A hunt for some picks at a thrift store turned into a major payday for a 19-year-old Oregonian when he happened upon what turned out to be a warmup jacket worn by in the 1972 NBA finals by Wilt Chamberlain, one of professional basketball’s most iconic players.
The name on the back of the yellow Los Angeles Lakers jacket said “Chamberlain” — as in Wilt Chamberlain, one of the most famous and dominant athletes in sports history.
Quinn Brown bought it for $3.07 six months ago. This week, it sold for $89,600 at a Sotheby’s sports auction.
However, the Portland teen wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at back in January when he watched another thrifter at the Goodwill Bins in nearby Hillsborough examine the item but then toss it back into a pile of used clothing.
“I know a good amount about vintage items, so I was able to tell that it was probably worth waiting to see if they got rid of it,” Quinn told the Oregonian. “A lot of people just throw things back. I stood next to him, and after, like, 20 seconds of standing there, he ended up throwing it right in front of me.”
Quinn snatched the jacket and paid for it at the checkout.
“The key moment for me was I was sitting in my room and I looked at the measurements of the jacket and Wilt Chamberlain being seven-foot-one, the jacket measured 33 inches long, so it would have gone down almost to my knees. I looked at it and it matched up,” he told CBS News.
Soon, Sotheby’s auction house authenticators got involved and matched the jacket and it’s stitching to photos showing Chamberlain in the 1972 finals against the New York Knicks, where he was named the series MVP.
The jacket went up on Monday in Sotheby’s sports auction, describing it as “a piece of sports history.”
Forty eight bids pushed the sale price to $89,600.
How that jacket ended up in a pile of used clothing at a Goodwill store is anyone’s guess.
The NBA center’s items have commanded top dollar over the years — and for good reason. Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain holds 72 records, and he’s the only NBA player ever to score 100 points in one game.
As Sotheby’s stated in its listing:
Widely regarded as one of the ten greatest basketball players of all time, Chamberlain posted career averages of 30.1 points and 22.9 rebounds per game across 15 seasons. He leads the NBA all-time in rebounds per game and ranks second only to Michael Jordan in career scoring average. His single-game record of 100 points, set in 1962, has never been approached.
Among his records: four of the top five single-game scoring performances in NBA history, the all-time record for points per game in a season (50.4), the most points scored in a single season (4,029), and the highest single-season field goal percentage ever recorded. He was a 13-time All-Star and 4-time MVP.
The 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers also are widely regarded as one of the greatest teams in NBA history. That season they won a then-record 69 games, including a still-standing NBA record 33 consecutive victories, before capturing the championship over the New York Knicks in five games.
Sotheby’s also matched the jacket to the 1972-73 NBA season, Chamberlain’s last in which he set the single-season record for field goal percentage (72.7 percent) that wasn’t broken until the 2019-20 season.
Chamberlain died of congestive heart failure at the age of 63 in his home in Bel-Air, CA.
For the past three years, Brown has made a business out of finding and reselling clothes picked from thrift stores.
Before the Chamberlain jacket, his most profitable find was a T-shirt of Sub Pop Records, the indie label that signed Nirvana in 1989 and released the band’s first album. That item went for $250.
Brown told news outlets he plans to take a cheap vacation to Vietnam with friends, then he will invest the rest.
“I didn’t even think that finding something like this was possible,” Brown said. “I got very, very lucky.”
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.