Wilt Chamberlain's Lakers Jacket Found At Thrift Store Sold For $89K

Digging through the bins and parsing through the racks at thrift stores, you’ll occasionally find a gem like a perfectly tattered vintage tee or some Levi’s jeans you’d consider a score.

But Oregon teen Quinn Brown had the ultimate come-up when he found Wilt Chamberlain’s 1972 NBA Finals warm-up jacket and only paid $3.07 for it back in January.

Now, months later, he learned just how lucky he was when the jacket was authenticated, and he put it on the auction block through Sotheby’s, where it sold for $89,000.

The famed auction house estimated it’d go between $150,000 and $200,000, so selling for less than half of that may be a recession indicator, but a W nonetheless.

The warm-up jacket features the Lakers’ iconic yellow with purple and white trimming on the collar and around the waist. On the back is Chamberlain’s name arched in purple.

To verify authenticity, Sotheby’s matched the jacket to images from Game 1 or 2 of the 1972 Finals — when the Lakers beat the New York Knicks— and painstakingly pored over details like letters being close together or shaped oddly. They even matched the puckering on the trim and Lakers logo.

“The jacket matches our templates— in terms of design, style, colors, and lettering for Lakers home warm-ups from the late 1960s/early 1970s,” writes SIA Photo Match.

Since it was Chamberlain’s second NBA Finals and last season in the NBA, Sotheby’s dubs the find “an extraordinary piece of memorabilia from Chamberlain’s final chapter in the NBA.”

Brown is a thrifting reseller and quickly grabbed the piece of history when he saw it available and still can’t believe how it’s all played out. 

“I didn’t even think that finding something like this was possible,” Brown told the Associated Press. “I got very, very lucky.”

Wilt Chamberlain's Lakers Jacket Found At A Thrift Store Just Sold For $89,000 was originally published on cassiuslife.com