Michael Jordan basketball shoes sell for $1.5 million at auction | showbiz

Jordan (now 58) wore the red and white Nike Air Ships in 1984 for his fifth game in his first year with the Chicago Bulls. The American led the team to six championships in the 1990s.

The new owner of the shoes is Nick Fiorella, a collector of valuable sports cards. The shoe belongs to Tommy Tim III Lewis, a former ball boy of the Denver Nuggets. He got his hands on boots after a game in the 1984-85 season.

Since the huge Jordanian documentary “The Last Dance” premiered on Netflix, the market value of items belonging to Jordan has skyrocketed. The white shirt in which he played his first NBA game in the 1980s fetched 275,000 euros at an auction last year.

The shoes that the star wore during his career also became more and more famous. A pair of Air Jordan 1 shoes he wore in his first season got hammered back in May for $481,000. Even so-called “smashed rear” Air Jordans fetched up to €528,000 in August: in the sole of one of those shoes was a piece of glass, a souvenir of an exhibition match in Italy. Jordan thought the ball was so solid that the glass screen behind the basket shattered into shrapnel.

Despite the massive amounts, this auction from Sotheby’s wasn’t about the most expensive sneakers ever sold. In April, the same auction house sold a pair of Nike Air Yeezy 1 shoes from Kanye West during a private sale for the equivalent of 1.55 million euros. The American rapper wore the Grammys shoes in 2008.