From Snoop Dogg’s blunt to the Eagles locker room: Inside the wild world of the company changing sports memorabilia
Jason Arnold is walking through the detritus littering the Philadelphia Eagles post-game locker room, sidestepping assorted gloves, socks, athletic tape, empty Gatorade bottles, a discarded comb, an orange, a banana and even a toothbrush – used or unused is unclear.
Just an hour or so earlier, the Eagles completed a 31-0 decimation of the Las Vegas Raiders and Arnold, who works for a company called The Realest, is here to collect select game-worn jerseys and the nameplates that sit atop the players’ lockers. He’s already gathered two five-gallon paint buckets worth of freshly shorn grass from Lincoln Financial Field and the pads that wrap around each of the goalpost stanchions. Later, he’ll reclaim a custom-made LED sign that hung in the Eagles’ tunnel entrance to the field.
Photos of all of the stuff – right down to the grass clippings packaged to look like some sort of inedible cleat-trodden bottle of oregano – will be uploaded to the company’s website, where collectors can buy authenticated sports and entertainment memorabilia directly sourced from the teams, athletes and artists themselves.
And if all goes as planned, it all could eventually find its way into the hands and homes of rabid Eagles’ fans in a sporting upcycling, wherein one NFLer’s leftovers and laundry make for someone else’s treasure.
How The Realest, a barely three-year-old start-up, found its way into the inner sanctum of the defending Super Bowl champions is nearly as interesting as its cloak-and-dagger business, complete with proprietary invisible ink placed in a secret spot on select memorabilia by retired police officers.
None of that, however, is as fascinating as The Realest’s origin story.
It started with Snoop Dogg smoking some weed.
The passion to possess a thing that belonged to someone famous is as old as time.
Pilgrims once collected dirt and stones from Holy Land sites where they believed Jesus had been crucified. In the late 1700s, while visiting England, American presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson allegedly carved off pieces of a wooden chair said to belong to Shakespeare.
People have since paid for the ridiculous ($7,500 for Ty Cobbs’ dentures) and the sublime ($28 million for Dorothy’s ruby red slippers), but the collectibles industry has exploded with the advent of the Internet. A quick search for “autographed jersey’’ on eBay turns up more than 200,000 items – from a Pelé signed Manchester United Centennial jersey for $2.5 million to a Kyrie Irving signed kid’s shirt for 99 cents.
Everything is for sale.
Except not everything is for real.
The collectibles market is flooded with fakes. The FBI once estimated that as much as 75% of the goods being sold aren’t legit. The frauds have grown nearly in lockstep with the growth of the industry. In 2006, a joint investigation run by the FBI and IRS – Operation Bullpen – busted a nationwide forgery ring that defrauded collectors of more than $100 million, and just last year, an Indiana man admitted to selling some $350 million worth of fake gear over the span of 20 years.
So prevalent is memorabilia fraud that the United States Postal Inspectors Service devotes an entire page on its website educating consumers how to protect themselves.
But protection often feels more like a trust fall – collectors hoping that they are actually getting what they’re paying for without a lot of tangible ways to be certain of it. Items for sale come with promises of “authenticated” or “witnessed,’’ but just how authentic is the authentication and just who is doing the witnessing isn’t always clear.
Scott Keeney did not know any of this when he scored his first piece of memorabilia. In the 1991 World Series, Kirby Puckett launched a dramatic walk-off home run in the 11th inning of Game 6. The ball landed maybe 10 rows behind where Keeney sat with his dad at the Metrodome.
But it was past midnight and Keeney was seven and, “I woke up to the sound of the loud crowd,’’ he says now with a laugh. Someone else got that treasure but Keeney and his family went back for Game 7 and, at the end of batting practice, Brian Harper tossed Keeney his batting glove. He not only got the keepsake, but his stepmother snapped a picture of the glove hovering in mid air between Harper and a giddy Keeney.
So began a childhood love affair with the Twins and, when Keeney’s dad bought him the World Series baseball card set from that year, a love for collecting grew as well.
“It wasn’t about the monetary value,’’ Keeney says. “It was my childhood. That moment was priceless, right? It’s that magic that got me started.”
