My Antiques Roadshow-ish Redskins tale

[catmandu]

My octogenarian Father just had to walk down the hill to get his daily Washington Post in the snow a few weeks back, slipped, and tore his right rotator real good.  Sucks, but could have been a lot worse.  I, being relatively unencumbered, employment wise, became the caretaker post surgery this week, at the family homestead in northern virginia, where I grew up.  I have taken the opportunity to de-hoard his house a bit.  I have come upon some good Redskins memories in the process, most of which are ticket stubs from games we have been able to attend over the years.

 

But the most significant is the framed jersey (which you can see in my Avatar) that just sort of hangs around down in the basement.  I finally sat down and did some sleuthing on that, since, as I have seen on all the PBS shows, ‘provenance’ (shames me to know that word) is everything when it comes to collectible value.

 

I sort of had the timeline for our acquisition of that jersey, but not the details.  I was pretty sure I could narrow the details down in the archives of the Washington Post, but did not feel like spending time in a library.  Luckily, I found the DC Public Library allowed online searches of their hometown newspaper for DC residents with a library card.  Well, thanks to a ‘Map of the Stars’ for DC and a little Wikipedia action for necessary personal information, I was able to go online and register a local celebrity for a 30 day temporary library card, using one of my burner email addresses.  Now all could be revealed:

 

On October 14th, 1983, I was home from college for some unknown reason.  Dad had some professional dealings with Mark Moseley’s wife, and had been invited to the Mayflower Hotel downtown for a charity auction the Moseleys were sponsoring benefitting the Ronald McDonald House.  I recall it was pretty festive, with some nice things up for auction, including a car from Rosenthal Chevrolet.  Most things were of no real interest to us, until there was the offer of said avatar: Game Worn Jersey from Super Bowl XVII MVP John Riggins.  Not sure those were even the terms used back then, probably just called it an official Riggo jersey, but those are the facts of the matter.  As I recall, bidding was kind of slow, and we were in the mix as bidders, the exact financials I do not recall.  But I do know that to entice some more money, a beer distributor from Springfield, Virginia offered to include ten cases of Coors Light if the bid went over some dollar amount.  Being an astute college student on a budget, I leaned over to Dad and said, “that dollar amount is less than the price of the beer alone!”  Dad was kind enough to bid the proper amount of money, we won, and I took the beer back to college.  He did a bit of talking to Mrs. Moseley, and she said she would arrange to have the jersey signed.  When she asked what we wanted for the signature, I suggested “To all The (our last name)” so we could pass it down generationally.  And so it happened.  After the Detroit game that year (game 8), a package showed up at our house, and it was an autographed jersey worn at some point in the first half of that season by Super Bowl XVII MVP John Riggins, complete with what I now know are called team repairs, and some stains. 

 

A pretty good piece of memorabilia we got for free, because we bought some discounted Coors Light.

 

Nutty.

[MassSkinsFan]

Thanks for sharing - interesting story, and well-written!

[Burgold]

Very cool. Great family memory and quite possibly a really wonderful Redskins artifact.

[Taylorcooley1]

#coorslightisthebest!

[MarkB452]

If you were home from college at that time, it might have been due to something called "Fall Break"....great story.

[Rocky21]

Game worn Riggo jersey.  Nice. 

[Killer Rob]

lots of beer and a game worn autographed riggo jersey for the price of one! -nice

btw, is provenance really a word?