‘Beckham Ball’ Changes Hands Again – Next Stop: Space
GoldenPalace.com formally presented Pablo Carral with a cheque for over €28,000 today
Monday 9th August 2004
Following the much talked about winning of the eBay auction for “The Beckham Ball” by GoldenPalace.com on Thursday July 22, the online casino today formally presented seller Pablo Carral with a cheque for over €28,000.00 (approx. USD $35,000) at a Press Conference in Madrid, Spain.
GoldenPalace.com CEO Richard Rowe presented the cheque to Pablo in the Hotel Santo Mauro, Madrid—the hotel in which David Beckham chose to live during his first few weeks in Spain when he started playing for Real Madrid.
This is the very ball that Beckham sent sailing over the cross-bar during England’s playoff loss in the Euro 2004 tournament and into the arms of Carral, a Spanish sports fan, who seized the ball and left the stadium with it concealed under his shirt. He decided to auction the ball on eBay where it was eventually purchased by GoldenPalace.com.
The casino plans to raise money for charity by allowing people to use The Ball to participate in penalty shoot-out style competitions worldwide. One of the stops on The Ball’s tour around the world will be in an unlikely place: 100 kilometers above the earth in sub-orbital Space.
On August 5, 2004, the casino announced the GoldenPalace.com Space Program: Powered By The da Vinci Project would be the Canadian entry in the Ansari X Prize competition. The first team that privately finances, builds, and launches a spaceship carrying three people to a 100 kilometer altitude (62.5 miles), returns safely to Earth, then repeats the launch with the same ship within 2 weeks will win $10,000,000. GoldenPalace.com provided the funding necessary to complete the project.
Project team leader and pilot Brian Feeney will be bringing The Ball along for the ride as well as a laptop so that he can enjoy some of the GoldenPalace.com games during their race to Space as they fly their ship, the Wild Fire, into the history books.
“We’re very excited about bringing The Ball on tour around the world, especially our trip into Space,” said Rowe. “We hope to raise a significant amount of money for charity, and expect to see more of The Ball appearing somewhere near you.”
The launch of the Wild Fire is scheduled for October 2, 2004.
