As Tiger Woods plays the final round of the 2022 Masters Tournament, his return to the green has many golf fans remembering the epic “Tiger Slam” of 2000-2001. Turns out, the irons that Tiger used during that stretch just sold for over $5 million in a record-breaking auction.
Woods won the 2000 PGA Championship, 2000 U.S. Open, 2000 British Open, and 2001 Masters, making him the first golfer to ever win four consecutive majors. Known as the “Tiger Slam,” it’s a run of victories that seems unlikely to ever be topped.
During that run, Woods used a set of Titleist 681-T irons, which have now been sold for $5,156,162 at Golden Age Auctions. In terms of golf memorabilia, that’s a record-breaker and it’s not even close. The previous golf memorabilia high was Horton Smith’s green jacket, which sold for $682,000 back in 2013.
The seller was private equity investor Todd Brock, who bought the clubs in 2010 at an auction for $57,242. That’s quite the investment.
“I’ve had them for 12 years now, and I haven’t told anybody that I owned them. They were in a really nice frame in my office and I’m not an investor in memorabilia, so nobody was seeing the irons,” Brock said, per ESPN. “I’ve had the opportunity to see these for 12 years and it’s like a Rembrandt, where somebody takes it to their castle and it’s never seen again. I felt blessed that I got to hang out with them and look at them, but it’s time for somebody else to do something bigger and better with them.”
Interestingly enough, Woods has claimed that while he did use those irons around that time, the ones he used to win the majors were in his home. However, the owner of the irons at the time took a polygraph test to prove authenticity and Golden Age Auctions reportedly confirmed the authenticity of the clubs through photo matching.
[ESPN]
