AUGUSTA, Georgia − It’s a sports ticket unlike any other.
One of the last 1934 Masters Tournament badges known to exist is headed to the auction block.
The ticket from the tournament’s inaugural year – autographed by Horton Smith, the tournament’s first champion – is scheduled to go up for bid Dec. 6 through auction house Christie’s New York and sports memorabilia auctioneers Hunt Bros., Christie’s confirmed Wednesday.
Called “badges” by the Augusta National Golf Club, tickets from the earliest Masters Tournaments are especially rare. The event was called the Augusta National Invitational Tournament until 1939.
“There’s a real Augusta story there because it’s been in an Augusta family since March of 1934,” Edward Lewine, vice-president of communications for Christie’s, told The Augusta Chronicle. “It hasn’t been on the market. It hasn’t been anywhere.”
The badge’s current owners are an unidentified Augusta couple “known as community and civic leaders,” whose family attended the Masters for more than 50 years, Christie’s said. The woman possessing the ticket at the time successfully asked Smith for his autograph, which he signed in pencil while standing under the iconic Big Oak Tree on the 18th green side of the Augusta National clubhouse.
According to Christie’s, the ticket is one of fewer than a dozen believed to have survived for almost 90 years.
When another 1934 Masters ticket fetched a record $600,000 at auction in 2022, Ryan Carey of Golden Age Auctions told the sports-betting media company Action Network that only three such tickets existed, and one of them is owned by the Augusta National. That ticket also bore the autographs of Smith and 16 other tournament participants and spectators, such as golf legend Bobby Jones and sportswriter Grantland Rice.
Christie’s estimated the badge’s initial value between $200,000 and $400,000, according to the auction house’s website. The ticket’s original purchase price was $2.20, or an estimated $45 today.
Because no one predicted the Masters Tournament’s current global popularity in 1934, few people had the foresight to collect and keep mementoes from the event, Lewine said. The owners likely kept the badge for so long, at least at first, because of Smith’s autograph, he added. The ticket’s very light wear and vivid color suggests it hasn’t seen the light of day since badge No. 3036 was used March 25, 1934.
“According to my colleagues whom I work with, the experts, it’s by far the best-preserved. The more objects are out and about in the world, the more chances there are to get damaged or out in the sun. The sun is the worst thing,” Lewine said. “If you look at that thing, it’s bright blue. It’s as blue as the day it was signed. That means it’s been in somebody’s closet somewhere.”
The badge’s auction is planned to be part of a larger sports memorabilia auction featuring the mammoth autographed-baseball collection belonging to Geddy Lee, lead vocalist for the rock group Rush.