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Michael Jordan over giant piles of hundred dollar bills
There are optimistic auction estimates, and then there is predicting that somebody will spend $100 million on one sweaty basketball jersey. The latter is where the current owner of Michael Jordan’s Game 3 jersey from the 1998 NBA Finals has landed ahead of its trip to the auction block next month.
Jordan wore the white Chicago Bulls jersey during the 96-54 demolition of the Utah Jazz on June 7, 1998, part of the championship run immortalized in The Last Dance. Bidding opens Sept. 15 through Pharrell Williams’ Joopiter with an official presale estimate of $10 million to $15 million,according to Sports Illustrated.
The Owner Thinks $15 Million Is A Little Low
Rob Gough, the sports investor who owns the Michael Jordan jersey in question, has a slightly more ambitious number in mind; he told the New York Post report that he thinks “this will be the first jersey to hit $100 million.”
That would require the sports-memorabilia market to lose its mind even by sports-memorabilia-market standards.
The current public-auction record for a Jordan jersey belongs to another piece of the exact same Finals. Jordan’s red Game One jersey sold through Sotheby’s for $10.091 million in 2022, according to the auction house’s official records.
A $100 million result would be nearly 10 times that number.
It would also blow past the $24.12 million paid in 2024 for Babe Ruth’s famous “called shot” jersey, which currently sits atop the game-worn sports memorabilia market.
So Gough is not predicting a record.
He is predicting this thing gets fired out of a cannon and lands in another ZIP code.
At Least This Jordan Jersey Comes From A Win
Gough does have one wonderfully simple argument for why his jersey deserves to outperform Jordan’s $10.1 million Game 1 shirt.
Chicago lost Game 1.
The Bulls very much did not lose Game 3.
Jordan scored a game-high 24 points in only 32 minutes as Chicago beat Utah by 42, which remains the largest margin of victory in NBA Finals history. The Bulls held the Jazz to 54 points, took a 2-1 series lead, and eventually finished off Jordan’s sixth and final championship.
The jersey has also been photo-matched to the game by MeiGray and is the white jersey Jordan wore during one of the strangest beatdowns of his championship career.
There is obviously an enormous gap between “historically significant Michael Jordan jersey” and “worth $100 million.”
Joopiter itself is only estimating $10 million to $15 million, which would already put it among the most valuable pieces of basketball memorabilia ever sold.
But this is Michael Jordan, The Last Dance and the increasingly unhinged high-end collectibles market all meeting in one object.
Four years ago, a Jordan Finals jersey selling for $10.1 million sounded insane.
Now its owner is looking at that record and basically saying add a zero.