THE FIRST ITEM THE YOUNG MAN STOLE FROM AUGUSTA NATIONAL WAS A GREEN AND WHITE GOLF TOWEL.
current job and his employment pros- pects as a felon don’t stand to improve greatly. Calculating the restitution fig- ure was rather philosophical, as what loss did Augusta National incur when unsold items marked to be destroyed were stolen? And then, what value do we assign artifacts that are in essence priceless, except when occasionally subjected to the bidding contests of very wealthy collectors? After much paperwork and consternation, the arrived answer of $5.3 million was straightforward – the total amount Globensky made from his illegal sales. One way to complicate even that answer is to ask: Why after years of cooperation with the FBI has nobody else been arrested? The people who knowingly bought stolen goods from Globensky could be liable to share that debt or more, and they surely profited more than $5.3 million. We can assume this because – lovers of golf history, read this sitting down – Globensky re- ceived $5 million for the truckloads of relatively low-value merchandise, but just $300 000 for all the memorabilia – the three green jackets, the trophy, the tickets, the letters and other items. In 2013, Horton Smith’s family sold his jacket at public auction for $682 000. While the inaugural champion from 1934 and again in 1936 is a figure of great significance, Horton Smith is no Arnold Palmer. Originally, Globensky applied to Augusta National to wait tables, but the job opening was in the warehouse. When he started, the main warehouse was at the corner of Washington and Eisenhower, and there were two other
This was just after the 2007 Masters, when he had come to understand it was customary for warehouse employees to take one or two small things – a hat, a flag, a shirt, a mug emblazoned with the iconic club logo – from piles designated for destruction. The 22-year-old was a college dropout whose previous job was waiting tables at nearby West Lake Country Club. So was set into motion the most brazen thefts the game has ever known. On March 19, 2025, Richard Brendan Globensky, an Evans, Georgia, native who goes by Brendan, was sentenced to 12 months in prison. He got off light because he never wasted anyone’s time denying his guilt, voluntarily sold his house inside Champions Retreat to send a cheque for $1.6 million to Augusta National, and for two-and-half years energetically cooperated with the FBI to implicate other people. Some basic facts have been known for a while. Across more than a decade of employment, Globensky regularly stole merchandise in increasing quantities. If not for also taking historical memorabilia, he might have got away with it. In 2022, he was arrested shortly after Arnold Palmer’s 1958 green jacket from his first Masters win was seized outside the Lincoln Park, Chicago, home of a reputable collector who had been confident of the item’s honest origin until that moment. Hear “golf collectibles” and you might imagine a fusty scene of mostly older men content to marvel at even older spoons, cleeks, featheries and whatnot, but the story cir- culating the collecting world in 2025 was wild. It involved wiretaps, controlled transactions, trucks getting loaded Tony Soprano-style, a connoisseur with a private jet saving the day and, most importantly, a breathtaking list of treasures that went missing: the green jackets of Palmer, Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen; a Masters trophy; tickets and programmes from the first Masters in 1934; signed letters from Bobby Jones and more. All to say, when’s the movie and who’s George Clooney going to play are two questions not normally bandied about the annual convention of the Golf Heritage Society. When the Feds knocked on Globensky’s door, he owned to taking it all essentially immediately. He’s on the hook to pay back $3.7 million more, which, the prison sentence aside, will be difficult given he makes less than $100 000 per year at his
storage spaces on club grounds beneath the shops. For half the year, the warehouse had a small crew of 10 or 12 people, and the other half it ramped up with additional workers, including many PGA professionals from northern sections whose pro shops were closed or quiet during the winter season. “It was a neat little game we played receiving and moving stuff where we could not run out of space,” Globen- sky told me in an interview with his lawyer, Thomas Church, present. “Like, you can’t receive hats until February because there’s just so many of them.” Globensky remembers the club receiving about 30 containers from China every November, and then another 75 domestic truckloads closer to the tour- nament. “Some paths were just wide enough to walk down to take inventory and others just wide enough to drive a fork- lift, within inches.” A recent estimate of the total gross merchandise sales during Masters week is $70 million, or about $1 million per hour – incredible demand that is strengthened by the fact the items, from windbreakers to garden gnomes to scotch tumblers to almost anything imaginable, can be purchased only on-grounds during the tournament. The exception to this rule has been a smattering of unauthorised reseller web- sites, the leader of which is MMO Golf, formerly known as Masters Mail Order before the club forced its name change. In the early days, owner Kenley Matheny would rent a house in Augusta during Masters week for a crew of mostly col-
A BIG BREAK The text chain between two collectors, one of whom was working with the FBI.
86 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 87
MARCH/APRIL 2026
MARCH/APRIL 2026
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