LONDON — It was said that Andy Warhol, the king of New York bohemia, cared so little for sport that he barely knew the difference between a golf ball and a football. Like many Warhol stories, it wasn’t entirely true.

Giving the lie to the myth, next month a set of barely known Warhol paintings of 10 of the greatest sports stars goes on show to find a collector with more than $28 million to buy the group.

Among the portraits are Muhammad Ali, fists ready to strike, Chris Evert, once the darling of Wimbledon, O.J. Simpson when he was just an American football star, the golfer Jack Nicklaus, and Pelé.

Warhol’s athletes series, painted in the late 1970s, is little known because it was a private commission. Warhol was asked by a friend, the Manhattan socialite Robert Weisman, to execute the series. Warhol was to be paid $80,000 and each of the stars, received $15,000 to let the artist take as many Polaroids of them as he needed to get a suitable image to be silk-screened onto canvas as the basis of the portrait. Culture clashes were inevitable. Warhol said his subjects seemed incapable of saying much more than “gee” and “wow.”

Mr. Weisman said: “Jack Nicklaus didn’t know who Andy was. When he met him he thought that he was some freaky, white-haired weirdo. Andy asked him as he was taking photographs, ‘Can you move your stick?’ Mr. Nicklaus snapped, ‘It’s a club, not a stick'” He added: “Chris Evert was very nervous about how she was going to look. In the end, she liked the portrait so much that she asked Andy if he would do some smaller versions of it for her as well.” Eight sets of the 40-inch-by-40-inch paintings were completed.

The other athletes were Willie Shoemaker, the jockey, Dorothy Hamill, the Olympic ice skating champion, the 7-foot-2-inch basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabar, Rod Gilbert, the ice hockey player, and baseball pitcher Tom Seaver. The set will go on show at Martin Summers Fine Art in London on May 23.