Lawrence Taylor’s Super Bowl XXV ring eventually sold for more than $230,000 at auction as Osi Umenyiora admitted defeat in his unlikely attempt to claim the prize for the Giants great.
The flurry of six-figure offers for the ring saw bidding for the lot extended past its deadline late Saturday before the 30th bid of $192,001 was declared the winner by SCP Auctions.
The price rose to $230,401.20 with the addition of the buyer’s premium.
Current Giants defensive end Umenyiora, who had promised to buy the ring if his follower list on Twitter passed 500,000, accepted Sunday morning that he would not be reuniting the memento with Taylor.
With his list of followers climbing from the low 20,000s to little over 55,000, Umenyiora tweeted, “Well i guess we didnt make it to 500k for LT. But i appreciate the people who tried. #respect# you can now unfollow me.”
Upon hearing the eventual sale price, though, he said, “Yikes! I guess the 450,000 let me off the hook!”
Umenyiora, who originally demanded one million followers to enter the bidding, had pledged to choose one of his Twitter followers at random to present Taylor with the ring if he had won the auction.
Taylor was unaware until very recently that the ring that he won at the end of the 1990-91 season, when the Giants defeated the Buffalo Bills in the title game, was even up for auction.
A longtime representative of Taylor told FOX Sports’ Jay Glazer on Friday that the former NFL linebacker had given the championship ring to his son TJ who could do whatever he wanted with it.
“Lawrence was in fact unaware of it but said he gave it to TJ and it’s his right to do what he wants with it. He’s fine with whatever TJ decided,” Mark Lepselter told Glazer.