A single Nike Air Jordan I shoe and black Wilson baseball glove, both once owned by Michael Jordan, sold for over $62,000 at auction Sunday night.
The items were consigned to Heritage Auctions by the son of the man who turned them into metallic birthday gifts on behalf of Michael Jordan’s wife back in 1994.
The size 13.5 shoe—possibly game-worn — and monogrammed mitt were kept by the Israeli family who made them. The recent docuseries The Last Dance spurred Dan Lavi to take them out of his own closet to see what he could get on the open market. The answer was quite a bit.
The shoe sold for $37,200 while the glove went for $25,200.
The items were used by Lavi’s father 26 years ago to make molds for the silver versions of each. To create the molds and make sure the original items kept their shapes, the glove was filled with permanent epoxy, while material like modeling clay, which could be removed, was inserted into the shoe.
What emerged on the other side were silver replicas so perfect in their detail, from the leather grain to the shoelace patterns, they look almost wearable – were they not so heavy (the shoe alone weighs 10 pounds) or sheathed in thousands of dollars’ worth of silver. Only 10 of each were made, as Juanita Jordan requested. After that, the molds were destroyed but the glove and mitt were never returned to the former Mrs. Jordan.
Michael Jordan kept one silver shoe and one silver glove, so the story goes, and disbursed the other pieces to his agent, one of his restaurants, a golf club, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and elsewhere. In time they would scatter to the wind. They cost around $2,000 each to make – and when they do show up for auction, which is rare, they command significantly higher prices.
In February 2019, Heritage Auctions sold one of the silver gloves for $7,200. Six months later, Heritage sold one of the silver sneakers for $20,400.
Other items sold in Sunday night’s auction included PSA 9 and PSA 8 copies of Jordan’s Fleer rookie card which netted $13,200 and $6,300, respectively and a 1932 World Series ticket from the “Babe Ruth Called Shot” game which sold for $4,320.
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