He started collecting baseball cards, even selling a few out of the garage to kids in the neighborhood, and dreamed of being a pro sports star, too. Reality hit, as it so often does, but in high school Keeney took an audio engineering class. He’d always loved music almost as much as he loved sports, and the class gave him the foundation for a new passion. He started tinkering around with music, borrowing one of his dad’s old turntables to mess around with DJ’ing.
He scored a few gigs in Minnesota – at the local mall and on the radio – before boldly penning a letter to a record executive about ways he could improve his business. Intrigued by the letter’s brashness, Steve Rifkin, whose Loud Records handled clients including Wu-Tang Clan and Akon, hired the teenager.
‘Nobody’s gonna buy that sh*t’
Kenney wound his way from Minnesota to Los Angeles and evolved from Scott Keeney into DJ Skee, and carved out a niche as a DJ known for his knack for discovering young talent. He worked on Akon’s first mixtape, spied Kendrick Lamar as a 16-year-old and gave Post Malone his first radio interview opportunity.
Skee’s popularity soared. He scored his own radio shows, featured on LA’s KIIS FM and in 2007, launched Skee TV on Fuse cable channel. By 2010, Skee made Billboard’s 30 Under 30 list and a year later, Forbes named him to its music version of the same list.
On a near-insatiable quest for the next big thing, Skee in 2015 started Dash Radio as an answer to the dull and often repetitive FM radio market, and later invested in StockX, an online marketplace for sneaker collectors. He often landed in the very organic crossover between music and sports, once sitting in a recording studio with Kendrick Lamar and Kevin Durant, both in the infancies of their careers. Skee became one of the first DJs to work an NFL game, and later did the same at a NASCAR race.
All the while, he honed his own eclectic collection. He has a pair of Nipsey Hussle’s Victory Lap Air Jordans (he managed Nipsey briefly) and one of the first Beats by Dre samples. He also secured the very jersey that Brian Harper wore when Harper gifted Skee those batting gloves back in 1991.
“I mean talk about full circle, right?” he told CNN Sports.
In 2021, Skee launched a collectible alternative asset fund, Mint 10, to invest in small businesses and buy items with other investors, including a 2011 Mike Trout card for $1 million.
“I had this unique perspective of being something that was in the middle of buying things not just for myself, but from an institutional capital perspective,’’ Skee said. “I realized the value of provenance and trust. It wasn’t just my money anymore and that’s when I learned about the risk and an industry that really hadn’t been modernized.’’
Skee understood intrinsically what so many did not – that the value in an item wasn’t the item itself, but in how or by whom it was used. And that to secure that value, people wanted assurances of the item’s legitimacy.
“But people would say, ‘Well, we are 90% certain,’’ Skee says. “And somehow that was accepted as good enough.’’
Really, the only honest way to authenticate something, he realized, was to go to the source directly.
During the course of his wide-ranging career, Skee had lived like a sort of Forrest Gump life, except with much more intention. He didn’t just bump into famous people; he knew them. He’d known Snoop Dogg, for example, for decades. In 2011, the two collaborated on Snoop’s Puff Puff Pass Tuesdays mixtape, and in 2021, Skee memorably traded a Kobe Bryant rookie card for one of Snoop’s cars, an old-school silver Cutlass.
Skee knew if he was going to revolutionize the collectibles’ market, he needed to grab its attention.
“So the first person I hit up was Snoop,’’ he says casually.
Snoop, it turned out, had eight public storage units filled with stuff he didn’t want but had no idea how to unload. It was worthless to him – wardrobe pieces, rhyme books, concert riders, set lists – but Skee knew it would be pricless to his fans.
The Shiznit, as Snoop dubbed his sale, debuted six months after Skee started The Realest and included not just the stuff from the storage units but one specially crafted item just for the sale.
“So, obviously, he’s known for his habit of smoking weed,’’ Skee says. “We figured out a way to preserve a roach from a blunt that he smoked.’’
Snoop was skeptical, texting Skee, “You’re f-ing crazy. Nobody’s going to buy that sh*t.’’
It sold for $4,765.
It is a little past eight on a December Friday morning and Bobby Bonds is at work in the locker room.
Not that Bobby Bonds.
This Bobby Bonds grew up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, an avid Philly sports fan who liked nothing more than playing touch football in a snowstorm. He spent 35 years on the city’s police force, the last few with the special victims unit, until he retired.
