Card 101 Sat on Top of the Bag: How the Star Jordan Was Damaged Before Anyone Bought It

Somebody is going to offer to buy your 1984-85 Star Jordan cheaply because it is short. I want to explain why that card is short, why almost all of them are, and why the person telling you it is a defect either does not know the set or is hoping you do not.

Card 101 sat in the top left corner of the printing sheet. That position did two things to it, and both are permanent.

It made the card off-centre left to right. There is nearly always a wider border on the right, and that is not a copy-by-copy accident - it is where the card lived on the sheet, and it happened to every one of them.

And it made the card short. More than ninety per cent of #101s were cut under full height. A full-size example measures three and a half inches from top to bottom and most do not reach it. The ones that do are called full-size by collectors, which tells you how unusual they are.

So a short #101 is the normal case. It is what came off the press. Someone presenting that to you as evidence of trimming has the situation exactly backwards, and I would be more careful of the person than the card.

Then there is the bag.

Star did not sell in wax packs. The cards went out in sealed plastic polybags, one team to a bag, ten to fourteen cards, through a small network of dealers between January and May of 1985 at two dollars fifty to five dollars a bag. The Chicago Bulls bag held cards 101 to 112.

Card 101 was on top. Face out, against the plastic, the first thing anyone saw when they picked the bag up. Every bag that got handled in a dealer's box, shuffled through at a show, or shoved in a drawer, got handled through Michael Jordan's face.

Polybags also do nothing for corners. A wax pack at least has a wrapper and a slab of gum holding a stack rigid. A polybag lets twelve cards slide against each other.

Put the three together - top-left sheet position, red borders that chip and fray, and a card mounted face-out on the outside of a soft bag - and you get the population we have.

Across the whole 288-card set, PSA has recorded fifteen 10s. Not fifteen for a card. Fifteen for the set.

On card 101 specifically, PSA has recorded 576 copies and not one is a 10. Three are 9. The most common grade is 7.

Nor does adding the other graders rescue it. Beckett has recorded 1,281 copies of this card, more than PSA has, and its best are three at 9.5 and seventy-three at 9. CGC has six. SGC has none at all. Four companies, nearly two thousand graded copies, and nobody has ever awarded this card a 10.

I have seen it written that a PSA 10 of the Star Jordan trades above a million dollars. That number describes a card which does not exist and never has.

The other thing worth knowing is that Star's first series was badly printed even by its own standards, with enough miscuts that a lot of cards were destroyed rather than sold. So the surviving population is not just a record of what people kept. It is what came out of a difficult print run, went into a bag that did not protect it, and sat on top facing outward for forty years.

What this means if you are buying is straightforward. Set your expectations to the card rather than to the money. A 6 or a 7 is an ordinary good example. Off-centre to the right is correct. Short is correct. Sharp, square and full-size is the thing that should make you look twice, because that is the profile a counterfeiter would produce if they were working from a scan rather than a sheet.

And buy graded. This is a set where PSA refused to work for years after US Marshals seized six figures' worth of counterfeits, and where Beckett carried on. Both grade it now. A raw one is an assertion.

The full population and the recorded sales are on the card page for the 1984-85 Star Michael Jordan #101, and the set itself, including how Star came to hold the NBA licence at all, is at 1984-85 Star. How we handle population figures and sales evidence is set out in sources and method.

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