Ticket-Eating Dog Causes Angst with Masters Ticket Holder


A Seattle man finally realized a lifelong dream when he won a lottery for four passes to Wednesday's practice round at the Masters. Unfortunately, his dog got to the tickets before he could get to Augusta National Golf Club and use them.

Sierra, a Swiss mountain dog, had eaten the tickets. At first, Russ Berkman was very upset. "First thing I do is I panicked," Berkman told KJR radio in Seattle. Then he called his girlfriend and said, "'I don't know what the hell to do.' And she says, 'Well you gotta make the dog puke.' "

So Berkman fed the dog hydrogen peroxide, inducing her to vomit. "Quite frankly, she didn't really have much else in her stomach but that, so it worked out," he told KJR.

"I grabbed a spatula, put (the vomit) into a Ziploc baggie and brought it inside on my kitchen counter, and started, I guess, either a 'CSI' or surgical-type process to figure out what was going to be salvageable, if anything."

Emboldened by drink, Berkman carefully reassembled the four tickets, which was, admittedly, a disgusting process. "We got about 70 percent of all four tickets put together," he said. "It took about, I don't know - about three cocktails deep was how long it took to put this thing all together."

Berkman then contacted Augusta National Golf Club to explain the situation. The ticket folks at the Masters believed him and reprinted the tickets. They were waiting for him when he got to Georgia.