Vince Lombardi

What does a signed Vince Lombardi item cost?

The seventeen results recorded here, from Heritage and Goldin, run from under three hundred dollars to over twenty-five thousand, but most of his market is paperwork: signed cheques, a pair of handwritten plays, an inscribed copy of his book Run to Daylight, and photographs from his early years in Green Bay. He died in September 1970, before the autograph-show era, so everything here was signed while he was coaching.

Why are so many of his signatures cheques?

Because a coach had no card to sign and signed a great deal of business paper instead. Eight of the results on this page are cheques, most of them Green Bay Packers payroll cheques from 1959 and 1960, his first seasons with the club. The recent ones sell in a strikingly narrow band, roughly $730 to $790, which is what a steady supply of near-identical documents produces. They are also among the safest Lombardi signatures there are, for the reason we set out in the piece on cancelled cheques: a cheque had to clear a bank. Rocky Marciano, another figure with no cards in his signed market, shows the same shape.

Why did one championship ticket stub sell for seventeen times another?

Because of which championship it was. He signed a stub from the 1960 NFL Championship Game, which the Eagles won 17-13 and which was the only postseason defeat of his career as an NFL head coach, leaving aside a 1964 third-place game. It made $1,500. Stubs from the 1967 championship, the Ice Bowl, which Green Bay won, made $25,200 in 2022 and $19,800 in 2024. Same kind of object, same signature, and the price follows the game. It is the pattern on Roger Maris's page, where anything tied to 1961 sells far above the rest.