The world’s oldest hockey stick could fetch more than $1 million.
What would you do if you owned the world’s oldest hockey stick? Would you hang it on your wall? That’s what George Ferneough did. He hung it on the wall of his barber shop. Would you use it? Well it is said to have been used over 170 years ago, made for W.M. Moffatt. Or would you sell it? Mr. Ferneough did that too; he sold it for $1000 to a man named Mark Presley. That was before either of them knew just how old, and valuable, the stick was.
Imagine being George Ferneough. How was he to know what he had in his barber shop? It doesn’t look quite as impressive as its story is. Mark Presley took a gamble, and then began to investigate the stick’s origins. The maple used to carve the stick luckily had a knot on the butt end of the shaft. Ideal for dating analysis because of the rings showing, it was dated back to the 1830’s. That was also the time that young W.M. Moffatt was growing up. The analysis also detected four types of paint common from eras long since past.
Mr. Presley found that he had purchased something special indeed. No stick has ever been found that proves to be as old as this one. He is opting to go with sell rather than use or display the stick. I think I might choose the same considering it could sell for over 2 million dollars. Not a bad investment for this 41-year-old Nova Scotia native. This chunk of maple is going to be sought after by collectors willing to pay crazy dollars for a splinter of Canadian sports history. Just for a basis of comparison, a similar stick was sold in 2006 for 2.1 million. That stick is about 150 years old.
Personally I would like to see the stick end up in a museum. It belongs somewhere where it can be seen by hockey fans from all over the country, and world. It’s hard to imagine what hockey would have been like so long ago. It is a piece of Canadian Heritage, but it is even older than Canada itself. That’s what makes the stick so precious, seeing it is like looking back in time.
