Everything started at Lower Merion High School for Kobe Bryant — and on Wednesday night, a Kobe Bryant jersey from his high school days sold for a price that stunned even the seasoned world of sports memorabilia: $2,176,000.
Sotheby’s announced Friday that the Kobe Bryant jersey — Bryant’s game-worn Lower Merion No. 33 — had sold at auction for a record-breaking $2.2 million, making it the most expensive high school jersey ever sold. The sale drew 26 bids from seven competing bidders and blew past the auction house’s pre-sale estimate of $1 million to $2 million.
“This Lower Merion jersey is where Kobe’s story starts, before the rings, the records, and the Mamba Mentality, when he was just a kid in a gym outworking everyone,” Sotheby’s said in its description of the lot. “This jersey symbolizes that greatness has a beginning, and this jersey was there for it.”
Kobe Bryant Jersey Eclipses LeBron’s Record
The $2.2 million hammer price nearly doubled the previous record for a high school basketball jersey. That mark was set in 2024, when LeBron James’ St. Vincent-St. Mary jersey — the one he wore on his famous 2002 Sports Illustrated “The Chosen One” cover — sold for $1.3 million.
This Kobe Bryant jersey topped it by roughly $876,000, a margin that speaks to both Kobe’s enduring mythos and the white-hot state of the sports collectibles market.
Brahm Wachter, Sotheby’s head of modern collectables, oversaw a sale that turned into a genuine bidding war. Twenty-six bids across seven collectors pushed the price relentlessly upward until the gavel finally fell.
Kobe Bryant Jersey: From $51,400 to $2.2 Million in Thirteen Years
Perhaps the most staggering number in this story isn’t the final price — it’s the trajectory. The very same jersey sold in 2013, through Goldin Auctions, for just $51,400.
That means the uniform has appreciated roughly 4,133% in thirteen years — about 42 times its 2013 price. Few assets on earth, sports-related or otherwise, have performed like that over the same stretch.
The jersey originally came from the collection of Bryant’s mother, Pamela Bryant, before passing into private hands. Photo-matching firm SIA matched the jersey to photographs from Bryant’s 1995 playing days, tying it specifically to his junior season.
Why This Kobe Bryant Jersey Matters
Sotheby’s reports that Bryant wore the jersey during his junior season, in a March 1995 matchup against Hazleton Area — one year before he led Lower Merion to the Pennsylvania state championship as a senior.
Bryant began his high school career wearing No. 24 before switching to No. 33, the number his father, Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, had worn in high school. The maroon No. 33 dates from that pivotal junior season, the year the legend-in-progress truly announced himself.
The jersey carries one more distinction that makes it unique among all Kobe memorabilia: it is the only basketball uniform Bryant ever wore that did not have the words “Lakers” or “Los Angeles” across the chest. He entered the NBA draft immediately after finishing high school, so his entire professional career was played in purple and gold. This is the before — the last artifact of Kobe before he became a Laker.
It is worth noting that some collectors online have raised questions about the game-worn attribution, pointing out that the photo-matching tied the jersey to a photoshoot and that the game-use history rests partly on a letter from Bryant’s mother. Sotheby’s stands by its cataloging, and the market has spoken — but the debate is a reminder of how much money now rides on a few threads of old polyester.
Kobe Bryant Jersey Sale Caps Memorabilia Boom
This Kobe Bryant jersey is the latest data point in a sports memorabilia market that keeps rewriting its own record book. Bryant’s items remain among the most coveted in the hobby — the priciest being a 2007-08 Upper Deck dual-autograph card featuring Bryant and Michael Jordan, which sold for $12.6 million in August 2022.
But $2.2 million for a high school jersey — a garment worn by a teenager in a suburban Philadelphia gym — marks a new frontier. It says that in today’s market, origin stories are worth as much as championships.
For the seven bidders who chased it and the one who finally won, that maroon No. 33 isn’t just fabric. It’s the first chapter of the Mamba Mentality, and now it’s the most valuable high school jersey on the planet.
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Source: New York Post