A Boat Called Catch 23
The White Marlin Open ran its fifty-second year at Ocean City, Maryland this month — the largest billfish tournament in the world, boats leaving before dawn, a scale on the dock and a crowd around it every afternoon. Among the fleet, as it has been for several years, was an eighty-foot Viking sportfisherman named Catch 23, wrapped — of course — in the elephant print from the Air Jordan 3.
It belongs to Michael Jordan, and the same two anglers who fished it last August, Trey McMillan and Nick Ewald, were aboard again. It is worth remembering what they did the last time out. In 2025 they brought a 71-pound white marlin to the scale and finished second — one pound behind the winning fish — for a reported payout of about $389,000. A single pound, in a tournament that pays out millions.
This year the fish did not come, at least not for them. Catch 23 appears nowhere on the 2026 leaderboard, which was topped by an 80-pound white marlin aboard a boat named Mister Pete — worth better than $3.5 million. He entered anyway, and came up empty, which is the ordinary arithmetic of competing at anything.
He is sixty-three years old. He does not need the money, and he keeps a boat in a competition where the difference between first and second is measured in ounces.
A Team Called 23XI
On the other side of the competitive landscape is race car driving. He does not drive the cars. But since 2020 he has co-owned 23XI Racing with Denny Hamlin, and the name is simply the two of them side by side — Jordan’s 23 and the Roman eleven Hamlin has raced under for most of his career.
Earlier this year the team did something the sport had not seen before. Tyler Reddick won the Daytona 500 to open the year, then won the next race, and then the one after that — the first driver in Cup Series history to take the first three events of a season. Bubba Wallace drives the team’s other car. Away from the track, the antitrust suit 23XI brought against NASCAR ended in a settlement partway through the trial.
Twenty-odd years after the last jump shot, he is still assembling teams and still measuring them by whether they win.
Two Rookies, Forty Years On
Which brings it back to cardboard, and to a distinction worth making. The 1986 Fleer #57 is the mainstream rookie — a second-year guard caught mid-flight in a set of only 132 cards — and it turns forty this year. In July a copy in a flawless PSA 10 sold for $347,700 at Heritage Auctions.
That is a strong number, and it deserves some context. The card traded higher at the top of the 2021 boom, and noticeably lower a year ago. One could argue the card is not necessarily spiking, but rather settling — at a level the market keeps re-confirming every time a clean one surfaces.
But the Fleer was not his first card. Two years earlier a small California outfit called Star Company printed him at #101 in its 1984-85 set — sold to dealers in team bags rather than wax packs, in a fraction of the numbers, and argued over by collectors ever since. Earlier this year a copy graded BGS 9 brought $387,484 at Memory Lane’s Winter Rarities auction: a record for the grade, and roughly three times the previous best.
Set the two side by side and the market is saying something specific. The Fleer is iconic and reasonably plentiful. The Star is genuinely scarce. Collectors are paying up, hard, for the one there is less of — and paying steadily, without drama, for the one everybody knows.
He last played an NBA game in 2003. It’s quite possible that a good share of the people bidding on these never watched him play a minute of it live.
What Keeps Its Value
The cards that hold are the ones attached to a name that refuses to become past tense. That is the whole of what we look for here — not a hot rookie or a clever parallel, but a person the culture keeps handing the ball to, decade after decade, in whatever the current game happens to be.
He fishes now, and he owns race cars, and somewhere a nine-year-old who has only seen the highlights is asking for the Jordan card. The competitor became the collectible. The number stayed the same.
Tournament results courtesy of the White Marlin Open — Ocean City, Maryland.