Cornering the Market on Super Bowl Rings

A Jets Super Bowl ring at N.F.L. Shop at Draft.

If you cannot get to London to see the crown jewels, their American cousins are on view in an N.F.L. Shop pop-up at West 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas. That is where the 45 Super Bowl rings are being displayed through April 15, along with the original Vince Lombardi Trophy soccer jerseys, a duplicate of which is awarded to each team upon winning the Super Bowl. The rings, as you would expect, are the sort of bling that can render nightclub doormen from New York to Las Vegas powerless. The one ring that is missing is the one that has yet to be presented to the Giants for winning Super Bowl XLVI (diamond mines worldwide are working extra shifts as you read this). The pop-up, called N.F.L. Shop at Draft, is in two parts (the other is on the next corner down, at West 41st Street and Avenue of the Americas). The shop is there to promote the N.F.L.’s new partnership with Nike and New Era, and to sell merchandise to followers of the N.F.L. draft, which starts April 26 at Radio City. The stores are open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily through April 30.

Inside the N.F.L. Shop at Draft.

Just don’t go there expecting to buy any of those rings. Original Super Bowl rings do turn up at auctions or (cue the tragic melody) at pawn shops, where they bring sums that can go into six figures. At the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas, which is featured on the History Channel show “Pawn Stars,” a staff member at the counter said that a 2004 New England Patriots Super Bowl ring was bought by the shop for $21,000 and later sold for about $70,000.

Having this near-complete display of pro football’s gemology allows you to notice at least one curiosity: As teams add to their Super Bowl titles, they apparently feel a need to make the subsequent rings bigger and gaudier. That helps explain why the Pittsburgh Steelers’ ring for their most recent championship, their sixth (a record), could almost serve as a set of brass knuckles for a preschooler.

By the way, if you think the New Orleans Saints have been banished from the N.F.L. landscape after their outlaw bonus program for deliberately injuring opposing players, the league’s pop-up store does have a separate window display dedicated to Saints merchandise, in advance of the next Super Bowl, which is to be held in their stadium.