Augusta’s Green Jackets: For Winners, Members (and Buyers) Only

Yet the jacket that belonged to Byron Nelson, who won the first of his two Masters titles in 1937, was last known to be in the care of a wealth manager based in London, long after Augusta National retroactively presented blazers to pre-1949 winners.

For a while, a man near Philadelphia with a golf museum in his home owned a blazer believed to have belonged to Bobby Jones, an Augusta National founder. A late member’s great-grandson kept a jacket in a Maryland closet. The Jack Nicklaus Museum at Ohio State University has one that Augusta National lent it. Horton Smith won the first (and third) Masters tournaments in the 1930s but had his name stripped from a P.G.A. award this year for his racist views. His coat spent decades with distant relatives until they sold it at auction in 2013 for $682,229. And so on.

The market has been active for more than a decade, but it is sporadic. A company that was until recently known as Green Jacket Auctions sold more than a dozen over the years at an average price of nearly $78,000.

“I wanted the jacket to go somewhere other than hanging in my closet,” Mike Lackovic, whose stepfather was Smith’s brother, said this month. About seven years ago, Lackovic and his brother had put the blazer up for auction. “I wanted somebody to display it, maybe put it in a museum. We had it for 20, 30 years, and it was ridiculous.”

The sale price, though, stunned him. He had only insured the jacket for $50,000 and had occasionally shown it to friends, who were largely nonplused.

“As strange as it was, not a whole lot of people were interested,” he said. “After it sold for $682,000, they said, ‘Wow, we didn’t know it was that valuable.’ Well, I didn’t either.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/sports/golf/green-jacket-masters.html