It’s outta here!
Brian Hoffman sold his one-of-a-kind basketball — autographed by former Kansas University men’s basketball coach Roy Williams and former North Carolina coach Dean Smith — on eBay, the online auction service, for $355.
“It went to a lawyer from Fayetteville (N.C.) — that’s pretty much all I know,” said Hoffman, who owns The Sports Dome, a sports memorabilia store at 942 Mass. “I shipped it last week.”
Hoffman said the buyer read about the ball in an Associated Press version of a story that first appeared April 23 in the Journal-World.
“That story must have gone out all over the place,” Hoffman said. “I got a bunch of calls from California and, for some reason, Seattle.”
Five years ago, Hoffman had Williams and Smith sign the ball, which he gave his father, a diehard Jayhawk fan, as a birthday present. But after Williams, at Smith’s behest, left KU for North Carolina, Hoffman’s father, Robert, gave it back to his son to sell.
“The hype helped, I guess,” Brian Hoffman said. “And the timing was right; if we’d waited another month, it probably would have gone for $100.”
Featured on eBay for 10 days, the basketball generated 32 bids.
