The Rolex watch folks gave golf legend Jack Nicklaus one of their glitzy timepieces more than a half-century ago, and he’s about to put it up for auction. Experts say it will fetch millions of dollars.
Nicklaus, who has won the most major tournaments in golf history, has not fallen on hard times. He will put every penny he makes on the watch into his foundation for children’s health.
Rolex presented Nicklaus the watch back in 1966 when he was starting to dominate professional golf. Nicklaus says it is the first watch he ever owned, and he has been pictured with it on his arm hundreds of times over the years.
A similar Rolex owned by the late actor Paul Newman was sold at an auction for $17.8 million two years ago, so the Nicklaus watch is expected to be the most expensive sports artifact ever auctioned.
That honor is now assigned to a New York Yankees baseball jersey that Babe Ruth wore in 1920. It was sold at auction for $4.4 million in 2017.
It’s a good thing Nicklaus has never had anybody like my mother keeping things in order at his house. That Rolex watch would have been ditched a long time ago.
Nicklaus says he wore the Rolex a lot, but he didn’t wear it all those countless times he was practicing his golf or playing in big tournaments or when he was on fishing and scuba diving trips around the world.
That means the watch was probably sitting in the drawer of a nightstand at his house for weeks at a time. It would never have survived the kind of decluttering my mother did on a regular basis.
I was a fervent baseball fan growing up and started collecting those trading cards with Major League players’ pictures on them the first time I saw one in a package of bubble gum.
The cards became more important than the gum to boys in our neighborhood during the 1940s and 1950s. Bubble gum companies started selling packs of baseball cards without the gum.
We could buy packages of five or six cards for a nickel. We got together every few days and traded cards with friends, swapping our duplicates for cards of players we didn’t have.
I had shoeboxes stuffed with baseball cards by the time I went off to college. When I went home for the Christmas holidays that year and looked for the card collection, I discovered that my mother had “cleaned out that closet.”
The cards were gone, including some Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron and Stan Musial cards that are selling for thousands of dollars these days to card collectors.
The comic books that I bought, traded, collected and cataloged for years had also been discarded as part of my mother’s continual decluttering of her little wood frame house that was propped on short brick pillars.
Those Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Archie, Roy Rogers, Tarzan and other comics from the 1940s and 1950s are collectors’ items now that are worth a lot of money.
The electric trains, View-Masters with all the films and reels that went with them and other boyhood possessions that I stockpiled were lost in decluttering crusades. They would be valuable today.
When Regina and I were clearing out my mother’s house after she died, we discovered that she was not nearly as diligent about getting rid of stuff that belonged to her and my dad, who had died 20 years earlier.
I’m glad. We got boxes of her old recipes, a lot of faded black and white family pictures, Christmas decorations that she made by hand, black iron skillets, my dad’s razor sharp pocket knives and J.C. Higgins shotgun and the round “corner table” they bought for $3 as their first piece of furniture when they married in the 1930s.
Nobody ever had a Rolex watch in our family, but the news about Jack Nicklaus planning to auction his watch to raise millions of dollars for charity reminded me that my folks gave me a Bulova watch for high school graduation in the 1950s.
They got it from Sears for $29.95 and paid it off in monthly installments. It would be worth a couple hundred dollars on eBay now, but it disappeared long ago when my mother was decluttering her house.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES