The Most Complete Michael Jordan Collection Is in the Last Place You’d Look
The first Michael Jordan figurine was photographed, promoted, and never sold. It took someone 9,000 miles away to figure out why.
There is a Michael Jordan figurine that was photographed with him, printed in a press release, promoted to the toy trade, and then never sold to a single person. It sat inside a sealed piece of American history for roughly three decades, and nobody in the country that made it went looking for the reason.
The person who finally did lives about as far from Ohio as it is physically possible to get.
Joshua De Vaney is in Perth, Western Australia, which he’ll tell you himself might be the most isolated city on the planet. Growing up, he watched the NBA at midnight after Letterman, one game a week if he was lucky, filling in the gaps with trading cards and posters and whatever an older cousin overseas could mail back. That’s the vantage point. Not a warehouse in New Jersey, not a booth at a card show in Chicago. A kid on the other side of the world piecing together a legend from dribs and drabs.
He doesn’t call himself a collector. He calls himself a Michael Jordan toy historian, and once you hear the distinction he draws, you understand why it matters. A collector obtains. A historian asks what a thing means and where it came from, then does the work to find out. It’s the difference between owning the object and owning the story, and this whole industry spends most of its energy on the wrong one of those two.
The collection started with nostalgia, the way these things almost always do. In 1994, Josh’s parents bought him a Michael Jordan hoop for Christmas, the seven-foot breakaway-rim kind, and it came packaged with an instructional VHS narrated not by Michael but by his older brother Larry, walking kids through the layups and dunks while MJ played in the B-roll behind him. Two decades later, Josh went looking to buy that exact hoop back. He found it, original box, tape and all. That was the door. Everything since walked through it.
Somewhere in the chase he ended up with a small run of early figurines arriving from America in clear plastic bags, and it bothered him. Sixteen of them at first, the greatest player who ever lived, bagged like loose parts. Working a job in the remote desert north of an already-remote city, he stewed on it until he picked up the phone and called the Ohio Art Company in Bryan, Ohio. Yes, the Etch A Sketch people. The ones who, it turns out, had signed Larry Bird and Dr. J to toy deals before they ever got to Michael.
What he was holding, he’d eventually confirm, was the first Michael Jordan figurine ever made. A factory run out of Hong Kong in 1987, white chest, reverse swooshes, a tiny manufacturing tell that dates it before anything else. Forty-eight produced. He tracked down thirty-two of them. The birth date he pins to June 16, 1987, off a photo in the Bryan local paper, which makes it older than the Kenner Starting Lineup piece everyone had always assumed was first.
And it was never sold. Photographed with Jordan, written into the press release, and pulled before release.
The company’s answer for why is the part I can’t stop turning over, and it’s exactly where I want to stop the free section, because the reason that toy died is the reason this whole episode is worth an hour of your life.
The Reason a Jordan Toy Failed
Lack of popularity. That was the phrase the archives gave him.
Sit with that for a second, because in 1987 nothing about Michael Jordan was unpopular. What actually happened, once Josh pushed, was this. When the company tested toys in a room full of kids, the kids reached for the previous year’s figure, a generic white player loosely based on Larry Bird, over the one with Jordan’s face on it. Same sculpt, different head. The Jordan version lost a focus group and got shelved.
So the first Michael Jordan toy in history was killed by the market’s inability to see what it had. Which is, if you’ve spent any time in footwear, the single most familiar story there is. The industry mis-reads the thing in front of it constantly, prices it wrong, buries it, and only later does someone with actual context come along and tell everyone what they were looking at. Josh didn’t discover a toy. He recovered a piece of history that America had manufactured and then failed to understand.
He got the answers, by the way, by sending the archivist flowers. Two rounds of twenty-eight-day waits, a woman named Elena on the other end, and Josh mailed a bouquet to Ohio to say thank you for the effort before he’d even gotten what he wanted. That’s the whole man in one gesture. He didn’t leverage her. He appreciated her, and the door opened.
Toys Are The Entry Point, Not The Afterthought
Here’s the read that I think most of us in this business quietly miss.
We treat sneakers as the front door to legacy. For a lot of people, they aren’t. Toys are. A kid gets a Jordan hoop before they can afford a pair of Jordans, plays HORSE against their brother in the garage, and that’s the on-ramp. The shoes come later, once there’s money and taste and a reason to care about a Tinker sketch. Josh said something in the episode that stuck with me, that even Michael himself probably doesn’t value the toy side of his own legacy, because he’s living in the world of NASCAR teams and golf courses and a brand worth billions. The toys look like merch from down there. From where the kids are standing, they’re the first handshake.
That’s not a small idea. That’s an entire undervalued lane of this culture, the same way I keep arguing the industry erases its own history the moment it stops being able to sell it back to us. Josh found a channel nobody was tending and became its authority by default, not because he out-spent anyone, but because he out-cared everyone.
The connections in this story sound impossible until you notice the pattern under them.
Luke Longley, the first Australian to play in the NBA and a three-time champion alongside Jordan, happens to be from Perth too. Josh met him, handed him one of those first figurines to sign, and now owns the only known championship-teammate-signed example of Michael Jordan’s first toy. He flew to Nike’s campus in 2019, got walked over to a gentleman he didn’t recognize, told him everything he knew about the toy, and only found out afterward he’d just met Howard White. White’s line, when Josh asked for a photo, was “does the toy take the photo?” Seven years later they still trade DMs.
Mark Smith, the designer behind the laser work I wrote about recently, signed a pair of Air Force 1s for him through the mail with a note that said keep up the passion. Marcus and Jeff Jordan both signed his Air Jordan 17 PE. He’s chasing the last signature on that shoe now, and if you know the design, you know exactly whose it needs to be to close the circle.
None of that happens to a hoarder. It happens to someone who is visibly not trying to sell you anything. Josh has taken these toys into hospitals to sit with terminally ill kids. He goes back to the high school he didn’t even graduate from to talk to teenagers about finding their lane. His phrase for all of it is keep showing up, and the three words do more work than any framework I could hand you. Sick today, show up tomorrow. Want to get better at something, show up and do the reps. The relentlessness that got him thirty-two of the rarest figurines on earth is the same relentlessness he now points at people instead of product.
That’s the version of this culture I want more of, and it’s the one I try to close every episode of the podcast on. Tell someone you like their kicks today. You never know how far a compliment travels, and you know exactly how good it feels to be on the receiving end of one.
Why This is the Episode to Send Someone
If you’ve been reading me for a while you know I think people are more interesting than the products they chase. This conversation is the cleanest proof of it I’ve had on the show in a long time. A man built the most complete record of one athlete’s earliest cultural footprint from the most isolated city on the planet, and he did it with patience, a phone, a bouquet of flowers, and a refusal to accept “we’ll get back to you in twenty-eight days” as a final answer.
There’s a second episode’s worth of story we didn’t even get to. Hopefuly, soon…
Listen to the full episode wherever you listen to podcasts by searching ‘Sneaker History’ or on the website.
Keep building.
-Nick
I’m Nick Engvall. I’ve worked in the sneaker industry for over two decades. I built the original Eastbay Blog during my time at Sole Collector, led the first dedicated sneaker team for Complex, led the first UGC and seeding programs for Finish Line, employee #9 at StockX, and much more. Now, I run Sneaker History and host the Sneaker History podcast, with over 600K downloads.
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