A Wilt Chamberlain warmup jacket originally found in a Portland, Oregon, Goodwill sold for $89,600 (including buyer's premium) at Sotheby's on Monday.
In January, Quinn Brown, 19, raided a bargain bin, looking for a jacket he'd seen someone toss in that seemed like it bore Los Angeles Lakers colors. Brown had been buying vintage clothes to resell online for three years; his priciest resell had netted him $250. An attempt to reach Brown was unsuccessful, but Sotheby's confirmed the details to ESPN.
The warmup jacket says "Chamberlain" on the back and cost Brown $3.07. When he got home, Brown searched the internet for comparable sales and found little. But he told a local news outlet he'd seen a Wilt Chamberlain warmup go for five figures a decade prior.
After Brown posted a photo of the jacket, Sotheby's head of modern collectibles, Brahm Wachter, got in touch and convinced Brown to consign the jacket to Sotheby's. Sotheby's then enlisted SIA Photo Match to verify and photo-match the jacket.
Photo-matched Chamberlain items, echoed by the lot description on Sotheby's website, are becoming "exceedingly rare."
The jacket turned out to not only be legitimate but a significant piece of Chamberlain and Lakers memorabilia: The jacket was "likely" used throughout the 1971-72 NBA season but was definitively matched to the 1972 NBA Finals, Chamberlain's second title and the Lakers' first championship Los Angeles; Chamberlain also won Finals MVP, his first as the award wasn't introduced until 1969. The jacket was also matched to the 1972-73 NBA season, Chamberlain's last in which he set the single-season record for field goal percentage (72.7%) that wasn't broken until the 2019-20 season.
