A ticket from Michael Jordan’s debut Chicago Bulls game sold for nearly half a million dollars at an auction Sunday morning.
Thirty-eight years ago, the ticket to the Oct. 26, 1984, game cost $8.50 — today, it made the seller, Michael Cole, $468,000.
Robert Wilonsky from Heritage Auctions, where the ticket sold, said the Jordan ticket nearly beat the record for the priciest ticket ever sold at auction. But, in the same auction, a ticket from Jackie Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers debut in 1947 sold for $480,000.
A then-Northwestern student, Cole attended the 1984 game alone after he couldn’t find a friend to join him. With two tickets waiting for him at will call, he used one and kept the other as a keepsake — making it the only known intact ticket from the game today.
With virtual tickets rising in popularity, Wilonsky said the auction house has seen an increase in demand for physical tickets.
“People don’t know what a paper ticket feels like to hold in their hands, to keep in their wallets, to hold on to forever,” Wilonsky said.
The magical thing about the little slips of paper, Wilonsky said, is that they were there — in Chicago Stadium as Jordan took the court for the first time, and in Dodger Stadium during Robinson’s debut.
“People are forgetting the value and nostalgia they had for that sliver of paper,” Wilonsky said.