Tiger Woods' debut ticket was a $25 grounds pass, and one has sold for $99,000

Woods announced he was turning professional in the week of the Greater Milwaukee Open and teed it up on Thursday 29 August 1996 at Brown Deer Park. He opened with a 67, finished tied 60th on 67-69-73-68, earned $2,544 and made a hole-in-one on the 14th in the final round (tournament record). That is the official professional debut, and the ticket shown here is the one PSA catalogues against it: a $25 grounds ticket, good for any one day of the tournament, graded MINT 9 as cert 63595220. It is the only copy at that grade and nothing sits above it. It sold at Heritage for $99,000 on 27 February 2022, the highest price any golf ticket we track has reached.

Every price below comes from 62 single-ticket sales of the Greater Milwaukee Open ticket that we track across Heritage, Goldin, Fanatics Collect, Huggins & Scott and eBay, from 18 September 2019 to 23 August 2026, $541,728 combined. A four-ticket group lot is excluded. Every one of the 62 carries a PSA cert that resolves to a slab in our scan database, so every grade printed here is PSA's own, not the one in the auction title. Population counts are from our reading of PSA's census on 8 July 2026, with the two headline items re-read live on 6 October 2026. PSA keeps autographed copies in a separate PSA/DNA index, so the counts are for unsigned tickets unless stated.

Three tickets get sold as the Tiger Woods debut, and only one is the professional debut

Auction titles use the word debut for three different Tiger Woods tickets. The earliest is the 1992 Nissan Los Angeles Open at Riviera, where a 16-year-old amateur on a sponsor's exemption teed off on Thursday 27 February 1992, shot 72-75 and missed the cut. That is his PGA Tour debut, but he was a high-school junior, not a professional. The second is the 1995 Masters, 6 to 9 April 1995, his first major, where he finished tied 41st as the only amateur to make the cut. The third is the 1996 Greater Milwaukee Open, the first tournament he entered as a professional. The hobby prices them in the opposite order to the record books: the amateur ticket from 1992 is the scarcest and the dearest per copy, a pattern we measured across other players in the preseason debut post.

The 1992 ticket's price comes from scarcity and from the story. PSA has graded 25 full tickets, 6 stubs, 13 badges and a single parking pass for that week at Riviera, 45 in all, and 23 of them are Authentic. Nineteen have sold, the median is $6,000, and two Authentic full tickets went for $57,600 and $51,600 within three months of each other in the winter of 2021-22. The 1995 Masters sits at the other end: 174 graded, mostly practice-round tickets and the Crenshaw-year tournament badge, 18 sales, and nothing above $960. A reader who wants the moment Woods first took a cheque needs the Milwaukee ticket, which is the rest of this post.

The debut ticket is a $25 any-day grounds pass, which is why 102 of them are graded

The ticket does not name Woods and does not name a day. It reads Greater Milwaukee Open, presented by Lite, Brown Deer Golf Course, August 26 1996 thru September 1 1996, $25.00, good for any one day of the tournament, one day grounds only, Thursday thru Sunday. A full ticket is one that was never torn; a stub is the same ticket with the bottom panel taken at the gate. Because it was valid on any of the four tournament days, no copy can be tied to the Thursday round in which Woods made his debut. The same is true of the green corporate variant, and the $15 tan practice round ticket, valid Monday to Wednesday, covers the days of his announcement but not a competitive round. The official guest badge is the only form that was not sold to the public.

PSA's census on 8 July 2026 held 102 graded copies across the three catalogue entries: 38 full tickets (32 tournament, 3 corporate, 3 practice round), 48 stubs (39, 6 and 3 on the same split) and 16 badges. The ceiling is low. There is no PSA 10 in any form. The tournament full ticket has one MINT 9 and two NM-MT 8s, the corporate full has two 8s, the badge has three 9s, and no stub of the standard ticket grades above EX-MT 6. When we re-read the two headline certs live on 6 October 2026, the PSA 9 was still population 1 with none higher and the corporate PSA 8 was still population 2 with none higher, so nothing has been added at the top in the three months since the census.