Toward the end of his career, Bonds started working for the Phillies as a resident security agent, providing traditional boots-on-the-ground security. But when Major League Baseball decided to combat the fraud in sports memorabilia by requiring every team to hire and utilize an in-house authentication system, Bonds became the Phillies’ chief authenticator.
Like most other people, he had no idea such a thing existed.
“I would always see, when you go to the store to buy a football or something, there would a little hologram on it,’’ he says. “I didn’t pay any attention to it.’’
Until it became his job.
On game days, Bonds perched in a folding chair near the Phillies dugout and if a ball of some significance – a record hit, a significant out – went into play, the ball boy would collect it and bring it to Bonds, where he’d scan it into MLB’s database and adhere one of those hologram stickers to it.
That’s the model Skee used for The Realest, taking the bones of the MLB plan and adding his own spin.
Venika Streeter, a former authenticator for the Minnesota Twins, heads up TRuEST, the Realest’s patented technology for its authentication system. It includes its own proprietary invisible ink, written logbooks and an app to scan when, where and by whom an item has been authenticated.
The gadgets and technology are cool; the people, like Bonds, make it run.
“Ninety-five percent of authenticators are former or current police officers or law enforcement, and the other 5% are people who have worked in sports,” Streeter said. ‘“It’s people who know how to handle themselves behind the scenes, when they’re around professional athletes or musicians. People who have experience being in spaces where the average person doesn’t get to go, and we also want people who understand chain of custody.”
MLB remains wildly ahead of the curve, still the only major professional league that requires each team to have in-house authentication. Which is why there is such a need to fill for The Realest, which is slowly building its sports partnerships. Along with the Eagles, the company works with the women’s basketball league, Unrivaled, Major League Soccer, the Miami Heat and partnered with the PGA of America to sell items from this year’s Ryder Cup.
But one of the first to jump on board was the Eagles, who saw value in having an official merchandiser and authenticator that also wasn’t afraid to think outside the box.
“We’re not trying to break the bank here, so it’s just what’s going to provide some joy and some fun for our fans,’’ said Christian Molnar, the Eagles director of team relationships. “It’s something they can keep on their shelf or put in their man cave or put in their RV on Sunday and it’s like their little piece of Eagleville.’’
Arnold is, if you will, the mayor of Eaglesville, in charge of creating the quirky items that fans might want to purchase.
He found Electroglow in the Fishtown section of the city and commissioned its owner, Antwonn Del Rosso, to create a one-of-a-kind LED sign for each home game. On Friday, Arnold hangs it on the wall at the tunnel where the Eagles gather before taking the field and on Sunday, it’s removed, authenticated and put up for auction.
After the Eagles won the Super Bowl, a local barber, Tony Riley, crafted totes out of the banner that hung outside Lincoln Financial Field and a business in suburban Philly crafted Christmas tree ornaments out of old jerseys. Following every home game, an authenticator watches the grounds crew mow the field so that Arnold can jar up the clippings for sale.
“So, I’ve been here 25 years and the most memorable games our fans will always say are the snow games,” Molnar said.
Last year it snowed for the Eagles divisional playoff game against the Los Angeles Rams. Arnold rolled up to the field entrance with coolers loaded with dry ice. In some Philadelphia freezers somewhere sit jarred up divisional-championship winning snow, preserved not unlike a first slice of wedding cake.
The good stuff, of course, comes from the players. In the game against the Raiders, tight end Dallas Goedert caught six passes for 70 yards and two touchdowns. A little more than an hour after the game ended, an equipment staff member handed Goedert’s jersey, complete with grass stains on the eagle shoulder patch, to The Realest.
Two days earlier, Bonds had marked the jersey with the company’s proprietary invisible ink, authenticating that Goedert would wear it on that particular December day.
Arnold is then invited into the locker room. He’s handed a ladder and then proceeds to move from locker to locker – DeVonta Smith, A.J. Brown, Cooper DeJean, Saquon Barkley, Jalen Hurts – and slides the name plates, already marked on the back with The Realest’s sticker and ink, out of their holders.
With a veritable who’s who of Eagles’ players’ names stacked in his hands, he heads to the exit as the equipment team rolls out bins to collect the detritus on the floor.
Why not, he is asked, grabbed that stuff, too?
“We can’t authenticate it,’’ he says with a laugh. “But if we could…”
