An iconic ball from Tiger Woods’ Masters Tournament victory in 1997 sold for a huge sum this week at auction.
Tiger Woods will go down as one of the greatest players in golf history and is the sport’s most famous athlete. His meteoric rise to superstardom is one of the great stories in professional athletics. Great tales always have a key starting point, and for Woods, it began at the 1997 Masters Tournament.
The first of the golf legend’s 15 major titles came at the event and lives in the sport’s lore because he achieved the shocking tournament win when he was just 21 years old. A small piece of that historic tourney went up for sale at auction house Golden Age Auctions recently, and the final price it went for was a shocking number compared to where it started.
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During his final round of the 1997 Masters, Tiger Woods bogeyed on the fifth hole and gave the unlucky ball to Julian Nexsen, a nine-year-old fan who was looking on as the golfer was in the early stages of completing a historic moment. Nearly a dozen witnesses reportedly verified the moment before the item went up for sale.
The Titleist ball that has a “Tiger” stamped on it was put up for auction late last month at a surprisingly low starting price of just $500.
“Unless Tiger himself or his caddie Fluff intentionally saved a ball from this historic final round (which we doubt), this may be the only confirmed golf ball from the final round of Tiger Woods’ first major championship victory,” Golden Age Auctions said in the listing(via ESPN).
After a couple of weeks on the auction block, the rare piece of sports memorabilia ended up selling for an impressive $64,124.
However, while that amount is stunning for a golf ball, it is less than half of what a signed Tiger Woods ball went for last year. In November, a Woods-signed ball sold for a record $186,000. Woods hit a hole-in-one with the ball in his 1996 professional debut.
Woods withdrew from the 2023 Masters after aggravating a previous tissue problem in his heel. The 47-year-old legend won four more Masters titles after his legendary win in 1997.