Except the invite was supposed to go to another Scott Stallings. A mix-up with the invitation from Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the Masters, led to him ending up with Stallings, the Atlanta-based real estate agent, instead of Stallings, the 37-year-old professional golfer and three – time winner of the PGA Tour.
The Masters is the first of four major tournaments of the year and the only played on the same course every year. The field is limited to the best golfers in the world. By winning the 2022 tournament, Scottie Scheffler pocketed $2.7 million of the contest’s $15 million purse.
Augusta National did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
But all will be granted some sort of mulligan. After realizing he wasn’t the intended recipient, Stallings and his wife, Jenny, made it their mission to make sure the invitation was in the right hands, he said.
They’re lucky they found the invite when they did. Scott and Jenny decided to celebrate the New Year with an impromptu getaway to their condo on St. Simons Island, which they had purchased in August as a vacation rental. But when no one booked it for New Years Day straddling the week, they decided to stay there themselves.
They arrived on New Year’s Eve. As usual on a trip, Scott began unloading their luggage from the car as Jenny headed inside. As she approached, she spotted a UPS package outside the front door and opened it. She immediately recognized the familiar Masters green of the envelope inside and the tournament logo on the front. Jenny thought their years of trying to score tickets to the tournament had finally paid off. But as she thought about it, it didn’t make sense because they hadn’t even applied for tickets to this year’s event.
Jenny reads the letter inside, realizing it was not a ticket to watch but an invitation to player in the tournament. She broke the news to her husband.
“It was amazing. It was like we just won the lotto,” said Scott Stallings. We know the Masters is such an important event. It was like holding the golden ticket.
For a moment, he let his mind wander. He had just received an invitation from Scott Stallings to play in the Masters. He was, in fact, Scott Stallings and had a driver’s license to prove it. Armed with the official invitation, he suspected he could make his way to the Augusta National course and maybe even play a few holes before anyone else was out of luck.
Stallings let his mind wander a little further. Maybe – just maybe – the invitation was meant for him. Augusta National might have picked him at random as a way to let the common man compete alongside Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth.
But reality crept into Stallings’ thoughts, dashing his hopes. He knew there was a professional golfer who shared his name. And he knew it wasn’t his golden ticket. Although momentarily deflated, the realization that he had received the invite by mistake gave the Stallings new purpose.
“We had something special on our hands, but at the same time we knew we weren’t the rightful owners,” Stallings said. So our mission was to return it to the rightful owners.
Not immediately. Because the Stallings had plans for New Year’s Eve, they put the Masters’ invitation on their dining room table. He stayed there the next morning as they took their planned New Year’s walk on the beach. When night fell, they returned to their project. They had to get the invitation of professional golfer Scott Stallings, but how?
Jenny sent a direct message on Instagram to the pro, who replied with a laughing emoji. So they took pictures of the two envelopes and the invitation letter and sent them as proof. Stallings, the real estate agent, also gave his phone number to Stallings, the professional golfer.
But he called that evening around 9:30 p.m., after Stallings put his phone on “do not disturb” mode. The call went to voicemail. On Monday morning, Jenny checked Instagram and saw that the golfer had posted screenshots of their posts on her account and the story had exploded.
Literally I had been checking the mailbox five times a day, then I received this random DM yesterday. Stallings wrote:.
At 11 a.m., the professional golfer called back as he prepared to play the Sentry Tournament of Champions in Hawaii, and the two Scott Stallings finally connected. He gave them his home address in Tennessee so they could send out the invitation he had been looking forward to for weeks.
The next day, Tuesday, Stallings and Jenny took the Masters invitation to a UPS store in Georgia. They filmed the experience in a video they posted on Instagram.
“Okay, Scott, why are we at the UPS store?” his wife asked behind the camera.
Wearing a frown and holding a green envelope emblazoned with the Masters logo, Stallings explained.
“Because I have to send my invitation to play at the Masters back to other Scott Stallings,” he said.
Stallings said the professional golfer invited him and his wife to Augusta during Masters week as a token of appreciation for fixing his invitational blunder. That includes dinner with all four Stallings and tickets to watch practice rounds before the tournament begins on Thursday. Stallings said he was excited to go to Augusta National during Masters week, something that had eluded him for years.
“It’s just a dream come true,” he said.
Stallings still holds out hope that he will find a way to watch the tournament – maybe even the weekend a champion is chosen. One thing is clear: Stallings backs his namesake, now more than ever.
The professional golfer, however, still doesn’t have his invitation. On Wednesday afternoon, the property developer checked the tracking information for the UPS package he had sent the day before.
“He is along the way,” he said. The package is expected to arrive at the golfer’s home in Knoxville on Thursday, he added.
Then, the real estate agent hesitated a little on his ETA: “I think”.
The other Scott Stallings will check the mail.
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