Last ditch tickets still draw big bucks

Filed by Rhonda Cook in Augusta.

They came empty-hand.

Most are hopeful and a few very confident that they will get inside Augusta National to watch the final day of practice rounds for the Masters Golf Tournament.

“Are y’all going back in?” Joe Walker asks the young couple leaving through the less-used gate nine.

He and his buddy from Montgomery wanted to buy their passes.

Walker lives in Augusta but Justin Bixenman, had come a long way, expecting Wednesday passes from a friend of a friend who never produced.

“I’m from Alabama. Let me show you,” Bixenman said, pulling his wallet with his driver’s license from a back pocket as the two men followed the couple along a gravel path.

For $560, Walker and Bixenman got a pair of passes.

Up the hill at Gate Six where most people enter the grounds the tickets would have gone for much more, they say. “If you go to the most popular gate, that’s where the scalpers are, These are $500 [each] up there,” Bixenman said.

A few hours earlier Wednesday, pass holders were demanding as much as $700 a ticket, they said.

Walker and Bixenman, smooth-talking salesmen, finally persuaded the man and woman to part with the passes after promising to mail the tickets back to them so they could keep the tickets as souvenirs.

Once the couple walked away, Walker and Bixenman said they would have gone as high as $300 a ticket.

“He’s from Washington, Ga. He’s naïve,” Walker said of the man who sold them the passes.

Walker said the secret is to “know what you’re going to pay and have the gumption to ask people.”