Do you have a few extra bucks lying around? Do you really like Michael Jordan? If you answered ‘yes’ to both of those questions, you’re in luck! From Yahoo:
“Longtime trainer Tim Grover says it was really more of a ‘Food Poisoning Game,’ but regardless of what spurred it, the outing we’ve come to know as ‘The Flu Game’— Michael Jordan fighting off a 103-degree fever on June 11, 1997, to pour in 38 points, grab seven rebounds, dish five assists and hit a game-sealing 3-pointer in his 44th minute of play to beat the Utah Jazz in Game 5 of the NBA finals — still stands as one of the truly legendary and memorable performances in the career of the greatest basketball player of all-time. It’s been studied, dissected, discussed and immortalized in video-game form — over the past 16 years, fans of the Chicago Bulls and the NBA have had a million different ways to relive M.J.’s iconic performance, which put the Bulls one win away from the fifth NBA title of his career. And soon, thanks to Westhampton, N.Y.-based auction house Grey Flannel Auctions, they’ll have another — by buying the shoes he wore en route to those fever-fueled 38 points at auction. (We should’ve known that it had to be the shoes.) After Game 5, Jordan signed the red-and-black size 13 Nikes he’d worn and handed them over to a Jazz ball boy before leaving the arena. (Industrious grinding, Jazz ball boy.) Said ball boy-turned-grown man kept them under lock and key for years, but as Grey Flannel director of operations Michael Russek told Ball Don’t Lie, he recently had a change of heart. ‘We were approached by the ball boy because of our affiliation with the Basketball Hall of Fame,’ Russek told BDL. ‘He never looked to sell them before now. I think he recently realized that he was getting a little older and was more curious than anything to see if people still cared about the story… He wants someone else to have them who can display them better, as they’ve sat in a safety deposit box for the last 15-plus years,’ Russek said. ‘Mainly, he wants Jordan fans to hear the story and know they are out there and how they were obtained.'”
