Selling golf clubs online - Brief Article

Golf Digest, August, 2000 by David Owen

My life as an eBay junkie lasted about three months. It ended one morning last year, when I eagerly tore open a freshly delivered UPS package and discovered a cocktail glass decorated with Billy Casper's top-four short-game tips. (No. 4: "Choose the club with the proper loft to match the type of shot you want to play.") I had no memory of bidding on the glass, much less of "winning" it. Shaken by my blackout, I stopped bidding cold-turkey.

Ominously, perhaps, my interest in Internet auctions has recently reawakened-although I am now a seller, not a buyer. I was introduced to online selling by my son, who owns a large collection of Beanie Babies. My son views his Beanies not as toys but as speculative investments, although he and a friend will occasionally take a dozen of them into the yard and attempt to throw them over the house. When he boasted to me about how much his collection was worth, I did my fatherly duty and explained that, despite what various online price guides might claim, Beanie Babies were not scarce and, therefore, couldn't possibly be valuable.

He ignored me. One day when he was strapped for cash, he put two of them up for sale on eBay. After a week of frantic bidding, the pair sold for $123.50-roughly 10 times what he had paid for them. I promised I would never again offer him unsolicited advice on any subject.

Charitably, my son helped me make my own first eBay sale: a driver with a head the size of a bowling ball. I had bought it for $400, but had found it useless at hitting anything except low, weak hooks, a shot I seldom need. After a brief struggle at the driving range, I banished the club to my garage, where it sat for most of a year. On eBay, it went for almost $350.

Since then, I've sold four other abandoned clubs, and I've rounded up 14 more, which

I will sell as soon as I've tracked down enough big long boxes to ship them in. What will I do with the proceeds-roughly $1,000 so far? Well, my wife has put up with an awful lot from me and my golf over the years, so I think I'll splurge on something nice for her. (Just kidding. I've already ordered a set of new titanium woods.)