New BM Executive Director is Getting Attention for his Unique Collection
Calkins: The new leader of Ballet Memphis has a hobby. It involves Michael Jordan — and you.
Andrew Goldberg, the new executive director of Ballet Memphis, would like your assistance. He would like you to support the organization, of course, which has been bringing world-class ballet to Memphians for 39 years. He would like you to attend performances. He would like you to bring your friends. He would like you to enroll your kids in Ballet Memphis’ fabulous school. He would like you to donate money, if you’re so inclined. Oh, and one more thing.
If you happened to attend the games between the Memphis Grizzlies and the Washington Wizards at The Pyramid on Dec. 11, 2001, or on Nov. 23, 2002, he would like you to check and see if you still have the ticket stubs. The man needs them. To complete his astonishing collection. Because in addition to being the new executive director of one of this city’s preeminent arts organizations, Goldberg, 52, is the world’s foremost collector of Michael Jordan ticket stubs. Yes, that’s right.
The ballet guy collects Jordan ticket stubs.
“Including every regular-season game Jordan played for either the Bulls or the Wizards, and every Bulls playoff game, and his 13 All-Star appearances, it’s 1,264 games,” Goldberg said.
He has tickets from all but 136 of them.
He has a ticket from the 1989 playoff game when Jordan hit the winning jumper over Cleveland’s Craig Ehlo. He has a ticket from the 1997 NBA Finals game when Jordan scored 38 points to beat the Utah Jazz while sick with the flu. He has a ticket from every playoff game Jordan ever played. What Goldberg does not have are tickets from the two NBA games Jordan played in Memphis when he was with the Wizards. So rummage around in your attics, people. What better way to welcome Goldberg to town? But it’s possible you may be asking: What does ballet have to do with basketball, anyway? How did Goldberg become such a fan of both? “I’ve always been a sports guy and an arts guy,” Goldberg said. “I owe it all to my father. He’s a guy who loved going to everything. So that’s what I grew up with. We’d go to the Chicago Symphony. But he also had season tickets to the Bulls.”
Perry Goldberg, Andrew’s father, actually split season tickets with two buddies. So Andrew — who is 6-foot-5 and played center for his high school basketball team — would get to a handful of games a year.
“I really started saving the tickets in 1987-88,” Goldberg said. “I collected things all the time — sports cards, comic books — but I didn’t think of tickets as collectibles. They were just memories. But Jordan had just won his second scoring title. He hadn’t won a championship at that point. I just thought, ‘Hmmm, I’m sure people would think that tickets to games Babe Ruth played in would be valuable. If Jordan continues on this track, maybe one day he’ll be viewed as basketball’s Babe Ruth.’” So that’s how it started. Goldberg kept his tickets and his father’s tickets. He had a nice little collection by the time he went off to college and a career in the arts. “I didn’t think a lot more about it,” he said. “But then, about 10 years ago, when the Warriors were on a hot start to their great season, I started to think about the Bulls team that went 72-10. I had this idea, ‘Wouldn’t it be great for a man cave to have that entire season of tickets?’” Goldberg started to search out tickets from that season. But a lot of the tickets he found were sold in random groups of tickets, some from one season, some from another. “Pretty quickly, I decided I was going to go for the whole thing,” he said. “I mean, every game Jordan ever played in. I put together a spreadsheet and got to work.” Goldberg focused on the version of tickets sold to season-ticket holders. They tend to be prettier. And like any savvy collector, he leveraged his knowledge of Jordan’s career — all 1,264 games — to help him along the way.
Tickets are less obvious than other collectibles. There’s nothing on the face of a ticket to tell you what happened in that particular game. Take the ticket from that epic playoff game in 1989 when Jordan hit the jumper over Ehlo. “The ticket says, ‘1989 Home Game C,’” Goldberg said. “You look at it, and it doesn’t mean anything. I saw it for sale on eBay as part of a group of tickets. It was an auction. And I thought, ‘I’m going to pay $300 for this thing.’ Today, it’s at least $3,000. I got it for a dollar. Crazy. That’s because nobody knew what it was.” Goldberg’s quest picked up momentum in 2020 when ESPN aired a documentary about Jordan’s final season called “The Last Dance.” After that, everyone was looking for fresh Jordan stories to tell. “I did a dozen interviews,” Goldberg said. “People started to get in touch with me with tickets they had found. Sometimes, people say they just want me to have it. That’s less common, but it happens. “Usually, people want something for it. It’s either people who are collectors or people who have a box of tickets they hadn’t looked at in years. They’ll tell me what they want for it. If it’s too high, I have to walk away.”
Goldberg says most ticket stubs go for between $5 and $20. But some tickets go for a whole lot more.
“I’ve certainly spent tens of thousands over the last decade,” he said. “But I got a lot of stuff early on before people were really looking. And I trade or sell a lot of tickets — doubles I have — for other tickets. I really haven’t gone into my week-to-week paycheck to pay for them.” And where does Goldberg keep the collection? “In a safe in another country,” he said, which sounded like a joke — but not quite. So now it’s just a matter of completing the collection. Only 136 tickets to go!
Goldberg recently got his hands on two playoff tickets — a 1986 game against the Celtics and a 1988 game against the Pistons — to complete the set of Jordan playoff games. “Every ticket is a story,” he said. “It’s the stories connected to the tickets that I really love.” For example: In 1996, the Bulls eliminated the Knicks from the playoffs. “The ticket was labeled ‘Home Game E,’” Goldberg said. “Toward the end of the game, Jordan hit a 3-pointer. As he was backpedaling, he waved goodbye to his friend (and celebrated Knicks fan) Spike Lee. I was able to obtain a full, unused ticket from that game. And last summer, at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago, Spike
was signing autographs. I got him to sign the ticket. When he asked me what happened in that game, I said, ‘Do you really want to know?’” The tickets don’t tell the stories. But they are tangible connections to the stories and the memories. “I love having something that reminds me,” Goldberg said. “I love the idea of going to a scrapbook and saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that.’ Now most tickets are digital. I think something definitely has been lost.” Goldberg doesn’t know when he’ll complete his collection. Lately, the process has slowed. “I’ve been tracking my progress per year,” he said. “Right now, I’m at about 20 tickets a year if I’m lucky. At this rate, it’s seven more years. “In my dream world of the future, I’ll complete this collection and approach the Hall of Fame or the United Center or the Smithsonian to see if they want to have a public exhibition of the collection. And Michael Jordan will be invited. And I’ll tell him I had to do all this to meet you.” In the meantime, there is the fiscal year 2026-2027 budget for Ballet Memphis to worry about. And plans for the organization’s 40th anniversary. It’s an exciting, challenging time. “The Last Dance” was great and all that. But it’s still not “The Nutcracker.”
by Geoff Calkins, Daily Memphian
Read the original article on DailyMemphian.com here.
More interviews about Andrew's collection can be found here:
