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Michael Jordan rookie card, iconic 1986 Fleer Basketball set filled big void for 1980s NBA collectors
The 1984 NBA Draft produced arguably the best class of athletes in the history of any of the four major sports.
Hakeem Olajuwon was the top pick, Michael Jordan was selected third, Charles Barkley fifth, and John Stockton 16th. All were future NBA Hall of Famers. It was a dream team of superstars—each was named one of the 50 greatest players of all time—all drafted on the same night.
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When the 1984-85 NBA season rolled around, these phenomenal rookies took the league by storm. Card collectors would have been all over the first-year cards of these future stars. However, there weren’t any major companies producing cards that year.
Topps halted printing basketball cards after the 1981-82 release and no major companies picked up the NBA license during a four-year hiatus. Only the Star Company, which distributed team sets and not packs, produced NBA-licensed cards from 1983-85. That’s it.
It was an unprecedented time for basketball cards and collectors.
“It was just so weird not having any basketball cards, but at the same time they’re still making hockey cards,” said Scott Mahlum, who was a big basketball card collector and autograph seeker during the early- to mid-1980s. “Think about it, the popularity of hockey versus NBA. I would love to know Topps’ reasoning why they didn’t make it. Did the NBA want too much royalties? Something had to be the reason why, because it doesn’t make sense.”
The lack of product paved the way for the iconic 1986 Fleer set to hit the scene. It featured rookie cards of 18 players, including Jordan, Barkley, Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing, Clyde Drexler, Dominique Wilkins, Chris Mullin, and Isiah Thomas.
DOWNFALL OF HOOPS CARDS
Mahlum remembers vividly that when the 1982-83 NBA season started there weren’t any new cards to purchase; it was all about supply and demand.
“There was just not that much demand for the product,” said Mahlum, who opened up Mill Creek Sports in Mill Creek, Wash. in 1991, and is still running his hobby shop. “That was kind of weird because Magic and Bird played in the 1978-79 NCAA Basketball Tournament championship game, so there was success but it did not carry over to cards. So, in 1980-81 Topps tried that tri-panel with the mini cards, and it flopped. It was one year and done. It just wasn’t a big hit with the collectors.
“The next year, 1981-82, the last year of Topps, they tried a West, a Midwest and an East, and they would have like the first so many cards were the same nationally, and then they would have just the teams from those regions. Same thing, really bad feedback. Collecting-wise, it was not popular. In basketball in the late-’70s there were rumblings of a lot of the teams going under, the league was in trouble financially. It was a really tough time for the NBA. It was a distant third in popularity to the NFL and MLB.”
Vintage Breaks and Just Collect owner Leighton Sheldon was very young in 1982 when there were no NBA cards. However, he’s heard over the years how basketball cards just weren’t very well received in the early-’80s.
“In terms of basketball cards, in 1981 the Topps basketball wax that is still out there—an incredible amount of it is the X-out version, thus indicating that they were returned to Topps,” Sheldon said.
To further emphasize the lack of interest in basketball cards during that time frame, O-Pee-Chee was making hockey cards in the ’80s, while Topps took one year off before producing hockey cards in 1984.
“My logic, what I’m deducing, is that there must have been a serious lack of interest in the NBA,” Sheldon said. “It wasn’t because of the cost, in other words a lack of funds, I just think Topps didn’t think people would buy the cards. Why else would they do that? No one else had the license.”
Not having any packs to buy of new basketball product from 1982-85 didn’t sit well with Mahlum and fellow hoops collectors.
“It definitely sucked with it being my first love and being a high school basketball player during those times and being a collector,” Mahlum said. “My first love was basketball because the Sonics were the only championship team at that time; that was before the Seahawks had ever won the Super Bowl. There were just no cards being made. It was terrible.
“I had had complete sets all the way through the ’70s and ’81-82 and then all of a sudden it was just done. It didn’t make sense. As a collector and a basketball fan, I didn’t really understand because I was a high school kid and we didn’t learn what the reason was. Topps was just kind of done. It was nuts.”
Mahlum picked up some Star sets to fill the void of not having any basketball packs to open. He recalls there were only around 20-30 hobby shops or dealers nationwide that had the extremely limited Star sets for sale.
