Early last week I got to the house on Camelot Drive in Augusta that would be home for the week of the Masters golf tournament. On the driveway shared with my new neighbour, particular care was taken not to get too close to the car already there, this being America and all. A young man came from the adjoining house. “Uh-oh,” I’m thinking.
“Hi, I’m Blair,” he says. “Blair Richardson. Are you moving in next door?”
“Yeah,” I say, trying to disguise the relief.
“You here for the Masters?”
“Yeah, here for the week.”
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“Same as us, we’re from North Carolina. My wife and I are about to have dinner, just some steaks, you’re welcome to join us.”
This is 30 seconds after we’ve met. Perhaps I’ve been living in England too long. “Ah,” I say, without thinking about what comes next. Eventually I lie about tiredness after the long flight from London. “Maybe later in the week,” I say. The following evening, I drop by to say hello to Blair and Carrie. Mostly to thank them for their generosity. We swap stories about why we’ve come to the Masters. Blair’s is more interesting than mine.
While I’m in the living room he takes a call, from a guy called Mike out of South Carolina. Mike tells Blair he got his number through a contact. Mike has two Masters passes that he’s prepared to sell. Blair asks how soon he can deliver the passes, Mike says 1.30 on Thursday afternoon. These passes have a face value of $460 (about £370).
“I’ll pay $3,000 for each.”
“I was hoping to get five.”
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“How about I give you eight for the two.”
“OK, 8k it is.”
Blair inquires how Mike came by the tickets. Turns out his son got them in the official Augusta National lottery. He asks Mike to send a photo of his ID, which Mike agrees to do. Blair is reassured by this. Mike says he would need to be paid in cash and asks where they can meet. Blair suggests Mike comes to his rental house in Augusta. It’s now Mike’s turn to feel reassured.
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The main drag that runs by Augusta National is called Washington Road. By the side of the road there are ad-hoc signs offering to buy and sell tickets for the Masters, little stalls manned by men looking for what they call “pullovers”, customers who pull over in search of a ticket. A one-day usually sells for about $2,000 but depending on supply and demand, it can fetch up to $4,000.
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A journalist friend was once offered $12,000 for his press pass. The secondary market for tickets to sport’s biggest events is vibrant and nowhere more so than for the Masters. Should someone you know say they are going to the Masters, the likelihood is that their ticket was bought from a company such as Blair’s Ticket Preserve. Blair himself attends most of the biggest sporting events in the US; from the Super Bowl to NCAA play-offs; concerts to the most popular music festivals. He will be in Paris for the Olympics, buying and selling.
It began when he was 15. His dad, Jim, and his Uncle Mike had season tickets for the Charlotte Hornets in the NBA. A lot of the time Jim and Mike didn’t go to the games and they passed the tickets on to the kid. Jim was in the business of buying and selling on the secondary market and wanted to test his son.
Blair was good at hustling. Shaking and baking, he calls it. He would sell the tickets for well above face value, then buy more tickets for less than he sold and keep buying until it was game time. “The aim was to end up with two tickets ‘on the wood’, the floor seats that are gold dust in the NBA and still make a profit on the evening. At 16, I was making around $500 every game. I was good at it.”
He did a four-year degree at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. “I graduated from UNC with a bachelor of arts in criminal justice, and can you believe it, now I’m scalping tickets. Wanted to do something with the FBI or CIA, some kind of investigative work, but by the time I was 18, I was making six figures selling tickets and I’m [thinking], ‘Wait, what’s going on here?’ I loved what I was doing and 15 years ago, I set up Ticket Preserve.”
The Masters is close to Blair’s heart and not solely because of the pristine fairways and the pimento cheese sandwiches. “It is the mecca for golf but it’s also the mecca of our business. It’s more challenging than Super Bowl because of the dynamic of the four-day badge. My people and I spend a lot of our week ‘babysitting’ badges. People want to go for one day and are prepared to pay $3,000, so we give them a four-day pass and then have to get it back from them after they exit the property.
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“Augusta National charges less than $500 for the four-day pass. We can sell that for $10,000. So the Masters is a 20-times market. At Super Bowl it’s usually two or three times.”
He says if you want to play the secondary ticket market at the Super Bowl, you need to bring about $100,000 in cash. Blair is licensed to carry a firearm that he’s never needed to use, though once he had a bad experience in Miami. “Spent a day in the drunk tank when I hadn’t even had a drink. This was the Ultra Music Festival, they stopped me with a lot of tickets and thought they had to be stolen.
“I said, ‘No, no, no, that is absolutely not the case, here’s my business card. I’m a legit broker out of Charlotte, North Carolina.’ They didn’t want to believe me. They ran every single barcode on every ticket and they all came back clean, not one stolen. They still didn’t let me go, they charged me with doing business without a licence in the state of Florida but they had nothing on me. All the cash that I had, the tickets themselves, were all seized. The whole thing was dropped but I never got my cash back, $10,000 just disappeared. True story.”
On Thursday after Mike’s Ford Explorer pulls up in our driveway. Blair goes to greet him. They talk about the weather, perfect for the Masters. Mike hands over two passes, Blair gives him $8,000 in cash. They chat for a bit and then Mike heads home to South Carolina. Two days later I asked Blair what he got for Mike’s tickets.
“15k is the way it shook out,” he replied. I felt pleased for him.
