Augusta's Most Wanted (Not The Guy, The Jacket)

Green Jacket Owner Bill King Seemed To Barely Bother With His Family’s Old Keepsake, Until He Saw Dollar Signs. Then His Troubles Began.

- Sean Zak

Hanging in Bill King’s bedroom closet, there are some reds. Two or three oranges. A pink, even. And a lot of blues. But at a glance, there are no greens. Only after unzipping a garment bag does the hunter green jacket you’ve been looking for finally dazzle your eye. And your hands. The wool is heavy. On an inside label, you’ll find the name of its long-ago tailor, John Alfieri.

But it’s the logo stitched into the breast pocket that gives it away as the rarest of rarities. The original Augusta National Golf Club insignia dates the jacket to the 1940s. Bill King’s coat isn’t just old, it might be the only jacket of its kind in existence, and right now—tucked away on the second floor of his modest brick house on Baltimore’s north side—it’s very, very far from its original home. And Augusta National wants it back.

Members of the world’s most elite golf establishment have been wearing club coats since the mid-1930s, shortly after Augusta National was founded. Over the years, these once-scratchy but now immaculately sewn beauties have become an odd and distinctive status symbol. The club went so far as to trademark the phrase Green Jacket in 2010.

So when King reached into his closet and put the jacket up for auction in August 2017, Augusta National took notice. At the time, two other green jackets were also up for online bidding, one of them a Byron Nelson champion’s jacket secreted away somewhere in England. The club, and the lawyers representing it, stepped in quickly and aggressively. “They’re an 800-pound gorilla,” one former legal opponent says. “They try to bully you.” And then some.