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

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Christopher O’Brien is not a member of Augusta National Golf Club, much less a Masters champion. He once played the course “well enough to enjoy it, not well enough to brag about it.”

But at his home in Greenwich, Conn., a mannequin stands shrouded in one of Augusta National’s famed green jackets, customarily draped on victors of the 86-year-old Masters tournament, one of golf’s four majors, and club members. He purchased it at auction for less than $17,000.

“I took a chance because if you really think about it, it’s one of the most iconic pieces of sports memorabilia you could get,” he said in a telephone interview. “I have 400 or 500 pieces, and there are always three or four where people walk in and say, ‘What the heck is that?’ And that’s one of them.”

With the exception of the reigning champion’s blazer, which can go home with a winner until he returns it for safekeeping the next year, no jackets are permitted to leave the club’s grounds, at least according to Augusta National’s lore.

That has cultivated a widespread belief that almost all of those tailored symbols of golf history — presented annually to winners since 1949 and so renowned that a club official once publicly compared their status to the Statue of Liberty — are confined to several hundred cloistered acres of east Georgia.

But that is not true. It has not been true for more than half a century.

Perhaps “the most coveted award in all the golfing world,” as Augusta National once put it in a court filing, is to be presented under tightly guarded conditions on Sunday, when this year’s pandemic-delayed Masters is scheduled to conclude. What has become clear in recent years, though, is that for all of the club’s determination, it does not have absolute control over all of the gold-buttoned blazers that are emblems of its power and mystique.

Augusta National’s estimated 300 or so members also wear the blazers, like the one O’Brien now has, when they are at the invitation-only club, its roster a Who’s Who of international business, politics, sports and technology. But an unclear number of green jackets also exist in exile as family heirlooms, museum exhibits, showpieces for the wealthy and, at a course near Cleveland, a prized tribute to the man who won the Masters and then became the club’s head pro. Gary Player’s first jacket, which he took back to South Africa with him in a fit of ecstasy in 1961, is still there, having cloaked him as a new champion in Georgia and, from time to time in the decades that followed, as a man having dinner at home.

Player being Player, an impish and popular nine-time winner of major tournaments, that has proved acceptable. But the circumstances and desires that can surround one of the most renowned sartorial traditions in sports have sometimes led to trouble, with potential transactions occasionally giving way to trails of litigation and accusations of theft and deceit.

A spokesman for Augusta National declined to comment. The club, though, has long asserted that it owns the jackets and loans them to members, who first began to receive blazers in 1937, and winners. In a filing last year with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, lawyers for the club said it had “instituted firm control over the wearing of the Green Jacket through the propagation and enforcement of strict rules in order to protect the brand” and that the blazers “cannot be sold or given to third parties under any circumstances.”

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.”

The jacket O’Brien purchased through another auction house belonged to W. Ronald Alexander, a bus-manufacturing magnate who was an Augusta member before he died in St. Andrews, Scotland — home to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club — in 2006.

O’Brien was perhaps a decade into collecting sports memorabilia when the Alexander jacket surfaced for sale. He had grown up watching golf on television alongside his father, with the Masters an intergenerational rite of spring. And a green jacket, he reasoned, would be the centerpiece of a golf collection, much like a baseball signed by Babe Ruth can anchor a gallery of baseball memorabilia.

It arrived by mail — “just like you bought a suit at Saks Fifth Avenue,” he said — and took its place on the mannequin.

He wondered then, and sometimes still does, whether Augusta National might intervene. It has done so before, including in 2013, when the club asked a judge in Dallas to block the sale of Art Wall Jr.’s 1959 championship jacket, which a Florida doctor had purchased at auction less than a year earlier for $61,452.55.

The club said the coat had been stolen, not by the doctor but by some of Augusta’s employees. The workers, Augusta National said, had also taken three other blazers, all of which were recovered.

“The green jacket to Augusta is the Statue of Liberty to New York or the Mona Lisa to the Louvre,” Jim James, a club official, testified at a hearing, according to a contemporaneous Dallas Morning News report.

Court records show the case ended with a settlement that included Augusta taking possession of the jacket with a handoff in New York City on Halloween in 2013.

Augusta turned to similarly aggressive tactics later in the decade, when it sued Green Jacket Auctions in Federal District Court over its plans to sell three blazers. (The club also objected to an auction that would “release its proprietary silverware into the stream of commerce.”)

That case was also settled on undisclosed terms. Green Jacket Auctions, now known as Golden Age Golf Auctions, cited “certain relationships and arrangements we’ve made” when it declined to comment for this article.

From time to time, though, Augusta National effectively assented to the jackets not remaining behind its gates, particularly if a blazer was in the possession of a former Masters winner.

Player, a three-time champion, recalled this year that he had rushed to the airport with the jacket after his victory in 1961. After his second-place finish the next year and with his blazer unreturned, Clifford Roberts, Augusta National’s co-founder and longtime chairman, called to ask after the jacket and, ultimately, to tell Player that it was supposed to be back at the club.

“With tongue in cheek, I suggested if he wanted it back he would have to personally come and get it in South Africa,” Player said in an email. “We had a good relationship, and he laughed and simply asked that I don’t wear it out in public, which I never did.”

But, he acknowledged, “I did host several dinners in my home wearing it with great pride.”

Seve Ballesteros, who won in 1980, forgot to bring his back to the United States from his home in Spain the following year. Ballesteros died in 2011, and his children regard their father’s jacket as a fixture there.

“Since they were small kids, Seve’s sons and daughter had always seen the green jacket in their dad’s trophy room,” said Rosario Sordo, who works for the foundation that bears Ballesteros’s name. “Since their early days they have always been familiar with the green jacket at Seve’s home in Pedreña. It is where Seve left it.”

In Connecticut, O’Brien, who will sometimes let children try on one of Shaquille O’Neal’s enormous sneakers, another item in his collection, treats the green jacket with undisturbed reverence. He appeared aghast at the thought of regularly donning it himself, as others who have purchased jackets sometimes have.

“It would be like taking your Babe Ruth baseball and going outside and hitting it around,” he said. “For me, there’s something very special about it that says winner or member or nobody.”