Wayne Gretzky’s rookie card is the Holy Grail of Canadian sports collectibles – and I own one

It’s the Holy Grail of Canadian sports collectibles. The most valuable card produced on Canadian soil, marking the rookie year of the greatest hockey player ever to lace up skates.

It’s a centrepiece of multimillion-dollar sports-card auctions and major card shows that attract enthusiasts from coast to coast. One of them sold for US$3.75-million during the COVID-19 pandemic, when shutdowns and work-at-home tedium unlocked a massive wave of sports card interest and record auction bids.

It’s O-Pee-Chee 1979-80, #18. The Wayne Gretzky rookie card.

And I own one.

Open this photo in gallery:

I’ve had it since it showed up 43 years ago in a pack of 14 random cards, wrapped in waxy paper along with a rock-hard stick of bubble gum, at a corner store a couple of blocks from my childhood home in Calgary. Since then, it’s lived in shoe boxes and cookie tins and cupboards in Calgary, London, Ont., Vancouver and Toronto.

I’ve always known I was holding onto something special – a relic of my childhood, yes, but also something valuable. Yet I had never been motivated to find out just how valuable. Maybe I liked the mystery, the idea that this modest piece of cardboard might one day change my life – or not. But reading stories about the soaring prices for Gretzky rookie cards during the pandemic, I decided that it was time to find out.

I wanted to know if I was sitting on a winning lottery ticket. But I also wanted to learn more about this special card: where it came from, how it was made, why someone would spend millions of dollars to own a perfect specimen of it. And how something made as a children’s play thing evolved into one of the most coveted objects in sports.

I came into possession of my Gretzky rookie card when I was 15 – not quite old enough to have grown out of buying packs of cards hoping to get one of my heroes, but old enough, and with enough financial means, to pursue collecting the year’s entire set. I was also old enough to take care of the cards.

My friends and I traded our “doubles” back and forth, and bargained for the most valued players like junior general managers. What constituted “most valued” was, mostly, our favourite players on our favourite teams, followed closely by recognized NHL superstars.

Since I lived in Calgary and grew up a Montreal Canadiens fan, Mr. Gretzky – the star of the upstart Edmonton Oilers – was decidedly not a favourite of mine. The card I most coveted was Guy Lafleur.

David Parkinson’s Gretzky

O-Pee-Chee trading card

There are four key aspects that card graders always look at:

cut, corners, edges and surface. Imperfections in any

of these will hurt a card’s grade.

3

4

1

2

2

1

CUT

CORNERS

The cards were printed

on big sheets, with 132

cards on each, and then

cut into individual cards.

If the sheets were even

slightly misaligned

entering the cutting

machine, it resulted in

the image not being

properly centered.

David’s card: You can

see that the vertical

margins are slightly

wider at one end than

the other. Graders call

this flaw a “diamond

cut.” It’s quite minor on

this card, but it’s an

imperfection.

The four corners are a

big deal for card graders.

They want to see sharp,

perfectly square corners.

David’s card: One of

them is a little dented –

which, for graders, is a

fairly serious flaw. The

other corners are pretty

good, but not

super-sharp.

4

3

EDGES

SURFACE

Typically, graders want

to see smooth top,

bottom and side edges.

But on O-Pee-Chee cards

of the era, the type of

blade used left the edges

slightly ragged. As long

as it’s not too severe,

that roughness is

evidence that the card is

authentic – the hallmark

O-Pee-Chee roughness is

hard to imitate.

David’s card: The edges

aren’t unusually ragged.

However, the right edge

has a small dent in it.

Graders look at the

physical condition of the

surface for any damage.

They also want a clean

image on the card face.

Sometimes, the registra-

tion of the colours is out

of line, so there’s a

blurring of the colours,

and some wrong colours

bleeding through along

transition points.

 

David’s card: Registra-

tion is quite well aligned,

but there is a detectible

bump on the surface.

LANGUAGE: A hallmark of an authentic O-Pee-Chee card of

the era is the dual English and French text on the back. This

distinguishes O-Pee-Chee cards from the nearly identical

cards made by Topps in the U.S. market. It also enhances

the value: Collectors of rare hockey cards will pay more for

a version made in the country that gave birth to the sport.

DAVID PARKINSON AND JOHN SOPINSKI/the globe and mail

photos: melissa tait/the globe and mail

David Parkinson’s Gretzky

O-Pee-Chee trading card

There are four key aspects that card graders always look at:

cut, corners, edges and surface. Imperfections in any

of these will hurt a card’s grade.

