On a Thursday night in mid-December, Mike Cole awoke on his living room sofa with the TV still blaring.
He had dozed off with the Kansas City Chiefs trailing the Los Angeles Chargers by seven late in the fourth quarter. By the time his eyes fluttered open, Travis Kelce was dancing in the end zone in overtime after catching the game-winning touchdown pass.
“What happened?” Cole remembers thinking.
So he logged online to figure out what he’d missed.
As Cole caught up on the football game, another headline grabbed his attention. A ticket stub from Michael Jordan’s 1984 NBA debut had sold for $264,000, establishing a record for any vintage sports ticket.
The deeper Cole read into the story, the more his hands began to shake. He was almost certain that down in the basement of his Connecticut home, inside a clear plastic container labeled “Mike’s memories,” was an unused ticket to that very same game.
Cole immediately went downstairs, opened his memory box and pulled out a manila envelope stuffed with old tickets from games that he attended. There, among a heap of worthless Cubs and Red Sox stubs, sat a decades-old Chicago Bulls ticket that Cole suddenly realized might help him put his two kids through college.
“I’m a huge sports fan, and I enjoy keeping tickets as memories of good times I’ve had,” Cole, an admissions director at Quinnipiac University, told Yahoo Sports. “Before that night, if you’d have given me $500 for that ticket, I’d probably taken it. I wasn’t waiting for the right time to sell or to figure out if I had the only one. I just didn’t know this market for tickets existed.”
The story of how Cole obtained a treasured piece of sports history begins a few weeks into his freshman year at Northwestern. A family friend who worked for the Washington Bullets surprised Cole with two tickets to the team’s season opener at the Chicago Bulls.
To Cole, the appeal of the game wasn’t watching the Bulls or their highly touted first-round pick from the University of North Carolina. Cole wanted to cheer on the visiting Bullets, the team that the Bethesda, Maryland, native had grown up supporting.
While Cole offered the second ticket to a few hallmates, none agreed to join him. Not only was it a slog taking the train from Northwestern to Chicago’s West Side, the Bulls also weren’t much of a draw on the heels of three straight losing seasons.
And so, on Oct. 26, 1984, Cole journeyed by himself to Chicago Stadium and picked up two tickets at the will-call window. One he used to get into the game and later discarded. The other sat in his shirt pocket that evening before finding a permanent home in his tickets folder.
There it stayed for almost 34 years as Cole moved from apartment to apartment, got married and bought his first home. Eventually, the tickets folder landed in Cole’s memory box, alongside his high school and college yearbooks, some old photos, an autographed Cindy Crawford calendar and a purple pompom from Northwestern’s only trip to the Rose Bowl.
“Every time we’ve moved, my wife will look at all the boxes and say, ‘Can you pare down your stuff?’ ” Cole said with a laugh. “We’ve always tried to take that as an opportunity to downsize a little bit, but my tickets were small enough that I don’t think I ever would have thrown them out.”
On the mid-December night that Cole discovered that his Bulls ticket might be worth big money, he sat down in front of his laptop to do some 1 a.m. research. He learned the market for vintage sports tickets had exploded over the past few years, full unused tickets were rarer and more coveted than stubs and his was one-of-a-kind.
A few ticket stubs from Jordan’s NBA debut had previously sold at auction. No one had ever uncovered an unused ticket from that game.
“I had a very poor sleep that night because my mind kept racing,” Cole said. “I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, are we going to be able to sell this for hundreds of thousands of dollars? That just seems absurd.’ ”
Over the next few days, Cole emailed a handful of auction houses with his story and a photo of the ticket. More often than not, his phone would ring within minutes.
Among those who called Cole back right away was Chris Nerat of Heritage Auctions. Nerat always hoped he might get a call from someone with that elusive complete ticket to Jordan’s debut game, though he didn’t necessarily expect it at 4 p.m. on a Friday.
“You think it exists, but you don’t know for sure,” Nerat told Yahoo Sports, “and then all of a sudden it’s in your lap.”
What Cole’s picture revealed was a ticket that was frayed on the left edge but was otherwise in decent condition. Nerat urged Cole to first get the ticket graded and authenticated and then sell it as soon as possible, lest the market for vintage tickets begin to cool.
Cole put the ticket up for auction with Heritage earlier this month. The current high bid as of Wednesday was $250,000 — and Nerat expects that to rise significantly as the auction’s Feb. 26 end date draws closer.
“It’s going to far surpass the hobby record for a sports ticket,” Nerat said. “Could it hit a million? Absolutely. Will it? I don’t know. But I’m going to be buckled into my seat on the last day of bidding.”
Whatever it goes for, Cole will be happy. It’s money he never expected to have as recently as a couple months ago. He and his wife plan to use the windfall to pay off their mortgage, to pay for their two kids’ college tuition and to travel overseas.
“Hopefully, we’ll be able to have some experiences with friends and family,” Cole said, “that would otherwise have been out of our reach.”