Greg Norman Bought His Own Ticket to Get Into the Masters
The LIV Golf Commissioner was not on the Masters’ complimentary guest list this week at Augusta National, so he hit the secondary market for a ticket.
AUGUSTA, Ga. – Some Augusta National patrons surely did a double-take Wednesday at the sight of a certain blonde-haired man roaming the course in a straw hat.
Greg Norman, the LIV Golf commissioner and one of the faces of the pro golf divide, at the Masters?
Yes, Norman did attend the practice day and news of his presence quickly spread. But another detail about the visit emerged Thursday, thanks to Norman’s son, Greg Jr.
The World Golf Hall of Famer paid scalper prices to get inside the gates.
“My dad paid for a ticket on the secondary market to attend the Masters as a patron. He was denied one directly after going through the proper professional channels,” Norman Jr. wrote on social media.
Officials from major golf tours are believed to receive complimentary admission. Members of other professional golf organizations, like the PGA of America and the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, can also receive Masters tickets.
The general public only has two ways of getting into the year’s first major at a face-value price: be a regular ticketholder (the waiting list was last open in 2000) or win the annual ticket lottery.
After that, there is the secondary market where daily passes can sell for thousands of dollars.
That’s where Norman, the two-time major winner who finished in top 5 at Augusta eight times, including some of golf’s most infamous heartbreak, had to go for a Wednesday pass.
But once on the grounds, he said he did not receive any of the backlash that has surrounded the existence of the Saudi-backed league he helps run.
“Walking around here today, there’s not one person who said to me, ‘Why did you do LIV?’ ” he said to the Washington Post. “There’s been hundreds of people, even security guys, stopping me, saying, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is fantastic.’ To me, that tells you that what we have and the platform fits within the ecosystem, and it’s good for the game of golf.”
