👀 Inside the Most Exclusive Building in all of Sports

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I’m sure you’ve already heard all the normal Masters talking points this week: $1.50 sandwich this, $0 media rights that. So I promise you, there won’t be any of those in this week’s newsletter.

In fact, we’ve gotten so over-saturated with Masters talking points that people have started playing contrarian just to stand out.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Inside the Most Exclusive Building in all of Sports

📉 Biggest Loser: How One Man Bought a Masters Green Jacket for $5

🏆 Winner’s Circle: Why Augusta National’s Biggest Headache is a 92-Year-Old Woman

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🗞 The Big Story

This building is home to one of the most secretive experiences in all of sports, but for the first time ever, we just got a look at what’s actually going on inside.

Masters’ Strict Rules: Augusta National and the Masters have long been known for their exclusivity, from banning phones on the course to limiting club memberships to just 300 people.

But perhaps the most exclusive experience you can have at the Augusta happens inside this 90,000-square-foot building just off the fifth hole.

This is Berckmans Place, which debuted in 2013 with about 400 badges sold for around $4,000 each. Since then, prices have increased, with two sources saying that this year, badges have reached over $10,000 each, which includes:

• Food

• Drinks

• Gratuity

• A week-long pass to the Masters

Top Secret: When you try to search for images of the inside of Berckmans, all you’ll find are a few grainy cellphone pictures and videos (even though phones aren’t allowed inside the club). But recently, Sports Business Journal viewed Berckmans’ official website, which is password protected, and got an inside look at one of sport’s most secretive experiences.

Now, the first thing you’ll notice is the vast array of dining options. Berckmans is actually home to five different high-end restaurants, which include:

• Calamity Jane’s (American sports bar)

• Ike’s at the Pavilion (southern-style)

• MacKenzie’s (Scottish pub)

• Augusta’s (seafood and oyster bar)

• Isabella (Italian)

Guests at Berckmans also get access to a “Signature Shop,” which features merchandise that you can’t buy anywhere else in the world. For example, one Redditor explained how he bought one of just 150 putters that are sold for $425 on a first-come, first-served basis.

But perhaps the coolest part of this entire experience are the three replica putting greens of holes 7, 14, and 16 that are located right next to the building.

Augusta National even changes the hole locations on these three greens to replicate that day’s pin placement and provides guests with “the latest equipment and expert assistance from an Augusta National caddie.”

To read more about what goes on inside Berckmans, check out Josh Carpenter’s piece in the Sports Business Journal.

📉 Biggest Loser

The biggest mystery in Masters history has nothing to do with golf, but it made one man close to $140,000.

The Green Jacket: As most golf fans know, the Green Jacket is one of the most exclusive awards in all of sports. The only way to get one is by becoming one of just 300 members at Augusta National or by winning the tournament itself. But even if you were to ever get your hands on one of these jackets, you still wouldn’t technically “own” it.

That’s because the only person who can take a Green Jacket off the grounds of Augusta National is that year’s champion. All remaining jackets are required to be stored in the Champions Locker room year-round and are only allowed to be worn once a year during Masters Week.

Not to mention, the color of the jacket, Pantone 342 - better known as “Masters Green,” is trademarked by Augusta National, and every jacket since 1967 has been made by the same company in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Tracking the Jackets: Since Green Jackets were first handed out to tournament winners 85 years ago, there have only been 54 unique champions, meaning there are only 54 champion Green Jackets in circulation, which should make them easy to keep track of.

But the truth is, keeping track of every jacket since 1934 hasn’t been that easy.

For starters, there are at least two golfers who were buried with their Green Jackets. You then have a period in the 40s and 50s when the jackets weren’t as tightly regulated and ended up in the hands of various collectors.

But possibly the most surprising place a Green Jacket has ended up was in a Goodwill in Canada.

The Thrift Store Jacket: In 1994, a Toronto sports journalist noticed a familiar-looking jacket hanging on the rack and priced at just $5.

Upon purchasing it, he realized the jacket’s name tag had been cut out; however, Augusta National later confirmed its authenticity and dated it back to the early 1950s.

To this day, nobody knows who this jacket belonged to, especially since it was from an era when club members and champions were allowed to take their Green Jackets home.

That didn’t stop this same journalist from selling the jacket at auction in 2017 for $139,349.

And while that isn’t even close to the most money one of these jackets has gone for, the fact that it was even up for auction at all resulted in a lawsuit from Augusta National to block the sale of any Green Jackets in the future on the ground that the course it the rightful owner to every Green Jacket in the world.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

The Masters’ $200M expansion project is currently being ruined by one 92-year-old woman; let’s break it down.

Background: For the past 20 years, Augusta National has quietly spent more than $200 million to buy over 100 properties, which make up over 270 acres of land surrounding the golf course. This expansion has included spending $41 million to acquire and demolish a Hooters and a Publix, as well as buying an entire neighborhood just to bulldoze it over.

Now, the reason for Augusta spending all this money is simple: the course wants more space for things like parking and hospitality.

And for the most part, they’ve successfully done that, increasing the size of their original footprint by 75% since 1999.

Plus, in a city where the median home value was only around $125,000 as of 2019, it hasn’t been difficult for a club that makes hundreds of millions of dollars annually to offer homeowners double or triple their home value to simply move out.

Augusta’s 92-Year-Old Issue: However, for the past two decades, Augusta National has run into the same problem every year when it comes to actually completing its expansion: 92-year-old Elizabeth Thacker.

Elizabeth and her husband, Herman, have lived in their three-bedroom, 1900-square-foot home in Augusta, GA, since 1959. When it was built, 1112 Stanley Drive was in the middle of a nice neighborhood with plenty of trees, green space, and local businesses.

But starting in 1999, Augusta National started buying and bulldozing over everything around Elizabeth and her family one by one, including the houses of their family members.

Elizabeth’s brother-in-law sold his two-story house to Augusta for $3.6 million about 10 years ago; meanwhile, their grandson sold his house to the club for $1.2 million a few years later.

But even after Elizabeth’s husband, Herman, died in 2019, she continued to turn down the multi-million dollar offers Augusta National officials would knock on her door with multiple times per year.

Now, being the only house left in the neighborhood means that she lives in the middle of a parking lot that’s filled with thousands of cars for one week every year, but Elizabeth says she has no plans to sell her home in her lifetime.

Herman summed up their reasoning well in a 2019 interview with Fox Sports, saying, “This is home. We love it here.”

Today, Elizabeth’s home is valued at close to $400,000, but you have to imagine Augusta would be willing to pay a lot more than that for it.

⏱️ In Other News

• Have the two sports betting kings been dethroned?

• Inside Augusta's $140M Practice Area

• Of course, the Masters has a secret vault

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

I beg of you; pay attention to what the Masters is doing on Instagram.

It’s a masterclass in sports social media content — we’ll break it down more next week.