Obama’s game-worn high school basketball jersey up for auction
The No. 23 jersey worn by No. 44 is up for auction.
The game-worn jersey of former president Barack Obama when he played for Honolulu’s Punahou High School varsity basketball team during its 1978-79 state championship is for sale by Heritage Auctions. The starting online bid for the jersey was $25,000 and bids had risen to $27,000 by Sunday morning. Heritage officials expect it could bring $100,000 or more when goes on the auction block Aug. 17. Before then, the company will put it on public display in Chicago, New York and Dallas.
The white jersey has the name Punahou in blue, with the number 23; the back side features the number. According to the auction site, the jersey is slightly faded, with small stains. “Consignor Peter Noble, three years behind Obama,” saved the jersey, according to Heritage. He had worn the same jersey “while on the junior varsity team.”
Noble’s yearbook accompanies the jersey and includes a playground image of Obama labeled “We go play hoop.”
Obama’s playing career was brief, although he has continued to shoot hoops. As president, he regularly filled out NCAA tournament brackets during March Madness and he recently joined Masi Ujiri, the Toronto Raptors general manager, and Giants of Basketball, Ujiri’s foundation, on a mission to expand the game in Africa.
In high school, Obama, who went by “Barry” and was nicknamed “Barry O’Bomber,” was almost as dedicated to the game as he was to his studies. “He would carry his books in one hand and his ball in the other,” his former coach, Chris McLachlin, told NBC in 2017. “He lived across the street from school and before classes he’d shoot baskets on the outside courts, then at lunch he’d shoot more baskets, then I’d have him for three hours, then he’d go home, eat supper, and then be outside again shooting baskets.”
In 2008, Obama told SI that the game “was a refuge, a place where I made a lot of my closest friends, and picked up a lot of my sense of competition and fair play. It was very important to me all the way through my teenage years.”