3

4

1

2

2

1

CUT

CORNERS

The cards were printed

on big sheets, with 132

cards on each, and then

cut into individual cards.

If the sheets were even

slightly misaligned

entering the cutting

machine, it resulted in

the image not being

properly centered.

David’s card: You can

see that the vertical

margins are slightly

wider at one end than

the other. Graders call

this flaw a “diamond

cut.” It’s quite minor on

this card, but it’s an

imperfection.

The four corners are a

big deal for card graders.

They want to see sharp,

perfectly square corners.

David’s card: One of

them is a little dented –

which, for graders, is a

fairly serious flaw. The

other corners are pretty

good, but not

super-sharp.

4

3

EDGES

SURFACE

Typically, graders want

to see smooth top,

bottom and side edges.

But on O-Pee-Chee cards

of the era, the type of

blade used left the edges

slightly ragged. As long

as it’s not too severe,

that roughness is

evidence that the card is

authentic – the hallmark

O-Pee-Chee roughness is

hard to imitate.

David’s card: The edges

aren’t unusually ragged.

However, the right edge

has a small dent in it.

Graders look at the

physical condition of the

surface for any damage.

They also want a clean

image on the card face.

Sometimes, the registra-

tion of the colours is out

of line, so there’s a

blurring of the colours,

and some wrong colours

bleeding through along

transition points.

 

David’s card: Registra-

tion is quite well aligned,

but there is a detectible

bump on the surface.

LANGUAGE: A hallmark of an authentic O-Pee-Chee card of

the era is the dual English and French text on the back. This

distinguishes O-Pee-Chee cards from the nearly identical

cards made by Topps in the U.S. market. It also enhances

the value: Collectors of rare hockey cards will pay more for

a version made in the country that gave birth to the sport.

DAVID PARKINSON AND JOHN SOPINSKI/the globe and mail

photos: melissa tait/the globe and mail

David Parkinson’s Gretzky O-Pee-Chee trading card

There are four key aspects that card graders always look at: cut, corners, edges and surface.

Imperfections in any of these will hurt a card’s grade.

FRONT

BACK

3

LANGUAGE: A hallmark of an authentic O-Pee-Chee card of

the era is the dual English and French text on the back. This

distinguishes O-Pee-Chee cards from the nearly identical

cards made by Topps in the U.S. market. It also enhances

the value: Collectors of rare hockey cards will pay more for

a version made in the country that gave birth to the sport.

4

1

2

4

2

3

1

CUT

CORNERS

EDGES

SURFACE

Graders look at the phys-

ical condition of the

surface for any damage.

They also want a clean

image on the card face.

Sometimes, the registra-

tion of the colours is out

of line, so there’s a blur-

ring of the colours, and

some wrong colours

bleeding through along

transition points.

 

David’s card: Registra-

tion is quite well aligned,

but there is a detectible

bump on the surface.

The cards were printed

on big sheets, with 132

cards on each, and then

cut into individual cards.

If the sheets were even

slightly misaligned enter-

ing the cutting machine,

it resulted in the image

not being properly cen-

tered.

David’s card: You can

see that the vertical

margins are slightly

wider at one end than

the other. Graders call

this flaw a “diamond

cut.” It’s quite minor on

this card, but it’s an

imperfection.

The four corners are a

big deal for card graders.

They want to see sharp,

perfectly square corners.

David’s card: One of

them is a little dented –

which, for graders, is a

fairly serious flaw. The

other corners are pretty

good, but not

super-sharp.

Typically, graders want

to see smooth top,

bottom and side edges.

But on O-Pee-Chee cards

of the era, the type of

blade used left the edges

slightly ragged. As long

as it’s not too severe,

that roughness is evi-

dence that the card is

authentic – the hallmark

O-Pee-Chee roughness is

hard to imitate.

David’s card: The edges

aren’t unusually ragged.

However, the right edge

has a small dent in it.

DAVID PARKINSON AND JOHN SOPINSKI/the globe and mail photos: melissa tait/the globe and mail

The back of the Gretzky card doesn’t say much. He had only played the one season in the World Hockey Association before moving to the National Hockey League, though it was a spectacular season, considering he was just 17 when his professional career began.

