Driven by nostalgia and a love for basketball history, one collector has been on a mission to track down every retro Champion-brand NBA jersey ever made \u2014 turning a personal passion into a full-fledged project.<\/p>\n
Benjamin Christensen had just turned 12 in February 1995 when he collected his first Champion NBA jersey, a red Detroit Pistons Grant Hill jersey from the Basketball Hall of Fame member\u2019s rookie season. Inspired by his friends, who also were wearing Champion jerseys, and being a hoops fan, Christensen saved enough money to buy the rare jersey of that season\u2019s Rookie of the Year.<\/p>\n
This was in the midst of Champion\u2019s long-standing run as the league\u2019s official jersey supplier throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s. Back then, the brand produced both retail replica jerseys and authentic \u201cPro-Cut\u201d versions tailored to player specifications for NBA teams. <\/p>\n
After the 2001-02 season, Champion lost its NBA license and no longer produced jerseys. But the jerseys had already become popular in street fashion and pop culture for their affordability and nostalgic look. To this day, they remain highly sought by collectors, with rare ones selling for the mid-hundreds of dollars on the resale market.<\/p>\n
Enter Christensen, who lives in Oakland, once worked as the A\u2019s mascot and has been in the game of collecting jerseys for 30 years. At the time of writing, he had acquired 966 \u2014 with about 130 more to go of what he knows exists. <\/p>\n
His collection is filled with some of the rarest NBA jerseys Champion produced, including a blue New Jersey Nets Drazen \u201cPetro\u201d Petrovic jersey; a 1996 NBA All-Star Reggie Miller jersey; and a green Milwaukee Bucks Alvin Robertson jersey from the 1991-92 season. The Petrovic jersey, highly sought due to its tragic history (the player died in a car crash), was the most expensive Christensen has paid for to date, at $440.<\/p>\n
To build his collection, Christensen uses multiple online marketplaces such as eBay, Mercari, Depop, Poshmark and Grailed, with the latter being where he\u2019s had the most luck finding rare jerseys, including 12 so far. He said eBay, though, has been his \u201cgo-to\u201d for finding jerseys; he searches the marketplace up to 25 times a day.<\/p>\n
During COVID, Christensen said, Etsy became a destination spot for resellers and collectors as prices began fluctuating for collectible items during that time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think most people, resellers [included], didn\u2019t really understand the value that was behind a lot of these things,\u201d he said. \u201cOnce COVID hit, baseball cards came back, coin collecting \u2014 just everybody was kind of doing stuff to occupy their time, and so that just kind of like, shot the price up of anything collectible.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to online communities, Christensen has used local sellers in the Bay Area to grow his collection, which he safely stores at home. Because original Champion-brand NBA jerseys are difficult to forge, he said that verifying the authenticity of his finds has been relatively easy.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust the way that they did the lining on the side, the mesh configuration, and then even as far as the jock tag in the corner, like the typeface on that. I\u2019ve just become so adept to where it\u2019s like, I could just look at a photo and be like, \u2018OK, that\u2019s legit,\u2019 or \u2018that\u2019s bullshit.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The ebbs and flows of the reseller market haven\u2019t discouraged Christensen from completing his collection. With dozens more still to go \u2014 including a rare 1995 All-Star Reggie Miller jersey he has his sights on \u2014 the job is far from finished.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Driven by nostalgia and a love for basketball history, one collector has been on a mission to track…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61391,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,39992,39991,459,39932,82],"class_list":["post-61390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-closing-shot","tag-merchandise-and-collectibles","tag-nba","tag-print","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}