Story Archive

Jigsaw Puzzle

It was Russ Berkman’s dream to go to the Masters golf tournament, and he got his chance: he won the right to buy four tickets to a practice round. But after buying the tickets, they disappeared from his Seattle, Wash., home. Looking carefully, he found some scraps, and came to a sobering conclusion: his dog ate them all. “First thing I do is I panicked,” Berkman said. His girlfriend had a suggestion: “Well you gotta make the dog puke.” He induced vomiting with hydrogen peroxide, and “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.” He estimates he got “about 70 percent” of the tickets, and the Augusta National Golf Club said that was enough for him to get replacement tickets. How long did the ...um... recovery operation take? “It took about, I don’t know,” Berkman estimated, “about three cocktails deep was how long it took to put this thing all together.” (RC/Seattle Post-Intelligencer) ...Oh, not very long at all, then.