Vince Lombardi’s sweater fetched $43,000 at auction after couple paid 58 cents for it at Goodwill

By Matt Bonesteel February 23 at 11:02 AM

(AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Last June, Sean and Rikki McEvoy went to the Goodwill store in Asheville, N.C., looking for vintage bargains they could sell online. A sweater that simply said “West Point” across the front caught their eye. They paid 58 cents for it.

“I picked it up and thought it was cool,” McEvoy told Darren Rovell of ESPN.com. “At first, I thought it was a basketball warm-up.”

A couple paid less than a dollar for a vintage West Point sweater they found at Goodwill in North Carolina. What they didn’t know was that the old sweater belonged to NFL coaching great Vince Lombardi. (AP)

After leaving the store, they noticed that the word Lombardi was written in black ink on a cotton swatch sewn inside, but they didn’t think much of it at the time. In November, however, Sean McEvoy watched a documentary about NFL coaching legend Vince Lombardi, who was shown wearing a very familiar-looking sweater in a photo.

On Saturday, a sweater that was purchased for 58 cents fetched $42,020 at auction in New York.

Rovell reports that the sweater was donated to Goodwill by Ann Wannamaker, whose late husband, Bill, coached with Lombardi at Army. The company that handled the auction is donating $4,000, the amount it would have received in commission from the buyer, to Goodwill.

Lombardi’s sweater was far from the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia sold during Saturday’s auction. A pair of boxing gloves worn by Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston in their second fight fetched $956,000, and a letter written and signed by Ali in 1966 asking for a religious exemption to avoid being drafted into the military sold for $334,600.

After spending the first 17 years of his Post career writing and editing, Matt and the printed paper had an amicable divorce in 2014. He's now blogging and editing for the Early Lead and the Post's other Web-based products.