Sports Memorabilia Mysteries

         Through the years there have been a few pieces of sports memorabilia that have been in a class by themselves.  The Honus Wagner card, the Chamberlain rookie jersey, a Joe Jackson bat, and a few other items are real collector gems.

And there are always a couple of mysteries that have remained.  For one, what happened to the basketball that Chamberlain used to score his hundredth point on March 2, 1962 against the New York Knicks?   One story has it that in all the hoopla with the hundredth point, that a kid went on the court that night in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and ran off with the ball.  A ball that purported to be the one Wilt the Stilt used went on that memorable occasion was about to be auctioned in 2004, but the auction house withdrew it when the ball’s provenance could not be verified.  By the way, in that memorable game, Wilt made 36 of 63 field goal attempts and believe it or not, 28 of 32 free throws.  The game was actually stopped with 46 seconds remaining, with Philadelphia beating New York 169 – 147, in front of 4,124 people.

Another mysterious item has been the baseball that Bobby Thomson hit for a homer as the New York Giants beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1951 National League playoff.  This was the famous“The Shot Heard ‘Round the World”.

No one knows with absolute certainty what happened to that ball, but for all these years a fan, Bill Moore, has claimed that he’s owned it.  Moore’s ball was auctioned off recently on Lelands.com, and fetched $47,824.  To date, that ball seems to have been the ball that was hit by Thomson.

As the story goes, two days after Thomson homered off Ralph Brancato to clinch the pennant for the Giants on October 3, 1951, Harold Moore, Bill’s father, found him playing with friends in their Queens neighborhood and handed him a ball.  The father said it was a gift from a co-worker who caught it at the game, and gave it to him because he did not have any kids and knew that Bill Moore loved baseball.

Recently, Lelands bought the ball from Moore, and promoted the ball as possibly being “The Ball.”  Bidding was slow until near the close of the auction, but then picked up.  If someone can prove that the auctioned ball is really “The Ball,” its stock would rise to probably around a million dollars.

            But until that time, the mysteries of the Bobby Thomson ball, as well as the Wilt Chamberlain basketball, linger.

Solve either one of those mysteries and you could make a small fortune, but you’d become an instant millionaire if you found some old T206 Honus Wagner cards in pristine condition.