Such is the case for Bob Gustin, who was behind the par-3 14th green at Brown Deer Golf Park during the final round of the 1996 Greater Milwaukee Open when Woods jarred a 6-iron for an ace in his professional debut. Gustin and his brother-in-law begged the budding superstar for the ball, and after Tiger plucked his Titleist from the hole, he flipped a piece of history in their direction.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, Gustin managed to get the ball autographed by Tiger, and it’s been a prized possession since. But now he’s going to turn it into a huge pay day after deciding to put the golf treasure up for auction.

“Whatever it goes for, I’m splitting that with my brother-in-law, David,” Gustin told Golf.com. “He’s the one who shouted, ‘Throw it over here!’ He’s the one who it deflected off of before it came to me. We both had a part in me ending up with this ball, so we’ll both enjoy it after it goes to someone else.”

And it should go for a lot. Considering a piece of cardboard — the handwritten leaderboard — with Woods’ name on it recently sold for $69,000, and a ticket from the event sold for $99,000 earlier this year, this golf ball is bound to fetch a pretty penny.

According to Heritage Auctions, “It unquestionably ranks among the finest artefacts of Tiger Woods peerless career ever made available at public auction.”

No arguments here. And in case you’re interested, bidding ends at midnight on November 18. Good luck.

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Including, apparently, grabbing some of the turf itself.

That at least is what Kansas golfer Dan Young does, and he’s got the batch of plastic bags filled with crusty divots to prove it.

Divots pic.twitter.com/9YhgyFPRYd

— Dan Young (@ddygolfer) November 5, 2021

Credit Golf Channel host Shane Bacon for endeavouring to shine new light on the warped minds of golfers by asking his Twitter followers to name “the nerdiest golf thing” they collected. To go with the expected collections of scorecards and ball markers, the responses to Bacon also included a few outliers—from logoed plastic bags to logoed water bottles to, better yet, logoed water bottles filled with sand from those course’s bunkers.

But none rivalled the ingenuity or sheer weirdness of Young’s collection of divots, which he said he began five years ago, and includes sod from Augusta National, Bandon Dunes, Whistling Straits and the Old Course at St. Andrews.

“I must confess I didn’t play all these courses,” Young, who plays out of Prairie Trails in El Dorado, Kansas, wrote in a message. “My friends have helped me out.”

Young did play all the courses in Scotland in his collection, and it was at the Old Course where he received the expected quizzical look from a caddie as he scooped up his keepsake. But even then, the subtext was when it comes to golfers, the bizarre isn’t that bizarre at all.

“He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I told him I collect them,” Young recalled. “He said, ‘Cool,” and we went on our merry way.’ ”

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