Sports Immortals: The Incredible Story Behind The Greatest Collection On The Planet

The first contained a Michael Jordan autographed game-worn jersey from his rookie year. Another had Satchel Paige’s game-worn traveling Negro League All-Star uniform. A third trunk contained the last jersey Willie Mays ever wore when he played for the Mets in the 1973 World Series. 

There was a trunk full of encased baseballs, featuring a ball signed in 1939 by the first class inducted in the Baseball Hall of fame, including Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson Honus Wagner. The 1920 Ray Chapman “Death Ball” casually rested in another. The final trunk featured a Honus Wagner T206 American Tobacco Company baseball card, the rarest and valuable sports card in the world, one of which recently sold for $3.25 million.

While the overwhelming amount of memorabilia in the collection is beyond impressive, my favorite part of the tour was the history behind how Joel Platt acquired all of the items. The story starts at an early age and is unbelievably inspirational and should probably be told in a movie or television documentary one day. 

When Joel was 4 years old, he was injured in a gasoline explosion. Bedridden in a hospital for an entire year, his family brought him baseball cards in order to help him pass the time. One night, the player on his favorite card, Babe Ruth, came to him in a dream and told him, “Don’t give up. You can get better, and someday, you can either be a baseball player or build a museum for sports heroes.”

When he got out of the hospital and started collecting, sports memorabilia wasn’t something that people cared much about. From the 1960s until the mid-1980s, Platt was literally handed a good part of his collection by the athletes and their families. Over the course of seven decades, he has traveled over a million miles procuring over a million items. He also purchased 8 of the largest sports collections during that time, saying that he was “fortunate to be able to corner the market on sports collectibles before they became valuable commodities.”

The list of athletes he’s spent time with reads as a who’s who of sports legends. Muhammad Ali. Roberto Clemente. Pete Rose. Franco Harris. Jack Nicklaus. Bronko Nagurski. 

At the young age of 17, Joel’s first road trip took him on an unannounced visit to the house of Mrs. Honus Wagner. He knocked on her door, and after chatting for a few hours about his plans to preserve the history of his memorabilia for future generations, she offered him quite a few momentoes, including one of his uniforms, a bat, and a bronze mold of his hand. 

From there, he would quite literally drive from town to town, talking to locals and sometimes paying them for information on where athletes and their families lived. He would also show up at ballparks and talk his way into locker rooms.

In 1961, Joel took a trip to Philadelphia and knocked on Wilt Chamberlain’s front door, hoping to score some memorabilia. Wilt wasn’t home. After Joel explained his vision for the Sports Immortals Collection to Wilt’s mother, she handed him Wilt’s Overbrook High School uniform that had recently been retired.

In 1964, Platt fondly remembered meeting his favorite athlete, Muhammad Ali, shortly after his first victory against Sonny Liston. Joel had earlier become friendly with Ali’s trainer Angelo Dundee, who invited Joel to meet the champ after a training session in Miami’s “5th Street Gym.” Shortly after giving Ali a brochure explaining his collection, Joel was brought to Ali’s dressing room and handed the athletic suit that Ali wore while training for the Liston fight. This was Platt’s first of six meetings with the champ, each time leaving with more one-of-a-kind pieces of sports history.

In 1965, Platt traveled to California to track down some Jack Dempsey memorabilia and realized he was only minutes away from Jim Thorpe’s third wife, Patricia. After a quick phone call, Mrs. Thorpe invited Platt to come to see her collection but did not want to part with any of it at that time. The two stayed in touch for over 5 years after their initial meeting, and Joel made two trips back to California to visit her. In 1970, Platt received a telegram that said, “Come and get Jim’s things, am confined to bed, Patricia Thorpe.”

Platt went right out to California and came home with an absolute treasure trove, including Thorpe’s Carlisle Indians Football varsity sweater, his Sac and Fox Indian clothes and tribal garments, multiple trophies and medals, his Olympic scrapbook from the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, dozens of rare photos, and even a letter from President Taft congratulating him on his Olympic success. 

In 1978, Joel showed up at George Mikan’s house, and the two spoke for over two hours. Before leaving, Mikan took Joel to his attic, where he had a bag containing his old Minneapolis Lakers uniform and warm-up suit from the night he won the championship, ready to be tossed out. Instead, he gave them to Platt. The extreme rarity of these items can not be understated.

Every year, the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY gets around 260,000 visitors. The Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA, and Football Hall of Fame in Canton, OH each host around 200,000 visitors. Imagine if you could visit an all-encompassing Hall of Fame in Las Vegas that used the Sports Immortals collection to celebrate iconic athletes and moments across all sports!  

That’s exactly what the Platt family is planning to do.

The mission of the Sports Immortals Experience, according to Platt, is to “develop an interactive Smithsonian-type attraction that would perpetuate the memories and achievements of the greatest athletes in sports history.”

Other goals include:

• To make enshrinement as a “Sports Immortal” one of the greatest honors that can be achieved in sports.
• To establish a foundation that would contribute to sports medicine research and related organizations.
• To inspire and motivate every visitor to strive for maximum effort in his or her life endeavors.

The Platts have quite a few plans in development besides the museum, with the mission of "utilizing the Sports Immortals Assets together with the latest immersive technology to create projects both in the physical and virtual worlds that will be entertaining, educational and inspirational."

These projects include: 

1. Traveling Exhibitions
2. Satellite Developments: Scaled down version of the Hall of Fame. 
3. Intellectual Properties: Movies, documentaries, books, television shows, etc. 
4. Merchandising Opportunities: Apparel, games, toys, reproductions of original items from the collection. 
5. Mobile App & Virtual Museum
6. Classic Events: Tennis, golf, soccer, and gaming to raise money for Sports Immortals charities. 
7. Sports Curriculum: In association with major universities.

Have you ever dreamed of owning one of the pieces inside of this collection but couldn’t fathom spending $500,000 on such an item? If so, I have some good news for you.

Sports Immortals has recently partnered with Collectable, a fractional ownership platform, which will make it possible for people to invest in certain pieces of the collection made available to the public on the Collectable app.