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.
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