Authentic is the largest grade, and that is normal for a golf ticket

24 of the 102 graded Milwaukee tickets are Authentic: 12 of the 32 tournament full tickets, 5 of the 39 stubs and 7 of the 16 badges. Across every PSA-graded ticket in the hobby the Authentic share is 15% (42,848 of 279,911), and for golf it runs far higher: 51% of the 1992 Riviera tickets, 40% of the 1995 Masters badges, 31% of the 1997 Masters badges. A golf ticket is worn outdoors for a day, pinned to a shirt or hung on a string through a punched hole (the 1992 Riviera ticket is printed with the instruction that it must be worn at all times), and a pinhole, tape or a trim is enough for PSA to return Authentic instead of a number.

The Authentic tier is also where the consecutive certs are. Five full tickets numbered 62842852 through 62842856, one grading submission and almost certainly one find, all came back Authentic and were sold through Heritage between August and November 2021 for $2,100, $2,520, $2,640, $4,080 and $5,160. The eight Authentic full-ticket sales we track run from $2,100 to $5,160 with a median of $2,820, which is the same money as a VG 3 ($2,760 to $3,600) and only a little under a VG-EX 4 ($3,120 to $7,500). The grade does not start to matter until EX-MT 6, and it matters a great deal from NM-MT 8 upwards.

The record was set in February 2022 and the slabs that set it have come back cheaper

Two Heritage sessions set every record. On 20 November 2021 the corporate full ticket, cert 63435842 in NM-MT 8, sold for $87,000 alongside an EX-MT 6 at $10,500 and a signed practice-round ticket at $16,200. On 27 February 2022 the Winter Platinum Night sale, the same session that produced the $468,000 Jordan debut, took the PSA 9 to $99,000 and a 1992 Riviera full ticket to $57,600. Those four months account for the top two prices this ticket has ever reached, and six of the slabs sold between May 2021 and May 2022 have since been back on the block.

The fall is confined to the top of the ladder. The 29 sales recorded up to June 2022 have a median of $3,120; the 29 sales from January 2023 onwards have a median of $3,075. An Authentic, VG 3 or VG-EX 4 full ticket costs in 2026 what it cost in 2021, and the stubs have held too. What changed is the premium that one bidder was prepared to pay for the single best copy on a given night. The same PSA 8 that made $37,200 in May 2021 made $17,080 in August 2026 with one copy graded higher, and that is now the most recent reading of what the top of this market will bear.

The ten highest Tiger Woods debut ticket sales on record

The other Tiger Woods tickets collectors buy

1992 Nissan Los Angeles Open, 27 February 1992. The PGA Tour debut, as an amateur, and not the professional debut. 45 graded across full tickets (25), stubs (6), badges (13) and one parking pass, 51% of them Authentic. 19 sales, median $6,000, from $1,440 to $57,600. The highest numeric grade is a single NM-MT 8, cert 87866436, which sold at Heritage for $22,200 in October 2024.

1996 Las Vegas Invitational, 6 October 1996. The first PGA Tour win, in a playoff over Davis Love III in his fifth start as a professional (tournament record). PSA has graded 8 full tickets and 7 badges, 15 in all, and none of the 15 has sold through the auction houses we track. Our eBay archive records a PSA 6 Sunday full ticket at $15,000 in August 2024 and a badge at $4,000 in March 2021, both without a cert we could verify, so treat those as the only guide to price.

1997 Masters, 10 to 13 April 1997. The first major, won by twelve strokes at 270, a record that still stands. This is the most-graded Tiger Woods ticket by a wide margin: 366 badges and 9 daily full tickets. It is also the cheapest way in: 52 badge sales, median $719, from $312 to $14,030 for a signed PSA 9 at Heritage in April 2025, with the unsigned record a PSA 9 at $4,499 and a signed PSA 7 at Goldin for $11,895 in November 2025. We ranked it against the hobby's other most-kept moments in the most-graded tickets post.

1995 Masters, 6 to 9 April 1995. The first major, as an amateur, and the cheapest of the three debut tickets. 124 tournament badges and 50 practice-round tickets are graded, 18 have sold, and the range is $60 to $960 with a median of $336.

The Milwaukee ticket is the one that records the professional debut, the one with the deepest market, and the one whose top prices have moved most. A full ticket in any grade up to VG-EX 4 costs $2,100 to $7,500 and has for five years. A stub costs $338 to $5,500. The three copies graded NM-MT 8 or better have sold for anything from $8,235 to $99,000 depending on the night, and the next sale of one of them will say more about where this market is than any figure above.