The Nike "Boston Massacre" T-Shirt Is Now Selling on Ebay for $155,000

After Nike temporarily pulled from its stores a New York Yankees t-shirt that celebrated the team’s 1978 and 2006 routs of the Boston Red Sox — events Yankees fans call “the Boston Massacre” — the shirts started popping up on eBay. Nike was worried the shirts, which bear the words “Boston Massacre” spattered with blood, would be misinterpreted in the wake of the Boston marathon bombings. But eBay users apparently felt no compunction about offering the merch — for eye-popping sums.

Several of the t-shirts sold for surprisingly high prices. One seller offloaded 17 for $350 each. Others sold for $119 and $49. (Others failed to attract any bids even at $0.99.) As you can see from this screencap of an earlier eBay search, five shirts were available for sale this morning. One of which somehow had been bid up to a whopping $155,655 one day before the sale was set to end when eBay apparently stopped the auction. Now an eBay search for “Boston Massacre Nike” returns no results.

I don’t know what’s crazier: that sports fans would think that these shirts would become valuable as sports memorabilia (nevermind that Nike never said it was discontinuing the shirts, just pulling them from sale for now), or that people would want to buy something so tasteless after the terrorist attacks that killed three and wounded hundreds. As an investment, the shirts’ value would likely evaporate next baseball season when Nike (most likely) resumes selling them. As an attempt to profit from a tragedy, selling the shirts now is disgusting.

As Fashionista points out, none of the eBay sellers were pledging to donate any of the proceeds from the sales to victims of the bombing. Adidas, however, is offering a t-shirt 100% of the proceeds from which go to the One Fund, the charitable fund for victims of the bombings created by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino.