The Last Stand of the Masters Gnomes

It's no exaggeration to call Ryan Carey, founder and owner of Golden Age Auctions, the biggest player in golf memorabilia. He has all kinds of sale-price records from clubs to trophies to green jackets. But for most of the last decade, Carey has refused to deal in gnomes.

You might forgive his skepticism. In 2016, when Augusta National sold its first gnome exclusively at Berckmans Place—the fancy, semi-secret food-and-merch playground tucked beyond the tree line of the fifth and 16th holes that sometimes serves as a testing ground for new products—none of its marketing wizards thought it would become a phenomenon. Sure, gnomes are cute, and at 13½ inches look nice on a mantle. Who could’ve foreseen they’d be treated by early rising Masters patrons the way rabid teens once treated John Lennon and Paul McCartney? Augusta National didn’t even bring gnomes back for 2017. They returned in 2018 and gained notoriety and collectible value during the pandemic, but Carey considered them a fad. The memorabilia he prefers is “investment grade” meaning it should accrue value over time. He figured buyers would eventually come to their senses, and the gnome bubble would burst.

This April, for the first time, Carey will auction an Augusta National gnome. It’s the original 2016 model, which originally retailed for even less than the current going rate of $49.50. Carey predicts it will sell for more than $10,000.

“I will admit that I’ve been proven quite wrong,” Carey says.

So wrong, Carey explains, that the gnome now claims the highest resale of anything ever sold in the Masters merchandise tent, measured both as a multiple of the original cost and the highest dollar amount. As for previous high watermarks, Carey once sold a Scotty Cameron putter that cost $1,000 in the Masters shop for more than $5,000. If his 2016 gnome fetches what he thinks, it will be more than 300 times the original.

Yet, just as Carey is embracing gnomes as they achieve maximum desirability, rumor has it that Augusta National is poised to do the unthinkable. If you believe the whispers, the ceramic bearded totem that appears in shops this April will be the last of his line.

To all of this, we have just one bewildered word: Why?

Why did Augusta make gnomes in the first place? On the surface, we don’t know, and the most predictable sentence of this story is the following: “Augusta National declined to comment.”

We don’t know who makes the gnomes or where, how many are produced, or who came up with the idea. Through a well-placed source, we know approximately 1,000 were released each day of the 2025 Masters, with about 500 in the main North Shop and others spread between the South Shop by the fifth hole and Berckmans Place. That was about double the volume of previous years, an attempt to restore some sanity to the bedlam surrounding the creatures— people lining up outside the gates at 4 a.m., secondary-market buyers profithunting, and a scene more reminiscent of Black Friday at your local Target than the bucolic serenity Augusta National cultivates.

Nikki Dunagan identifies as a “Masters nepo baby,” and you should prepare to be jealous: Her grandfather was an Augusta native who bought tickets for the first time in the late 1950s (price: $12.50), and went back so many times that he became part of the “series badge program” that under certain circumstances can be passed down to children. Nikki has been to every Masters since 1997 except the COVID November Masters of 2020. She and her family didn’t even know about the gnomes until 2021, when they lucked across one during the Drive, Chip and Putt competition. She mostly bought that first one because it looked like her dad. Now she has five, including the 2020 Santa gnome that her husband bought as a gift (she didn’t ask him how much it cost). The rest of the on-site purchases have taken considerably more planning, as well as an earlier alarm.

“It’s just kind of become a thing,” she says. “Let’s try to keep getting them because we can.”

Brandon Greene is the General Manager of the Augusta GreenJackets, the minor league affiliate of the Atlanta Braves, and he’s made a point to attend every Masters since moving to Augusta in 2015. He missed out on the gnomes in 2016 and 2018, but a year later, as Tiger Woods was pulling off a miracle, he walked to the shop “like a normal person” and bought one as a piece of decor for his new house. The next year, he bought the COVID gnome from a catalog, and then it was off to the races. Now he’s got seven of the nine, and like Dunagan, he’s had to get more resourceful each year. One year, at the point of hopelessness when a trip to the shop came up empty, a security guard tapped him on the shoulder and hooked him up with a gnome that had been held for someone who never came.

