UPDATE
Jul 21, 2026 1:00 AM CDT
The Wilt Chamberlain warm-up jacket worn by the basketball legend during the Los Angeles Lakers' 1972 title run—which somehow ended up discarded in Oregon's Goodwill bins and purchased by a thrifting teen for $3.07—sold Monday for $89,600 in a Sotheby's auction, the AP reports. "Photomatching a piece of game-worn clothing to a specific Finals series, for a player of this era, is genuinely exceptional," the auction house's website says. "As photomatched items worn by Chamberlain become exceedingly rare, this jacket is a piece of sports history."
Jul 20, 2026 3:00 AM CDT
At Oregon's Goodwill bins, where castoffs are piled high and sold by the pound, 19-year-old Quinn Brown paid $3.07 for a long, skinny Lakers warm-up he figured might fetch a few hundred bucks. The non-sports fan just knew the name stitched on the back—Chamberlain—mattered. After a night of measuring and Googling, then posting photos on Instagram instead of his usual Depop, he learned how much: Sotheby's collectors reached out, authenticated it as Wilt Chamberlain's jacket from the Los Angeles Lakers' 1972 title run, and pegged its potential value at up to $250,000, the Washington Post reports.
The teen reseller, who has flipped nearly 10,000 thrifted items since high school (and whose largest sale before now was a '90s Sub Pop T-shirt that went for $250, MyNorthwest.com reports), watched an armored truck haul the jacket away for an auction that has climbed to $50,000 and ends Monday. He's not sure how the piece—which had a 2018 dry cleaning tag attached to it—ended up in the bins, but he knows what he'll do if the bidding soars: travel to Vietnam with thrifting friends, then save or invest the rest. As for the bins, he's still there most mornings, sifting for the next thing somebody else didn't recognize. He posts about 30 items for sale each day, per Oregon Public Broadcasting.
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