over the packs, hoping to find an inserted card – a card containing a portion of the bat or jersey the player wore. These cards are worth more, both at shops and online.

Like the sports themselves, it is difficult to say when money loomed as large as fun for the collector. Old, well-kept cards have always been worth something.

But now, Klein says, thanks to eBay and shrewd investments, there are people across the nation who can support themselves on the cards they sell, without owning a shop.

Nick Huggins is 22 and an art and design major at Iowa State. The cards he’s sold on eBay have paid his rent and bought him beer.

“I sell everything on eBay . If a player’s hot, you can put it on eBay and sell it for more than market value” he says.

Last month, he brought in $100 from selling cards. Some months, he’ll bring in $1,000.

For Vince Carter, Huggins says, after winning the NBA’s 1999 Slam Dunk Contest – “his stuff got real hot.”

After buying a Carter card for $200, Huggins sold it for $800. If you sell when the market on eBay peaks, Huggins says, “you can invest $300 and you’re guaranteed to make at least $100.”

Because eBay is basically a worldwide auction house, there seems to always be someone with disposable money, looking to buy what you have, he says.

Since he was eight years old – stopping to drive cars or date women – Huggins has collected his favorites.

Ken Griffey Jr. of the Cincinnati Reds is one of them. An autographed baseball from Griffey, encased in glass, sits on the television in Huggins’ room.

There was a time when Huggins would have found every Griffey card made. That time is not now.

In the early ’90s, the four or five major card manufacturers – Topps, Donruss, Fleer and the then-new Upper Deck – put out 10 times more product than they ever had before.

Suddenly there were specialty packs, packs with fewer players but better players, packs inserted with a bat or an autograph or a jersey, packs of retired players, packs of one great player, sold in extreme limit.

“There was a perceived interest,” says Klein at Beckett of people wanting more cards.

“It flooded the market,” Clark says. “Card-collecting was nearly killed by the explosion.”

Mayhem Collectibles in Ames quit carrying baseball cards altogether.

Klein says the industry was hurt but the 1994 Major League Baseball strike “hurt collectibles as a whole. It hurt every sport. Some different than others.”

Clark says he simply quit buying baseball cards for two years. (He wasn’t dealing then. He’s owned the shop for three years.)

“Baseball as a whole is still recovering from that, and if another strike or lockout occurs” – which could happen – “it would be devastating to both the sport and the baseball card industry,” Mark Anderson, a senior grader at Beckett, writes via e-mail.

“If a person expects the card collecting industry to return to the glory days of circa 1990,” Anderson continues, “that will likely never happen again.”

So what the manufacturers have done is “diffused” and “specialized” its product further, Klein says, hoping to appeal to as many collectors as possible.

But this makes it difficult for someone like Huggins at Iowa State to collect Ken Griffey Jr. because every year there are a lot of Ken Griffey Jr. cards to collect.

And some of them, like the specialty one-card packs, are well beyond his price range. So because of this, “I’m more of a dealer now,” he says.

Jeremy Whitefield is important. He is 14, goes to school in Gilbert and has about 500 cards. People in the industry are trying to get more of his friends to do the same.

Some packs are still cheap enough for Whitefield and his fraternal twin brother Matt to afford. But everyone from Klein to Clark to Bill Ford, owner of Main Street Sportscards in Ames, knows what needs to happen.

“We need to get kids involved,” Ford says.

“If I didn’t get into cards as a kid,” Huggins at Iowa State says, “I don’t think I’d be into them now.”

Klein agrees.

“Each dealer has to do some work,” he says. “It has to start at the grass roots.”

Ford lets kids browse for as long as they want and cuts them deals on cheap cards.

Clark tells the kids to buy cards from generations ago – they appreciate – and tells them to collect one set of one product of one brand, lest the cards become too many to gather in and the money disappears.

Still, some aren’t apprehensive about the future at all.

“As long as the industry remains flexible and innovative, it should continue with steady growth,” Anderson at Beckett writes. “There is too strong of a hobby base in place, and too long of a history of collecting for the hobby to ever fall apart.”