Bidding it up on eBay

Golf Digest, July, 1999 by David Owen

A friend who knows I'm interested in golf said, "I saw something at a garage sale that would have amused you. It was a box of old golf balls with Dean Martin on the-" I cut him off. "You mean the 'Swinger's Dozen'? Thirteen balls, including 'one for the road'-with Dino's face on the box?" My friend's jaw dropped. "How did you-" "You snapped them up, I hope," I continued.

"No way," he said. "Guy wanted 20 bucks."

I groaned. A Swinger's Dozen in good condition usually goes for more than $200 on eBay, the Internet auction site. I bid on one a couple of months ago but dropped out in the low three figures. I felt depressed for a while, though I later recovered-probably because of all the other golf-related stuff I've bought (or "won," to use eBay's seductive term).

Here are some of my recent purchases: a golf-trophy-cum-desk-calendar with an emblem that says "National Amputee"; an old tin practice-ball bucket decorated with a color lithograph of a guy at a driving range; a board game from the early '60s called Arnold Palmer's Inside Golf ("Learn Good Golf in the Living Room"); sheet music for a song called "Fore! Ike is on the Tee," copyright 1953; a box of Headown golf tees ("The Easy Way To Keep Your Head Down"), which are regular wood tees attached to semi-realistic plastic representations of the lower halves of naked women; a porcelain planter in the shape of a ladies' golf shoe with a porcelain golf ball balanced on the toe.

All in all, I've probably spent $2,000 in the last two months. That's a large sum, but it seems trivial when you realize how much I've saved by not bidding on tens of thousands of other items-such as a used plastic swizzle stick from the Green Jacket, a defunct restaurant in Augusta, Ga., and six dozen miscellaneous used golf balls, for which the seller wanted a minimum $36. You might think that my wife, who hates golf, would be furious at me, but she's only mildly peeved, because she buys stuff on eBay, too. Recently, she picked up an autographed copy of Mary Ann's Gilligan's Island Cookbook, by Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann. (Favorite recipe so far: Leaky Ship Watercress Soup.)

Our only problem now is storage. We have a nice big living room, but it's filled with stuff we didn't buy on eBay. To make room for our collection of golf-and- cooking memorabilia, we're going to have to de-accession some of our pre- Internet possessions, such as couches and chairs. That's fine with me but not with my wife, who's old-fashioned (so far) on the subject of furniture. If she ever changes her mind, though, I know where we can sell it all.