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For 23 years, mystery has surrounded an authentic jacket from the Augusta National Golf Club known as the “Thrift Store Green Jacket” after selling for $5 in a Goodwill store in Toronto.

The name of the rightful owner of the blazer — which is not allowed off the grounds of the Georgia club except by the reigning Masters champion — had been snipped from the label. No one knows how the 1950s era jacket ended up in the racks of used sports jackets.

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But the unnamed Canadian journalist who bought the jacket in 1994 knew how rare his find was.

So did British Golf International journalist Dominic Pedler. When he read about the sale months later, in the press room of the Augusta National on the morning the Masters, he resolved to track down the buyer of the coveted jacket with the gold buttons and trademark logo of a flag through the state of Georgia. Only members of the club and winners of the Masters can own the jacket.



“It took some time to locate the fortune finder and make him an offer he couldn’t refuse (he did); and several more months before I had a deal and a logistical plan to take safe possession of the plunder. But eventually there was the satisfaction of slipping it on to find that the estimated size 42 Regular could indeed have been made for me,” Pedler wrote in an article about his quest reprinted in Golf Today, titled The Jacket and I.