A once-in-a-generation phenom at the junior level, Mr. Gretzky accepted an offer to jump to the pros with the WHA’s Indianapolis Racers, but the team was in deep financial trouble as the season began, and sold his contract to the Oilers, a league rival, after just eight games. (The Racers folded a few weeks later. The entire WHA called it quits at the end of the season; its four strongest franchises – including the Oilers – were absorbed into the NHL.) The card doesn’t address that soap opera, but it shows that Mr. Gretzky racked up 46 goals and 110 points in what was the final season for the rival league.

The card – issued during Mr. Gretzky’s first year in the NHL – informs us that the then-18-year-old was 5′11″ and 165 pounds (which, based on photographic evidence at the time, was probably his weight in full equipment, soaking wet). A single-sentence write-up says, “Wayne is considered the best prospect to turn professional since Guy Lafleur.”

It was a bold assertion: At the time, Lafleur was the greatest scorer in the game. Within the next few years, Mr. Gretzky would surpass him beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. He rewrote the National Hockey League record book from one end to the other. He was The Great One.

Open this photo in gallery:

A bit east of downtown London, Ont., where a historically blue-collar neighbourhood gives way to industrial lands, stands a nondescript brick apartment building, converted from a factory built nearly a century ago. This was the home of a great Canadian candy maker called The O-Pee-Chee Company, Ltd. In its heyday, O-Pee-Chee kept corner stores and sweet-toothed children well stocked with such favourites as Bazooka bubble gum, SweeTarts, Thrills and Nerds.

The company’s legacy as an icon of the sports-collectibles industry began in the 1930s, when its founders, brothers John McKinnon (J.K.) McDermid and Duncan Hugh (D.H.) McDermid, decided to start putting trading cards in their packs of bubble gum.

By the 1960s and 1970s, when long-time manager Frank Leahy had taken over ownership, the inexpensive cards (they sold for a nickel a pack in the late 1960s) had become massively popular with children, and the gum inside had become a near-inedible afterthought, as any child from the era can attest. O-Pee-Chee was mass-producing sets for sports leagues as well as a variety of pop-culture collectibles. It marketed Beatles cards at the height of Beatlemania, and produced sets featuring The Partridge Family, Happy Days, Charlie’s Angels, and the original Star Wars movies.

Still, as a Canadian company, O-Pee-Chee’s main claim to card-collector fame was and still is its hockey cards. By the time the factory started cranking out Gretzky rookie cards in 1979, the company had been making hockey sets for 45 years.

The owner of probably the greatest – and certainly most complete – O-Pee-Chee hockey card collection in the world is Gary Koreen, who took the reins of the company in 1980 after Mr. Leahy, his father-in-law, died.

Mr. Leahy had kept a copy of every card that O-Pee-Chee ever produced, beginning in 1934 – a practice Mr. Koreen continued when his family inherited both the firm and Mr. Leahy’s collection. Mr. Koreen keeps the entire treasure – roughly 10,000 cards, he figures – in an undisclosed storage location not far from his home in London.

“I pretty well keep it to myself – I don’t want people to know about it and go look for it,” says Mr. Koreen. He does disclose that one particularly intriguing part of his family collection – a framed copy of a full, uncut, 132-card sheet from the 1979-80 season, which includes the Gretzky rookie card – resides with one of his three sons in Toronto.

At the time I bought my Gretzky card, the sports-card business had not yet emerged as the big-money investment industry that it is today. O-Pee-Chee’s target market back then was 9-to-14-year-olds. Kids were still attaching cards to bike spokes with clothespins to make a motorcycle-like sound when they pedalled fast.

Open this photo in gallery:

Over the next decade, that changed. The Baby Boomer generation had developed a nostalgia for the cards of their youth, and increasingly had the disposable income to indulge in it. Card collecting began to transform from a childhood amusement to serious business.

By the 1990s, Mr. Koreen was under pressure from card buffs to stop putting gum in the packs, because it damaged the cards.

“There was sugar dust in there to keep the gum from sticking together,” he says. “The collectors didn’t like that.”

Today, sports trading cards are a multibillion-dollar market. But when multinational Nestle Corp. bought the company from Mr. Koreen in 1996, it was for the candy side of the operation – Nestle didn’t know anything about running a trading card business, and wasn’t about to learn. O-Pee-Chee stopped making cards, with U.S. card maker Topps acquiring licensing rights to the O-Pee-Chee brand name.

