An Oregon teenager admitted “I got very, very lucky” after a basketball legend’s jacket he picked up at a thrift store for pocket change sold at auction for almost $90,000.
Quinn Brown said he was in a Goodwill store in Portland in January when he saw somebody throw the bright yellow jacket into a clothing bin. On the back was the name of Wilt Chamberlain, a legend of the sport and most valuable player of the 1972 National Basketball Association championship series in which his Los Angeles Lakers team was defeated by the New York Knicks.
Research and authentication
Brown, who sells used clothes online, bought the item for $3.07, according to the Associated Press, and set about researching it. He found a picture online of Chamberlain wearing what looked to be a similar jacket during the warm-up to one of the championship games, and noticed small stitching details on the Lakers patch on the front matched the clothing he bought. Brown said he also looked up the measurement of a different jersey worn by the 7ft 1in (2.2 meters) Chamberlain, and found they were nearly aligned.
“I really just wanted to make sure, because it was so hard to believe at the time,” Brown told the AP.
Auction and sale
After that, he posted a photograph of the jacket on social media, and was contacted by Sotheby’s, which sent an armored vehicle to his house to collect it after he agreed it could be auctioned. It sold on Monday for $89,600, far below its original estimate of $150,000-$250,000, but still enough to turn a tidy profit for Brown.
“I didn’t even think that finding something like this was possible,” he said. “I got very, very lucky.”
Significance of the jacket
Sotheby’s called the jacket an “extraordinary piece of memorabilia from Chamberlain’s final chapter in the NBA”, and posted additional photographs of matching spacing between the letters of the player’s name on the back as further proof of its authenticity. “Photomatching a piece of game-worn clothing to a specific finals series, for a player of this era, is genuinely exceptional,” the auction house said in its accompanying blurb. “Items from a player’s last active season carry a weight that nothing else can replicate. When Chamberlain retired after 1972-73, the supply of things he would ever wear on an NBA court became fixed forever. This jacket is part of that fixed, finite group.”
Chamberlain, variously nicknamed the big dipper, Goliath, and Wilt the Stilt during an illustrious 14-year NBA career, retired at the conclusion of the finals series, which the Knicks won 4-1. He died, aged 63, of congestive heart failure at his home in Los Angeles in October 1999.
Comparison to previous sales
The winning bid for his jacket, made by a buyer whose identity was not disclosed, fell well short of the $4.9m Sotheby’s achieved in 2023 for a jersey Chamberlain wore in the second and decisive fifth game of the championship series. It was, however, a significant result for Brown, whose previous record in a three-year career rifling through thrift shop bins and selling his discoveries online was $250 for a tee-shirt with the logo of the independent record label Sub Pop, which signed pioneering grunge bands Nirvana and Soundgarden. “That was as good as it gets,” Brown said of his new personal best.
