A pair of gold Air Jordan sneakers were donated to the Portland Rescue Mission earlier this year. Aaron Ankrom/Portland Rescue Mission
A volunteer for a Portland, Ore., homeless shelter was sorting through a pile of donated clothes and shoes earlier this year when he spotted a pair of gold Air Jordan sneakers near the bottom. They looked unique, so he gave them to Erin Holcomb, Portland Rescue Mission’s director of staff ministry.
Through a Google search, Holcomb learned that director Spike Lee had worn a nearly identical pair to the 2019 Oscars. She was convinced that the pristine shoes donated to her nonprofit were rip-offs.
A few months later, Holcomb was shocked to learn she was wrong. Sneaker authenticators told her that the shoes were one of the few original pairs Nike made in 2019.
Holcomb put the shoes up for auction, and on Monday, Portland Rescue Mission employees gathered in their office and watched as the highest bid gradually increased. When the auction closed at $50,800, the employees cheered, cried and hugged.
Holcomb told The Washington Post that the money from the sneakers will go toward serving Portland’s homeless community with shelter, clothes, and meals.
“I wouldn’t have guessed in a thousand years that they were going to be the real thing,” said Holcomb, 41.
The donor remains a mystery – even to Lee, who told The Post that the sneakers didn’t come from him. When Lee was nominated for multiple Oscars in 2019 for his movie “BlacKkKlansman,” he asked designer Tinker Hatfield to make him gold Air Jordans. Lee said the four pairs Nike sent him were in his size.
The donated shoes were size 12 1/2; Lee said his shoe size is 9 1/2.
“I don’t know where those 12s came from,” said Lee, 66. “My foot has never been that big.”
The Nike Air Jordan 3 sneakers were placed in a donation chute at the homeless shelter in April and landed in a bin in the building’s basement. Holcomb said the donations are usually old clothes, blankets, coats, sleeping bags, and shoes that are then distributed to Portland’s homeless community. In her 17 years working for the Portland Rescue Mission, Holcomb said, she had never sold a donated item.
When the volunteer brought the shoes to Holcomb, she considered giving them to someone in need but first wanted to check their authenticity. Lee had worn similar shoes on the red carpet in 2019 and onstage when “BlacKkKlansman” won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Still, Holcomb wasn’t in a rush, believing that a sneaker expert would just confirm the shoes were fake. She got sidetracked with work and raising her three children while she kept the shoes in the back of her Toyota Sienna for a few months before storing them in her home’s laundry basket.
In September, Holcomb finally visited Index, a Portland sneaker consignment store.
“Can you show me what to look for to know that these are fakes?” she recalled asking an employee.
Designer Tinker Hatfield visited Portland Rescue Mission’s office after gold Air Jordan shoes he designed were donated there. He contributed an autographed box and poster to the effort. Aaron Ankrom/Portland Rescue Mission
The employee took the sneakers into a private room and inspected them for about 15 minutes before telling Holcomb that he was calling the store’s owner. Holcomb figured the shoes needed further examination only because they were high-quality rip-offs.
But when co-owner Terrance Ricketts saw the shoes, he could tell they were real. He said no other Air Jordan sneakers looked similar to the gold shoes, and the material and tags were authentic. The left shoe’s heel displays a Jumpman symbol; the right shoe’s heel features the logo for Lee’s production company, 40 Acres, and Mule Filmworks.
Ricketts said Nike made a only handful of the sneakers, which weren’t released to the public.
“Do you know what you have here?” Ricketts, 39, recalled asking Holcomb.
Ricketts offered to help Holcomb sell the shoes, which he said were worth between $15,000 and $20,000. She said she tried to contain her excitement.
Hoping to advertise the shoes to a global audience, Holcomb declined Ricketts’s offer, locked the shoes in her office, and researched auction houses. She emailed Sotheby’s, a New York auction house that has sold rare Air Jordan sneakers. Sotheby’s agreed to sell the shoes at a December auction.
In October, Holcomb said, she contacted Hatfield, the footwear designer, who offered an autographed black box and poster for the sneakers to add to the auction, though he said he didn’t know who had donated the shoes. After Hatfield visited Portland Rescue Mission on Oct. 31, Holcomb flew to New York to deliver the items to Sotheby’s.
“With its limited production and unique design, coupled with . . . Tinker’s signature on the box and the design proof, these sneakers are a true collector’s item,” Eric LiBassi, a Sotheby’s sneakers specialist, said in a statement to The Post.
When Holcomb woke up around 4:30 a.m. on Monday, she checked the Sotheby’s website, where she said the highest offer was $13,000. A few hours later, the bid had increased to $20,000. Holcomb and nearly two dozen employees gathered in a conference room to follow the auction’s final 40 minutes on a TV screen.
With a few minutes remaining, the offer increased to $40,000. That bid stood as Portland Rescue Mission employees counted down the final 10 seconds. But just when the bidding was about to end, a new offer appeared on the screen: $50,800.
Portland’s homeless community needs the most support during the winter, Holcomb said, so the auction came at the perfect time. While she said she’s excited to make an impact with the charity’s new funds, Holcomb is still searching for the shoes’ donor.
“I am so glad that we were able to leverage them towards serving more people,” she said. “But we would all love to know the answer to that.”
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