In the sale, Mr. Koreen hung onto the company’s inventory of 14 wooden pallets stacked with boxes upon boxes of never-opened card packs, some going back decades. A few years later, he auctioned them to collectors for a not-so-small fortune. He won’t talk about how much money he made, but he will say that a single box – filled with unopened 1952 Major League Baseball cards, a set that includes Mickey Mantle’s rookie card – sold for more than US$180,000.

“I just kept the hockey cards. I sold everything else.”

Open this photo in gallery:

The picture on Wayne Gretzky’s rookie card is really quite striking. Hockey photographer Steve Babineau – who had actually gone to a game between the Oilers and the New England Whalers to get some shots of the Whalers’ ageless superstar, Gordie Howe – has captured an image of Mr. Gretzky as a young athlete who looks poised to do something great. He’s turning on his left skate, looking up at the time clock, his body already tilted – caught in that split second before decision turns into action. If Michelangelo had carved statues of hockey heroes, they’d look like this.

But, of course, it’s not the artistry of the photo that makes this card so coveted. It’s the man on the card. Rookie cards for big-name players always carry a special cachet. The rookie cards of players considered the greatest of their sport are the most sought-after of all.

O-Pee-Chee versions of popular NHL rookie cards are generally more coveted by collectors than the nearly identical cards made at the time by Topps for the U.S. market, under a joint marketing agreement. The main distinction between the two is that the O-Pee-Chee cards, from 1970 onward, had both French and English text – an instant identifier as having been produced in the homeland of hockey.

“The O-Pee-Chee typically sells for a premium, because when you’re dealing with hockey, [collectors] want a Canadian example,” says Chris Ivy, director of sports collectibles at Heritage Auctions, the Dallas-based auction house that has handled several news-making sales of Gretzky rookie cards in the past few years.

The O-Pee-Chee Gretzky rookie card is not wildly rare. O-Pee-Chee sold many tens of thousands of them. Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA), the U.S. company that is considered the gold standard for assessing the value of sports cards, has graded more than 10,000 of them. Another major grading company, Beckett, has graded more than 4,400.

But the O-Pee-Chee cards have a propensity for imperfections and damage that make high-quality specimens exceedingly rare. That has made superior 1979 Wayne Gretzkys among the most highly coveted sports cards in the business. Only two have qualified as “Gem Mint 10″, PSA’s highest grade. By comparison, PSA lists the most prized basketball rookie card in the world – the 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan – as having 318 Gem Mint 10 specimens known to exist. Baseball’s most valuable card, the Topps 1952 Mickey Mantle, has three Gem Mint 10s on PSA’s books.

Newsworthy purchases, by sport

$12.6

In millions of U.S. dollars

$5.2

$3.8

$2.3

Mickey Mantle

(Baseball)

LeBron James*

(Basketball)

Wayne Gretzky

(Hockey)

Tom Brady*

(Football)

1952

Topps

At auction,

2022

2003

Upper Deck

At auction,

2022

1979

O-Pee-Chee

Private sale,

2021

2000

Playoff Contenders

At auction,

2021

*Limited-edition autograph

john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: heritage auctions;

lelands 2021 spring classic auction; pwcc

Newsworthy purchases, by sport

$12.6

In millions of U.S. dollars

$5.2

$3.8

$2.3

Mickey Mantle

(Baseball)

LeBron James*

(Basketball)

Wayne Gretzky

(Hockey)

Tom Brady*

(Football)

1952

Topps

At auction,

2022

2003

Upper Deck

At auction,

2022

1979

O-Pee-Chee

Private sale,

2021

2000

Playoff Contenders

At auction,

2021

*Limited-edition autograph

john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: heritage auctions;

lelands 2021 spring classic auction; pwcc

$12.6

Newsworthy purchases, by sport

In millions of U.S. dollars

$5.2

$3.8

$2.3

Mickey Mantle

(Baseball)

LeBron James*

(Basketball)

Wayne Gretzky

(Hockey)

Tom Brady*

(Football)

1952

Topps

 

At auction,

2022

2003

Upper Deck

 

At auction,

2022

1979

O-Pee-Chee

 

Private sale,

2021

2000

Playoff Contenders

 

At auction,

2021

*Limited-edition autograph

john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: heritage auctions;

lelands 2021 spring classic auction; pwcc

A big contributing factor to the small number of high-grade Gretzky rookie cards is the era from which they came. Because they predate the rise of the sports-collectibles industry, they weren’t produced to the same quality standards that are demanded by card collectors and investors today, nor did their owners take care of them or store them with their future value in mind.

