Portland teen’s $3 Wilt Chamberlain NBA Final jacket found at Goodwill sells for nearly $90,000

A Portland teenager’s $3 Goodwill find turned into nearly $90,000 profit.

Earlier this month, 19-year-old Quinn Brown found a 1972 game-worn NBA Finals Wilt Chamberlain jacket at a Goodwill in Portland. The item, initially valued between $150,000 and $250,000 by Sotheby’s, sold for $89,600.

“I started, I don’t know, four or five years ago, just thrifting, looking for clothes for myself, and it kind of just snowballed over the years,” Brown said on “The Jake and Spike Show.” “It’s grown into something pretty big.”

What started as a personal hobby turned into a nice side hustle as classmates and other kids his age began buying his Goodwill finds.

“I would say I have a good eye for fashion,” Brown said.

His best find during his bargain-binning adventures was a vintage T-shirt from the Seattle-based record label Sub Pop, which sold for $250 after he snagged it for a dollar — until he came upon a certain gold-yellow warmup jacket.

“I was in Portland, Oregon. I get up at 7 a.m. and just go through these bins for hours,” Brown said. “They wheel out these bins filled with clothes, and then it’s just looking through piles and piles of clothes. Then, I saw some guy around my age holding up a jacket that I could tell looked really good.”

“How could you tell?” KIRO host Jake Skorheim asked.

“I could tell it was really old. I mean, I have a good eye for vintage items, so just based on looking at it, I was thinking ’70s or ’80s,” Brown said. “So I kind of just waited by him, and he decided he didn’t want it. Probably too big for him. I mean, not probably, definitely, but he decided he didn’t want it and just threw it right in front of me.”

The item? A 1972 game-worn NBA Finals Wilt Chamberlain jacket.

Beyond belonging to the legendary NBA Hall of Famer, the 1972 season was when the Lakers won 69 games en route to the championship — the most wins in a single NBA season for more than two decades until two Michael Jordan-led teams and the 2016 Golden State Warriors broke the record.

Led by Chamberlain, Jerry West, Gail Goodrich, and Elgin Baylor (with eventual nine-time champion head coach/general manager Pat Riley riding the bench), it was the first championship the Lakers won in Los Angeles (the franchise won five previous titles in Minneapolis) after losing in the NBA Finals seven previous times.

Brown bought it for $3.07.

“I just sell on an app called Depop,” Brown said. “I have my own shop, 1,600 listings or so. That’s where I post everything.”

But Brown decided to search other marketplaces to see how legitimate this find was.

“I didn’t see anything until I saw basically the exact same jacket sold at auction for like $56,000,” Brown shared. “So that was a pretty fun moment. Sotheby’s reached out to me. I had reached out to other auction houses, but he specifically reached out to me and was like, ‘Hey, I think this jacket looks real. I can see in the photo that you posted with it, it’s this. It’s very likely the same one.’ Which was another thing. I got super lucky. There was just a photo of [Chamberlain] wearing it on Google that I found within 15 minutes of finding the jacket, and so I could tell from the photos that it was the same one.”

“So when Jack Nicholson is the final buyer of this thing, I mean, it’s just an amazing moment,” KIRO host Spike O’Neill said.

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

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