Last May, Reverend David Ricken of Green Bay, Wisconsin, sent a letter to Pope Francis. He started by telling him about the life of Brian LaViolette, who died at 15 years old in a swimming accident. The LaViolette family started a foundation in Brian’s name to raise money for aspiring college students, and to help, Reverend Ricken had but one request for His Holiness: his watch. “Your Holiness, on behalf of the family, I humbly ask if you might consider offering an inexpensive watch you have worn prior,” Ricken wrote in the letter to Pope Francis.
Brian’s father, Doug LaViolette, explained to me that, by 15, his son was already an eager watch collector. So in order to raise money, the foundation decided a watch auction would be most fitting. A wide net was cast in order to find collectible timepieces from notable figures. Which leads us to the Pope.
Who, charmingly, obliged, sending back a Swatch. The Swatch Once Again is one of the company’s most basic models: white face, black plastic case, and large Arabic numerals—it looks like a wrist-sized version of a clock kindergartners might learn to tell the time on. Abscond to your local Swatch store now and you can purchase this model for $55. On Wednesday morning, though, it sold to a phone bidder for $56,250, making it the most expensive Swatch ever sold.
The Pope wasn’t alone: other watches came from Randall Park, Condoleezza Rice, Mason Crosby, Kenny Rogers, Coach K (Mike Krzyzewski) Joe Theismann, Betty White, Randall Park, Tony Shalhoub, Fred Savage, Dick Vitale, Ronny Chieng, and Terry Bradshaw. “It was a real network effect of raising awareness and asking people to donate watches,” said Eric Wind, founder of Wind Vintage, who helped organize the auction.
The auction is proof of the power of provenance in action. The Pope’s Swatch selling for 1,022 times retail price may be the most impressive result, but it wasn’t just pieces imbued with Holiness that far outstripped their original value. All in all, the watches in the auction—a ring embedded with a tiny clock from Betty White, a very aughts-looking piece from Condoleeza Rice, and an elegant Seiko from Joe Theismann—raised $335,507. Nothing came close, though, to the sale price of the piece from the Pope, making the mightiest watch in the auction the unlikeliest: a Swatch.
Cam Wolf
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