O-Pee-Chee itself can be blamed or credited (depending on your point of view), for a large degree of this rarity. Printing flaws, poor centring and jagged edges were commonplace.

“We weren’t making them for collectors,” Mr. Koreen says. “We were making them for kids.”

The cards were printed by a London printer named Lawson and Mardon Printing Co., and arrived at the O-Pee-Chee factory on full sheets of cardboard, 1,000 to a pallet, each sheet containing 132 cards, or one-third of the set. O-Pee-Chee then ran stacks of sheets through a cutting machine to separate the cards, shuffled them into a random selection, and packed them into wax-paper packages. Sometimes the printing was the problem, with the colour registration misaligned. Sometimes the sheets weren’t perfectly straight when they went into the cutting machine, and the resulting card would be a bit crooked, or the image not properly centred.

But a notorious issue with O-Pee-Chee cards, which set them apart from the U.S.-made Topps version, was the imprecise cutting equipment O-Pee-Chee used to separate the sheets into individual cards. O-Pee-Chee cards – even the best ones – tend to have ragged edges, rather than clean, smooth cuts. And when the cutters got dull, as they frequently did, the edges could become very rough, the cuts messy, the corners jagged.

The result was that large numbers of cards were well below what collectors consider “mint” condition before they even left O-Pee-Chee’s factory. Few perfect specimens of the O-Pee-Chee Gretzky rookie card were ever made, let alone survived in that condition through the ensuing 40-odd years.

Open this photo in gallery:

It is, frankly, a small miracle that my own Wayne Gretzky rookie card remains intact – or, indeed, even in my possession.

Once a new set of cards arrived for the 1980-81 season, they took over the space on my bedside table, and the 1979-80 set – including the Gretzky card – went into a roughly 12-inch-square baking tin that my mother had donated for storing my collection. There, they joined cards from numerous other seasons and partial sets, mostly from the 1970s.

The tin, eventually full to its limits, travelled with me on several moves without incident. But when I was living in Vancouver in the late 1990s, someone broke into my apartment and stole the tin full of my cards – along with a lot of other things – while I was away on a trip. I would have lost the Gretzky rookie card too, except that, minutes before leaving for the airport, I had taken several of my most valuable cards out of the tin and squirrelled them away in a more secure hiding place. I have no idea what prompted me to to that; I’d never done it before. Divine intervention, perhaps. (You might think that God is ambivalent about hockey, but I’ve seen Wayne Gretzky play.)

After that near-miss, the Gretzky card has resided alone, cleverly hidden. At some point, I found a little plastic container for it – not a proper protective frame made for storing and displaying valuable cards, but an ill-fitting case that once held a 3-1/2-inch computer disk. Still, it has spent most of its 43-year life unexposed to direct light, which has helped keep its colours reasonably sharp. To my untrained eye, this card looks pretty good.

But there’s a big difference between “pretty good” and the best, in terms of value to serious card collectors. A Gem Mint 10 Gretzky rookie sells for more than 10 times the price of a Mint 9 card – even though a non-expert eye would be very hard pressed to tell the difference. In turn, the price of a Mint 9 is about 10 times that of a Near-Mint 8.

Open this photo in gallery:

My Gretzky rookie card story can’t hold a candle to Patrick Bet-David’s.

The 44-year-old celebrity entrepreneur, author, podcaster and Youtuber, who has an estimated net worth of between $100-million and $200-million, owned – and then parted with – not one but two of the most valuable Gretzky cards in existence. He made millions. He could’ve made millions more.

When the Gretzky rookie card was created, Mr. Bet-David was an infant living half a world away, in Iran, during the Islamic Revolution. He developed a fondness for sports cards after moving to the United States with his family as a youth in 1990. As his wealth grew, so did his penchant for investing in high-end sports cards. He estimates that his collection is worth US$9-million to US$10-million.

Until a couple of years ago, the collection included two Gem Mint-10 Gretzky rookie cards – one an O-Pee-Chee, the other a somewhat less valuable Topps.

He bought both in the spring of 2019, for a combined US$520,000. Just 18 months later, Heritage Auctions convinced him to put both on the auction block, with interest booming and bidders lining up – including, Mr. Bet-David says, representatives for The Great One himself.