Greene has no intention of selling them—the seven dwarves occupy a prideful spot on his mantle, with the most recent featured on his TV stand— but when he needs to amuse himself, all he has to do is fire up the Internet.

“Sometimes I’ll get on eBay and be like, man, these things are going for $20,000 for a whole set!”

As with Dunagan, I pressed Greene about what made these gnomes so attractive. He spoke about the ties to the city and the general Masters motif that predominates, but he came back to the same rationale:

“Once you get a few things, it gets addicting. Now I want it just to say I have it.”

Other amateur collectors I spoke with echoed the same idea. The gnomes are popular because the gnomes are popular. People want the gnomes because people want the gnomes.

Well, OK, but something had to spur this. According to Carey, that “something” was the pandemic.

“COVID really put a spotlight on all collectibles,” Carey says. “The greater sports-collectibles industry all of a sudden doubled or even tripled. It was a perfect storm of being stuck in your house watching ‘The Last Dance’ documentary, having more time to be on websites like mine and revisit nostalgia, go back to the roots of what made you happy. That was the fire that got it started.”

Carey has no memory of anybody caring about the gnomes at the 2019 Masters, but by 2021 everyone wanted one.

“It’s the tail that wags the dog,” Carey says. “It’s more about the collectible and the collecting aspect. You can’t dislike the item, but the frenzy is about collecting.” (Note: Golf Digest has a business relationship with Carey’s company, Golden Age Auctions.)

Carey gives credit to Augusta for changing the style every year. The first gnome was a golfer who wore an argyle green-and-white sweater. Then in 2018 it was a Masters caddie, and the years since have showcased various patrons with lawn chairs and backpacks and ice cream sandwiches and all kinds of funky hats, even a gallery guard. (On that note, an actual gallery guard told me he amuses himself by telling patrons who ask about the mysteries of Augusta—“What’s down that road?”—it’s where the gnomes live.)

Of all items in Masters merchandising, the gnome is the only one that merits its own sign limiting purchases to one per customer. The resale prices speak for themselves and the mania shows no signs of relenting. “We sold Tiger’s irons from the Tiger Slam for over $5 million,” Carey says, “and I get more emails about these damn gnomes.”

Why on earth would Augusta get rid of them? Most companies, after launching a product that sends the consuming public into hysterics as they line up in the predawn hours praying just for the chance to throw $49.50 into your coffers, would respond by producing as many as possible as quickly as possible. But as Carey says, only Augusta National would get upset that it was selling too well.

The year 2026 would serve as the 10th anniversary and a convenient milestone on which to conclude the franchise. Our merchandising source put his certainty at “95 percent plus.” Augusta would not confirm this and could always pivot, but the writing on the wall seems to spell doom for our bearded friends.

In the end, it’s about self-image. Our merchandising source says the club is concerned about longer wait times. (Golf Digest Senior Manager of Social Media Will Irwin spent 50 minutes in line to get his gnome last year). Waiting in line detracts from the ideal patron experience but, perhaps more importantly, reads as gauche. Whatever money is generated isn’t a sufficient counterargument to what it costs in prestige. This isn’t just about gnomes—it’s been estimated that Augusta National grosses about $70 million in merchandise for the week—but the gnomes have become a glaring symbol of the hyper-consumerism the club is trying to curb.

If 2026 is indeed the last stand of the Masters gnomes, they can go to their Valhalla with a smile in their hearts and a glow on their ruddy cheeks. How many of us are lucky enough to be made obsolete because we were just too good? The truth is, nixing the gnomes means they’ll never die—rarity drives value, and these little guys will live on in the nooks and crannies of the Internet. Even if exiled from Augusta, their prices will rise to staggering heights that a simple little gnome could never achieve on his own.