Golfers may have their fancy clubs made with special materials, but ostentation will get you nowhere in the world of hockey. That’s why the most expensive hockey sticks in the world aren’t covered in diamonds and don’t have napa leather grips. They’re just pieces of wood—really, really old pieces of wood.
In early 2009, a Canadian man made news with a stick he’d purchased for $3,000 from a Quebecer antique shop. The stick was radiocarbon dated to the 1600s. He’d planned to sell the stick on eBay with a minimum bid of $1 million but historians threw doubt upon its origin, saying that the stick may have only been carved more recently from an old piece of birch wood rather than having been used in an early modern game of Nova Scotian proto-hockey.
As it stands, the world’s oldest and most expensive hockey stick comes from a somewhat more recent era. It was crafted in Ontario in the 1850s—a couple of decades before the first game of ice hockey was played—and passed down through generations until it reached the hands of Gordon Sharpe.
When Sharpe had the stick appraised, he discovered it was worth US $4.25 million.
Since then, he has had it displayed at Wayne Gretzky’s bar in Toronto and stored at the Hockey Hall of Fame. He has tried on three separate occasions to auction it off—citing the amount of care necessary to preserve the stick and the price of insurance as his reasons. Most recently, the stick was under the hammer during the 2010 Winter Olympics, but no sale has been reported.
