Price tag way out of the ballpark

KENT BLECHYNDEN/The Dominion Post

ONE OF A KIND: Not quite Beckham style, but Mike Bieniowski kicks what he reckons is the world's biggest football.

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Talk about a golden goal.
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Island Bay pensioner Mike Bieniowski, 76, claims to own the world's largest leather football - and now he's putting it on sale for $1.5 million.

Auctioneers say that is wildly optimistic, but Mr Bieniowski said yesterday it was hard to decide a value.

"It's the only ball like it. How do you price the bloody thing? The best idea was to start high."

The football - marked with the date 1898, and apparently made from the hides of 18 bullocks - has a circumference of five metres, weighs 40 kilograms and stands about 1.5 metres high.

Mr Bieniowski found the huge piece of leather in the 1960s when constructing the show buildings in Newtown.

"It was basically buried. It was in a crate."

After rejecting interest from an Australian speculator in the 1980s, Mr Bieniowski stowed the ball away.

He suddenly remembered it last week - when David Beckham came to town.

Packing it into a special trailer, he plastered a sign on the ball reading, "Beckham, I'm bigger than you", and camped outside the star's hotel waiting for a signature.

It never came, but other LA Galaxy players put their names to the leather.

Details of the ball's history were sketchy, but it seemed to have been brought to New Zealand in the late 1920s from Britain - after detours in Australia and possibly Africa.

Mr Bieniowski believed it was on display for New Zealand's centennial celebrations in Rongotai in 1940, but then went into storage, where it lay forgotten till he found it.

No one else wanted it at the time so he happily nabbed it.

Dunbar Sloane auctioneer Anthony Gallagher said Mr Bieniowski's price was far too high.

"I'd say it's at least $1.4 million off the mark."

Without documentation, the ball would be as hard to sell as an unsigned painting, he said.

"If it is bona fide, it's an interesting thing definitely. But figure-wise, he's a million miles out there."