Circa 1923 Green Bay Packers NFL membership certificate. (Photo courtesy Heritage Auctions)
(WTAQ-WLUK) — A rare piece of Green Bay Packers history has a new home.
Heritage Auctions says a certificate of National Football League membership, believed to date to 1923, sold for $111,000 over the weekend.
The auction house declined to release the name of the buyer.
The document came from former NFL president Joe Carr’s estate and has since been verified by authenticity experts.
Packers team historian Cliff Christl speculated in a 2017 article that the reason the team was not in possession of the document was safekeeping. He says the team didn’t have an office building in Green Bay until 1949. In 1923, the closest thing the Packers had to an office was the front desk at the Green Bay Press-Gazette newspaper.
Here’s how the document is described:
We have seen similar certificates for the Baltimore Colts and Dallas Cowboys, signed by NFL commissioners Bert Bell and Pete Rozelle, and while those are likewise great treasures to their respective fanbases, this artifact from the unsteady infancy of the National Football League is undeniably several cuts above those much younger siblings. This certificate presents at a commanding 13.5×16″ in size and offers no real cause for condition complaint, with scattered age-toning but none of the tearing, creasing of chipping common to century-old paper collectibles. It represents ultimate bragging rights for the advanced Green Bay Packers and/or early NFL collector.
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