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Wayne Gretzky rookie card sells for record amount at auction
It might not be a terrible idea to sort through the collection of hockey cards you might have stashed in the basement.
Heritage Auctions recently sold an extremely rare, 40-plus-year-old O-Pee-Chee 1979 Wayne Gretzky rookie card to a buyer for $1.29 million USD, making it the first hockey card in history to fetch more than $1 million and one of the most expensive sports trading cards ever.
More than 5,700 rookie cards issued for The Great One by O-Pee-Chee have been evaluated by the Professional Sports Authenticator grading service, and the card that sold for over $1 million is one of only two to receive a perfect “gem mint” score, according to the Canadian Press.
But hoarders and pickers beware: it is possible for O-Pee-Chee cards to be completely untouched and still fall short of the “gem mint” threshold. That’s because the quality of O-Pee-Chee’s collection would apparently diminish in its manufacturing process. Heritage Auction notes that the memorabilia company used wires to cut cards, which would dull with continued use and therefore produce a product with inferior quality over time.
Heritage Auctions hyperbolically compares the likelihood of the Gretzky card surviving unscathed from the cutting table to it evaluation as “the journey from an Alcatraz cell to the San Francisco mainland.”
Still, it might be worth sorting through any collection of cards you might have lying around, with the trading materials of every kind seeming to have a renaissance, of sorts, of late.
Go on, dig for that treasure.
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