A pair of game-worn sneakers won by Michael Jordan — but not Air Jordans — sold at auction Sunday for $1.472 million, shattering a record for game-used footwear.
Sotheby’s reveals that the winner of the earliest NBA game-worn Michael Jordan sneakers (matched to his fifth game), which sold for $1.47 million today, is Nick Fiorella.
Fiorella famously bought the Luka Doncic 1/1 Logoman card for $4.6 million in March. pic.twitter.com/qA49geajb7
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) October 24, 2021According to Sotheby’s, which handled the auction, the pair of size-13 Air Ships are the earliest known pair of game-worn sneakers Jordan ever used as an NBA player. He is confirmed to have worn them in his fifth career game Nov. 1, 1984, when he scored 17 points in the Chicago Bulls’ 129-113 road loss to the Denver Nuggets. Photos from the era suggest he may have worn them even earlier than that.
The sneakers — also autographed by Jordan — were auctioned off by Sotheby’s for TJ Lewis, who was a Nuggets ballboy. The winning bid was submitted by Nick Fiorella, a sports-card collector who in March paid $4.6 million for a one-off, signed Luka Doncic rookie card, reportedly the highest price ever paid for a basketball card and the second-highest price ever paid for a sports card, behind a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card that sold for $5.2 million in January.
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Nike had signed Jordan to a sponsorship deal that would give him his own line of basketball shoes, but the first run of Air Jordans was not yet ready when his rookie season began in 1984. In the meantime, Nike provided Jordan with Air Ships, which became the first sneakers Jordan wore as a professional and came in both the red-and-white color scheme as seen here and a black-and-red version.
The shoes caused some controversy and gave Nike a valuable piece of publicity when — after Jordan had worn the black-and-red Air Ships in a preseason game — the NBA told Nike that the sneakers with that color scheme violated the league’s uniformity of uniform clause. Nike created an Air Jordan 1 ad campaign around the NBA’s edict, saying: “The NBA threw them out of the game. Fortunately, the NBA can’t stop you from wearing them.”
The NBA objected to the black-and-red Air Ships because they didn’t have enough white in them and did not match his teammates’ sneakers, so Jordan wore either the red-and-white Air Ships or the red-and-white Air Jordan 1s during his rookie season. (Nike-created lore says the company paid a $5,000 fine every time Jordan wore the black-and-red sneakers, but he never actually donned them in a game, though he did wear them in the 1985 slam dunk contest.)
A pair of Air Jordan 1s worn by Jordan during a 1985 exhibition game in Italy — he shattered the backboard on a dunk, and the sneakers still had a shard of glass embedded in the sole of the left shoe — held the previous record for game-worn sneakers, selling for $615,000 in August 2020.
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