How a pair of Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Doncic’s game-worn shoes sold for $115,000
Dallas Mavericks superstar Luka Doncic has proven to be money.
And he did it again recently off the court.
A pair of Doncic’s game-worn, autographed basketball shoes recently sold for $115,000.
Matthew Malone, a Terrell real estate broker, bought the shoes at a “Do It For Durrett” charity silent auction in 2019. The annual benefit in honor of former DFW sportswriter and TCU alumnus Richard Durrett helps raise funds for families in need.
Malone won the shoes with a $1,700 bid, which included having his high school student daughter Madison monitoring any competing bids. Malone was prepared to go as high as $2,000 for the shoes.
“I’m a die-hard Mavericks fan and all Dallas sports,” Malone said. “It started at $500 and through the night it got a littler higher so I bid $1,700 and told my daughter to stand there and be willing to go to $2,000 if she needs to.”
Doncic, who has a signature line of Jordan Brand shoes called Jordan Luka 1s coming in June, hadn’t yet settled on a shoe brand back as a rookie in 2019. The $115,000 shoes are Paul George Nikes.
“That’s a pretty tough pill to swallow when I get home and told my wife I spent $2,000 on basketball shoes,” Malone said. “She was OK with it, but honestly, I’m not sure I told her what I paid for them at the time.”
Malone’s intentions for buying the shoes were originally to just display them along with his other sports collectibles.
But as the collectible markets started exploding in recent years, Malone decided to have the autographed shoes certified and authenticated by Beckett, the Farmers Branch-based company sports collectibles grading company, which cost about $200. Malone also paid Resolution Photomatching, a company that verifies and authenticates when a piece of game-worn memorabilia was actually worn by the athlete, to add even more legitimacy to the shoes.
Then a pair of game-worn rookie Jordan shoes sold for $400,000 and Malone started asking around about the potential worth of Doncic’s shoes.
Eventually, Malone sold the shoes to Collectables, an app that turns rare memorabilia and sports cards into an SEC asset. The shoes were registered and a price was set and 210 people bought out 8,200 $10 shares in the shoes in two weeks. Malone kept 40% ownership.
Malone immediately received a $43,000 payment.
“I thought, ‘OK, cool.’ We can start trading the stocks among the owners at whatever price we set, but before it reached that point someone made an offer,” Malone said.
That initial offer from a Nashville-base company called SportsCard Exchange was for $100,000. The investors voted against selling. Three days later on March 23 the offer was raised to $115,000.
Sold!
“I hope they are million dollar shoes one day, but I had another $40,000 in my account with a kid going off to college,” Malone said of the sale and his daughter Madison. “I’m going to pay cash for two years of college and buy her a very nice, new safe car to go to college off a $1,700 pair of shoes.”
This story was originally published March 31, 2022 at 5:01 PM.
