Seattleite Russ Berkman’s dream was to go to the Masters golf tournament, and his dream came true when he won the lottery for four passes to Wednesday’s practice round. But his dream was almost shattered recently when he came home to find his Masters tickets missing.
This is not Sierra. Nor is it even a Swiss mountain dog. But it is an image of a dog holding a piece of paper in its mouth. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
But he did find paper scraps on his floor. Which meant only one thing.
His dog, Sierra, had eaten all four of Berkman’s precious tickets.
However, as Berkman told KJR Seattle radio Tuesday morning, the story doesn’t end there. He was determined to go to the Masters, and there was only one way to get the tickets back.
Well, only one way to get the tickets back undigested.
“First thing I do is I panicked,” Berkman told KJR. He called up his girlfriend and said, “‘I don’t know what the hell to do.’ And she says, ‘Well you gotta make the dog puke.’”
In a stroke of pure genius — well, pure something — Berkman decided to feed Sierra hydrogen peroxide, inducing her to vomit, he told KJR. (Don’t worry: Hydrogen peroxide is safe for dogs to drink.)
And vomit the Swiss mountain dog did.
Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland hits a tee shot during a practice round Tuesday before the 2012 Masters Tournament in Augusta, Ga. (Rory McIlroy/Getty Images)
“Quite frankly, she didn’t really have much else in her stomach but that, so it worked out,” Berkman said. “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.”
Amazingly, with each ticket in about 20 vomit-covered pieces, Berkman was able to put them back together like the world’s most disgusting jigsaw puzzle.
“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.”
That’s three cocktails for Berkman, not three cocktails for Sierra.
Perhaps even more amazingly, when he contacted Augusta National Golf Club to explain the situation — My dog ate my Masters tickets! — the Masters folks believed him. They reprinted Berkman’s tickets and have them waiting for him in Georgia.
KJR has photos of Sierra, the puke and the tickets on the radio station’s website.
Visit seattlepi.com for more Seattle news. Contact Nick Eaton at nickeaton@seattlepi.com or on Twitter as @njeaton.
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