Shortly before the auction date, Mr. Bet-David says, he received a phone call from Bruce McNall – the former Los Angeles Kings owner who, decades ago, partnered with Mr. Gretzky to buy a famously rare 1910 Honus Wagner baseball card for a then-unheard-of US$451,000. Mr. McNall said that he and a partner were interested in buying the O-Pee-Chee version of the card. Mr. Bet-David asked who Mr. McNall’s partner was.

“Is it who I think it is? When you guys owned the Honus Wagner card?” Mr. Bet-David recalls asking. “He says, ‘Yes’.”

Mr. McNall’s offer, Mr. Bet-David recounts, was US$1-million. Mr. Bet-David declined; he would to take his chances in an auction. (Neither Mr. Gretzky, Mr. McNall nor their representatives could be reached for this article.)

A couple of weeks later, in December, 2020, the O-Pee-Chee fetched US$1.3-million at auction, the Topps $720,000 – in both cases, more than triple the cards’ previous record auction price.

“I was looking at it purely from an investment standpoint,” Mr. Bet-Davis says of his decision to sell. “I thought those were pretty good returns.”

Those prices look like bargains today.

How grade affects the value of

a Gretzky rookie card

Most-recent sale price according to PSA Card, by grade, in U.S. dollars

GRADE

MOST RECENT PRICE

GEM -

MT 10

$1,290,000.00

MINT 9

132,000.00

NM - MT 8

10,200.00

NM 7

5,300.00

EX - MT 6

3,325.70

EX 5

1,864.63

VG - EX 4

1,029.99

VG 3

861.58

GOOD 2

815.16

FR 1.5

600.00

PR 1

768.99

Auth

830.00

john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: psacards.com

How grade affects the value of

a Gretzky rookie card

Most-recent sale price according to PSA Card, by grad, in U.S. dollars

GRADE

MOST RECENT PRICE

GEM -

MT 10

$1,290,000.00

MINT 9

132,000.00

NM - MT 8

10,200.00

NM 7

5,300.00

EX - MT 6

3,325.70

EX 5

1,864.63

VG - EX 4

1,029.99

VG 3

861.58

GOOD 2

815.16

FR 1.5

600.00

PR 1

768.99

Auth

830.00

john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: psacards.com

How grade affects the value of a Gretzky rookie card

Most-recent sale price according to PSA Card, by grade, in U.S. dollars

GRADE

MOST RECENT PRICE

GEM - MT 10

$1,290,000.00

MINT 9

132,000.00

NM - MT 8

10,200.00

NM 7

5,300.00

EX - MT 6

3,325.70

EX 5

1,864.63

VG - EX 4

1,029.99

VG 3

861.58

GOOD 2

815.16

FR 1.5

600.00

PR 1

768.99

Auth

830.00

john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: psacards.com

Last August, a Topps Gem Mint 10 Gretzky rookie was auctioned for US$1.2-million. But that’s nothing compared with what has happened to the value of the O-Pee-Chee card.

A few months after Mr. Bet-David’s sale, the new owner received a private offer of US$3.4-million for the card – and turned it down. Undaunted, the prospective buyer had Heritage Auctions track down the owner of the only other O-Pee-Chee Gem Mint 10 in known existence, and struck a deal for US$3.75-million. (The owner of what is now the most expensive hockey card in history declined to be interviewed for this article.)

The dizzying price increases are symptomatic of what card experts say has been an unprecedented boom in the business since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived three years ago. Interest from both buyers and sellers surged across the whole spectrum of cards, from the low end to the top, triggering bidding frenzies and massive backlogs for grading services. When pandemic-related restrictions on public gatherings eased and card shows returned to convention halls, enthusiasts flocked to the events in record numbers.

“It’s a weird change in the hobby, and it’s all based off the pandemic,” says Bill Sutherland, head of business and operational intelligence at Beckett’s headquarters in Plano, Texas.

“People were stuck at home, bored, couldn’t get out of the house, so they started sorting through their cards and saying, ‘Wow, there’s some money here!’”

At the same time, collectors and dabblers in the hobby found themselves flush with cash, as COVID-19 restrictions limited the things on which they could spend their disposable income. The excitement led to growing numbers of high-end cards making their way to big-money auctions, which garnered media attention – propelling the card frenzy even higher.

