During his senior year at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii, our forever President Barack Obama was a member of the 1979 Hawaii State Champion boys’ varsity basketball team. Now, 40 years later, for the low, low price of $120,000, an unidentified collector is the proud new owner of 44’s game-worn jersey, according to CBS Sports.
This summer, the jersey hit the auction block for a cool $25,000 before eventually selling for nearly five times that in Dallas this weekend.
From CBS Sports:
The jersey from Punahou School—a prep school in Honalulu—was put up for auction by a classmate of Obama’s. Peter Noble, who was three years behind Obama at the school, said he only grabbed the jersey because otherwise it was going to be thrown away.
That decision turned out to be a smart and lucrative one. Rather than let the jersey sit in his closet—occasionally coming out simply to be shown off to friends—Noble elected to sell it off and allow it to flourish somewhere else. He says a portion of the sale will be donated to the school as well.
For those wondering how in the hell Noble was able to verify the authenticity of a jersey he had buried in his closet, he didn’t have to. The auction house, Heritage Auctions, reportedly carried that cross themselves, and the jersey reportedly came with some complimentary blood stains and needed repairs on its lower front left.
“What had been for decades a personal memento of my own childhood has been transformed into a monumental artifact of American history,” Noble told People via a letter. “I have decided [it] deserves a stage much larger than my closet.”
Obama has yet to publicly comment on the sale, but the first rapper to rock his throwback in a music video wins at life.