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“You couldn’t buy those any other place,” Mahlum said. “You had to either buy them from somebody in SCD or we had one card shop that sold them in the Northwest, and it was Pacific Trading Cards. Those were not successful either because they were just team sets and it was pretty boring.
“The funny thing that happened was basketball in ’83, ’84, ’85, all of a sudden, it’s Lakers-Celtics. It’s Bird-Magic going at it for several years in a row and those two teams were the champions. That really kind of clicked with the ratings. They were being broadcast on international TV, and then in ’84, Jordan pops onto the scene and then the Nike commercials. That was really the biggest thing—the Nike shoes and the commercials really kind of got it going.”
FLEER HITS THE SCENE
When Fleer came out with its 132-card base and 11-card sticker set in 1986—marking the first major company to produce basketball cards in four years—it was a thrill for Mahlum.
It was an opportunity for him to collect cards of his favorite young players and also get them autographed. Growing up in Everett, Wash., just outside of Seattle, Mahlum would track down players on NBA teams that came to town to play the Supersonics. Mahlum completed an entire autographed 1986 Fleer set with the stickers; he still owns it.
Mahlum always had fun getting Jordan for in-person autographs. Mahlum figures he secured 20-25 Jordan signatures during the early years of his playing career.
“The first couple years you could get four or five maybe when Jordan would come to town once a year,” Mahlum said. “Maybe they fly in the day before and you might get a couple that day and then on game day we might get a couple, too.
“I’ve got pictures of me with Michael Jordan from that year. I’m holding the Fleer rookie card in my hand. Like I jumped in the elevator with him.”
Despite its massive appeal these days, the 1986 Fleer set was a bust in collectors’ eyes when it was released. Dealers around the country weren’t able to sell all their product, so cases upon cases were shipped back to Fleer.
“There might have been NBA diehards and there might have been NBA collectors, but there was no one that I know who was some sort of soothsayer or guru who was like, ‘You know, I think the NBA’s going to be super huge one day and these basketball cards, because these are the only ones that they produce, are going to be really rare. So, let me buy every one of them,’” Sheldon said. “No, no one did that. They thought they were garbage.”
Mahlum would head to a wholesale business and buy boxes of 1986 Fleer for between $10-$12.
Sheldon remembers single packs of the product selling for a quarter.
“It really reflects how basketball was viewed back then,” said Dave Amerson, head of consignment at the auction house Goldin. “Before the rise of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and eventually Michael Jordan, the NBA just wasn’t in a great spot. Those three— especially playing in major markets—breathed new life into the league and helped elevate it to the national and global stage. Also, the trading card hobby wasn’t where it is today.”
Earlier this year, Sheldon had the opportunity to purchase a 1986 Fleer set from someone in Rochester, N.Y.
“The gentleman got it from his mother, who bought it in 1987 for $17.95 plus tax, and it came with the original receipt,” Sheldon said. “It just goes to show you the demand of Michael Jordan. Obviously, it’s substantial.”
It wasn’t until about three or four years after the 1986 Fleer set was on the market that it started to take off and collectors realized just how special the checklist was with all the star-studded rookies.
“I kind of relate it to the ’69 Topps basketball set, which probably has 20 Hall of Fame rookies in that set,” Mahlum said. “It’s similar to that because there was such a layoff from 1961-62 Fleer to the 1969-70 Topps—there were no rookies at all.”
Added Amerson: “The ’86 Fleer set didn’t just mark a turning point for basketball cards, it created hype across the entire trading card industry. Michael Jordan was right on the edge of worldwide superstardom, and getting your hands on his rookie card felt like holding a piece of history.”
Topps came back onto the basketball scene for the 1992-93 season with its regular Topps release, Archives and Stadium Club.
A collector can only imagine if Topps had produced basketball cards during Jordan’s rookie year what kind of popularity that “Draft Picks” card would have now in the hobby.
“That’s part of the mystique of the ’86 Fleer Jordan is that it was the first nationally distributed set with not just Michael Jordan, but with Charles Barkley and Clyde Drexler and Karl Malone,” Sheldon said. “The NBA was really coming into its own at that point. But to be fair, we sit here and say that, but it really wasn’t in ’86, it was ’88, ’89—the dunk contest, the All-Star Game. It took some time to develop.
“But the card landscape would look substantially different if Michael Jordan had Topps cards.”
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