“The value spiked on the nicest, cleanest, higher-end cards, because it became an investment opportunity. The new investors who joined the market were treating it as another asset in their portfolio,” Mr. Sutherland says. “But at the other end, the lower-graded cards, people said, ‘Now it’s my chance to fill the gaps in my collection’.”

Jason Martin, owner of Martin Sports Cards in Guelph, Ont., is perhaps the industry’s foremost dealer in Gretzky rookie cards – he has about 175 of them in his inventory. He estimates that their value “went up 100 per cent at the peak of COVID, when everything was shut down – they literally doubled in price.”

As life has returned to normal, some of the heat has come off that market; Mr. Martin figures that Gretzky rookie-card prices are down about 30 per cent from their peak. Still, he says, owners of the cards have enjoyed a big appreciation from the pandemic-fuelled boom.

Regardless, he argues, a good-quality Gretzky rookie card is one of the best investments in the business, in good times and bad.

“I’ve been at this at least 25 years full-time, specializing in Gretzkys. Like clockwork, 5 to 15 per cent per year they’ve gone up. You can bank on it. They are as rock-solid as anything I’ve seen.”

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But “rock solid” isn’t what ignites the imagination of owners of their childhood hockey cards. The news stories about the astronomical auction prices, naturally, had made me wonder. Could I be sitting on a goldmine in 2.5-inch-by-3.5-inch cardboard? Just how good is my Gretzky card?

To start my quest to find out, I visit the website of Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA), the gold standard of sports card evaluators.

PSA provides an online “Photograde” guide to help card owners self-assess the potential grade and value of the most highly valued rookie cards out there – such as Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Michael Jordan, and Wayne Gretzky. The guide is more than just an academic exercise; establishing an approximate grade helps determine how much the card should be insured for if an owner chooses to ship it to PSA for formal grading. It also determines how much PSA will charge you for its services – the more a card is worth, the more PSA charges. If you believe your card is worth between US$100,000 and US$249,999, for example, PSA’s grading fee is US$5,000. PSA has a track record of attracting higher bids at auction; clients pony up the steep fees with an eye on bigger returns.

But Photograde is also a good way for a casual collector to get a decent idea of what they’ve got. I begin comparing my card against the Photograde criteria, half-expecting my bubble to be burst.

It doesn’t take me long to notice some very minor issues with the cardboard of the card itself: the edges are slightly ragged. Of course, the appearance of a rough cut, as long as it’s not too severe, is a characteristic that actually helps authenticate the card as a genuine O-Pee-Chee, and not a forgery. Another key clue, which is visible on my card, is a tiny yellow dot on Wayne Gretzky’s left shoulder, an imperfection of the original printing process.

The Gretzky rookie card is also notorious for poor and misaligned colour registration, and poor centring of the photo and the Oilers logo in the lower right corner. To my untrained eye, I see a card that’s quite well-centred, the colours well-registered – none of the obvious flaws that immediately lower the grade. Looking at images on the website of Mint-9 and Near-Mint-8 cards; mine compares favourably. To me, anyway.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up the way they used to when Mr. Gretzky got the puck behind the Calgary Flames’ net. Might I actually have something valuable here?

The first thing that strikes me as I enter the Toronto Sport Card and Memorabilia Expo – the most important event on the calendar for the hockey card industry – is the sheer size of it. The show, held at the cavernous International Centre near Toronto’s Pearson Airport, covers more than 100,000 square feet of convention hall floor – a bigger area than a CFL football field.

The card-show business is booming. Attendance at April’s four-day event was a record 19,000, up 10 per cent from the previous record set last November, and up 56 per cent from before the pandemic.

Throngs of fans, enthusiasts and collectors, many of them wearing jerseys of their favourite teams and players, wander aisle after aisle of dealers selling, buying and trading sports cards and other collectibles – posters, magazines, jerseys, photos, autographs.

But the highlight here is hockey cards – stall upon stall, row upon row, displayed inside glass cases like jewellery. They span at least eight decades of NHL history. The price stickers range from a few dollars to many thousands. The show is also a hotbed for autograph seekers – a steady stream of ex-NHLers sit down at tables in the heart of the convention floor, scribbling their names on pieces of memorabilia bought to them by queues of admirers and collectors. (For a price, of course. Autographs run from $20 to more than $200 a pop.)

