For decades, the ticket had been loose in a folder, within a box moved from home to home, with a piece of yellow tape and the label “Mike Memories.”
Inside the box, Mike Cole had kept things from sporting events he had attended over the years. That included basketball and baseball tickets — including one from a World Series.
“To me, they’re memories of great times in my life,” he said.
Recently, something made him think about one of those tickets.
Cole had fallen asleep on the couch while watching a football game, and when he woke up, he logged onto the internet wanting to know which team had won. While there, he saw a headline about a ticket stub from a 1984 basketball game, which happened to be Michael Jordan’s first in the NBA.
The ticket had been auctioned off and sold for $264,000.
Suddenly he thought of his box. He was sure — positive — he, too, had one of those tickets. In fact, he thought he had an even more pristine ticket, without the stub ripped off.
“I knew I went to Michael Jordan’s first game,” he said. “And I also knew that I had a full unused ticket, because I couldn’t find anyone else to go with me.”
Despite being “a little groggy” as it was past midnight, Cole ran downstairs. He found his memory box and opened it. Sure enough, there it was: An unused ticket to Jordan’s NBA debut.
“I opened up the folder to make sure,” he said. He wasn’t hallucinating: “There it was.”
The ticket has been verified and is now for sale at Heritage Auctions, which noted that at $260,000 as of Tuesday, it is already believed to be the record-holder for the most expensive ticket ever sold at auction. The bidding ends Saturday.
“It’s a big deal,” said Michael Osacky, a Chicago sports memorabilia collector who runs BaseballinTheAttic.com. Trading cards have been popular for many years, but as people began to get priced out, he said, tickets and ticket stubs have become an alternative.
A ticket like this carries a unique feeling of an item that was present for a moment in sports history, Osacky said. The ticket was $8.50 on Oct. 26 1984.
“It literally was at the stadium or the venue on the specific date,” Osacky said. “It wasn’t worn by a player, but it was there. It saw the action.”
At the time of the game, Cole was in his freshman year at Northwestern University.
Having grown up on the East Coast, his interest in the game was actually on that side of things. He went to cheer on the Washington Bullets.
Two tickets were set aside for him at will call; no Northwestern friends bit at the invitation. So he went alone, collected both tickets, used one and saved the other.
There was a buzz about the new player, he recalled. The crowd seemed to understand that this was a person who could turn the tide for the Chicago Bulls. The one moment he clearly remembers from the game was when Jordan collided with another player, landing on his back in a way that made a scary sound in the old Chicago Stadium.
“It was like a collective gasp,” he said. “And then he popped up and everyone just exhaled.”
Otherwise, he doesn’t remember many details from the game.
In fact, he hadn’t thought about it much until he saw the headline about the other ticket.
After finding his own, he started looking into auction houses. Not having saved these sports items for anything other than his own memories, he wasn’t sure where to start.
“What I thought was in many ways, this is a historical piece as much as it is a sports piece,” he said.
After speaking with several auction houses, he decided now was the time to sell, with both the previous ticket’s price and “The Last Dance” documentary series recently highlighting Jordan and the Chicago Bulls through the 1997-98 season.
And in his mid-50s, he has two children to help support and could use any windfall of cash to pay for practical things and plan a trip to the Italian Alps this fall.
Plus, he said, “Maybe there’s someone else like me who’s going to go, ‘I have one of those tickets too.’ All of a sudden it’s not one-of-one, it’s one-of-two.”
Of course, his ticket had to be authenticated.
First, he packed it up very carefully, per the instructions of authenticating company Professional Sports Authenticator, which verified the item before it was put up for sale. He placed the ticket between two pieces of cardboard and with two rubber bands around it to make sure it didn’t move.
After verification, an armored car arrived on his Connecticut street to collect the item for auction.
When the car pulled up, and “two guys get out who were wearing bulletproof vests and guns,” he contacted his neighbors to fill them in on the situation.
Since then, he’s watched in amusement in this surreal experience of something from his memory box logging eye-popping bids.
He hopes it validates others like him who have kept — perhaps to the dismay of spouses — items for years and years. “I want this to be a win for the people who say it’s important to keep physical items of your great memories.”
In the memory box are other tickets. Who knows how important they could be? Some are from Northwestern, the Cubs, the White Sox. Some are baseball cards his childhood self drew beards and mustaches on if he didn’t love the players.
“That’s the fear I have, that I’ll find another card or something where I’ve taken away so much value,” he said. “a beard on a player who ended up being a superstar.”
Even as he handed over the ticket, there was a part of him that didn’t want to let it go. It connected him to his father, who died six years ago. It was through him, he said, that he first got the ticket.
“It made me think about him and the fact that even no longer being here, he’s still bringing great things to my life,” he said.