The Flagg Collection #5 – Michael Jordan “Wings” (1987) Nike 6-Foot Wall Poster

For real, serious sports poster collectors and enthusiasts, this feature is for you! On a periodic basis, I’ll be using this blog to display and describe the holdings of The Flagg Collection – the personal collection of rare and vintage posters held by me, Neil Flagg, the founder and President of SportsPosterWarehouse.com.

For the fifth entry in this blog series, it’s one of the most famous sports posters of all-time – Michael Jordan “Wings”, the iconic black-and-white classic that turns, believe it or not, 30 years old this year. No serious poster collection is complete without this one, the all-time best-selling Nike poster, from the prime of the MJ era:

From the Air Jordan III era, when Nike’s MJ-branded sneaker line was reaching its peak, it features the simple photographic image of the 24-year-old pre-Championship-era Michael extending his ripped arms to show off his incredible wingspan, palming the ball with his right hand as he did in game-action every night to hold on for miraculous slam dunks.

Proving the old adage that “less is more”, the designers at Nike were smart enough to keep it simple – the photo in black-and-white, simple block letters “W-I-N-G-S” along the top white border, and the Nike swoosh in the bottom border along with the verse of poetry that every MJ fan has memorized:

This specific poster held in The Flagg Collection is from a mid-1990s printing of this poster. It went through many, many press runs throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, and was certainly one of the top-selling posters of all-time. The first printing, to our knowledge, was a full 24″x72″ edition. They later cut it down to 23″x71″, as this one is, to fit the store racks of the day. Beware of knock-offs out of Asia – unscrupulous counterfeiters have flooded the modern market with cheap, smaller illegal reproductions that you can find for just a few dollars. Originals like this, however, regularly sell for hundreds of dollars at auction. This one, as with most of the holdings of The Flagg Collection, I’ve had this one canvas-transferred to preserve it forever with durability, in an easy-to-display format.

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