To the uninitiated, the atmosphere here is odd. There’s a cagey secrecy to it all, as buyers and sellers measure each other up like poker players. Cards are slipped discreetly out of pockets and back into them before strangers get a good look; interest is gauged with nods and gestures as much as words. I hear snippets of seriously spoken industry jargon as I pass the dealers’ tables, a code shared by those who really know what they’re doing, and pretenders trying to sound like they do. All of it is punctuated by occasional moments of high-adrenaline drama: At one booth, a man pulls out a wad of cash and counts off $9,500 for a Michael Jordan 1986 Fleer rookie card, creating a heady buzz that quickly circulates the building.

I make my way to the back of the convention hall, where the card grading companies have their tables. There I find Charles Stabile, a self-described “fast-talking New Yorker” who is senior sales manager for Beckett Grading Services.

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Beckett is offering a special price for attendees to the show – US$75 for an “express” grading (about a three-week turnaround from Beckett’s grading headquarters in Texas), half of the regular price. It’s a small fraction of what PSA charges. (Unlike PSA, whose fees are based on the estimated value of the card, Beckett charges the same price regardless of the card value; its price varies only by how quickly you would like the grading to be completed.)

The big kicker of submitting cards for grading is the cost of insurance. The grading companies require clients to have their cards shipped to central grading facilities, where they are carefully examined in what amounts to laboratory conditions, and then shipped back to the owner in a tamper-proof sealed case with an assigned grade attached. (The grading firms carefully guard the specifics of their grading processes; neither PSA nor Beckett would talk about them in any detail, let alone allow me to observe them.)

Anyone with a valuable card wants to be sure that it’s well-insured in case something happens along the way. At Beckett, the insurance cost for international submissions (including Canada) is US$1.25 for every US$100 of value. So, if you believe your card might be worth US$10,000, for example, your insurance will cost US$125; if you think you need to insure it for US$100,000, you’ll have to pay US$1,250.

But before we get to those details, Mr. Stabile agrees to take a look at my card, and give me the straight goods on what he thinks.

“The card is slightly diamond-cut,” he says. That means the card was cut not quite squarely – the borders are wider at one end and narrower at the other.

Then Mr. Stabile’s eye is drawn to the big issue: the upper-left corner.

“I hope this ding over here wasn’t because of you having it in this terrible holder,” he says of the computer disk case, like a parent scolding a careless child. I assure him it wasn’t. I fret that it was.

“Overall, the card looks great. But corner and centring weigh more heavily than the edges and the surface of the card,” he says.

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After a couple of minutes, he spots another “ding” in one of the side edges of the card. He also notices a “bump” on the surface. These flaws are so tiny that I literally can’t see them. But to card graders and high-end collectors, they make hundreds of thousands of dollars of difference.

So, each of the four aspects that make up a card’s overall grade – cut, corners, edges and surface – have “a flaw,” Mr. Stabile says. However, he notes that Beckett has seen “50 to 100″ Gretzky rookie cards over the course of this Toronto card show, and my card is “in a lot better condition than other ones that we’ve seen.”

I hand my card over to Mr. Stabile to have him ship it for formal grading, and buy insurance based on a value of US$6,000; he tells me flat-out that I’m over-insuring. Maybe I’m clinging to a dream that my prize card is worth more than it really is. All-in, with the insurance and shipping fees, it will cost me a little over US$200 to find out.

About three weeks after I entrusted my card to Mr. Stabile, an e-mail pops into my inbox from Beckett. My card has been shipped back to me, it says. There’s a line of information, in smallish print, showing the grade that Beckett has assigned.

I blur my vision a bit, take a breath, then take a look.

It’s a 7.5 Near Mint.

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Statistically, that’s very good. Only about 10 per cent of graded O-Pee-Chee Gretzky rookies receive a higher rating.

But my dreams of retiring young or buying a small island must be put on hold. I own a nice piece of sports history in quite good condition, but it’s not something that will change my life. On a good day, I’d be lucky to get $10,000, based on recent prices. Or I could hang onto it for another few years or decades, and have a conversation piece, while it appreciates some more.

I think I’ll hang on.

When I look at the card now, sure, the mystery of its value on the market is gone, but I appreciate it on so many new levels. Mostly, I see an image of a young man whose future is ahead of him – purchased by another young man who was in the same boat. After 43 years, this little cardboard Great One and I have been through a lot together. When I look at him, I get to be that kid again. You can’t put a price on that.