1980-81 O-Pee-Chee Wayne Gretzky Record Breaker #3

the card

notes

Card 3 of the 1980-81 O-Pee-Chee set is a Record Breaker, and the record is Wayne Gretzky becoming the youngest player ever to score fifty goals in a season. The front shows him in the white Oilers jersey inside the blue border, captioned in both languages - 1979-80 Record Breaker and Record Battu en 1979-80.

It is the first of his six cards in the set in numerical order. The set opens with five Record Breakers and his is the third.

O-Pee-Chee or Topps

Topps printed the first 264 cards of this set for the American market, identically numbered, with one difference that matters.

Topps covered part of each front with a black scratch-off coating - a "Who Am I?" rub-off quiz that hid the player's name. Collectors were meant to scratch it, and most did. O-Pee-Chee printed the same cards without the coating, so the Canadian version always shows the whole front.

O-Pee-Chee also printed 396 cards against Topps' 264. The extra 132 are why Mark Messier and Rod Langway have no Topps rookie card at all.

How many exist in each grade

PSA has graded 740 copies. Ten are PSA 10, a gem rate of 1.35 per cent. PSA's own write-up of the set recorded nine at the time it was published, so one has been added since.

The distribution is heavy in the middle and thin at the top: 174 at PSA 6, 146 at 8, 136 at 7, and 44 at 9.

Beckett's figure looks very different and needs reading carefully. Its published gem count of 55 is three Pristine 10s and fifty-two cards at 9.5. Tens against tens Beckett is at 1.79 per cent against PSA's 1.35, so the two are close - which is not what the headline comparison suggests. SGC has 77 copies with a single ten. CGC has 21 and nothing above a 7.5.

Why this card grades badly, and what does not explain it

Centring is the reason, and it is specific rather than general. The border on this card is narrow, collectors who have built top-ranked registry sets describe centring on it as close to impossible, and 1980-81 is ranked among O-Pee-Chee's worst years for centring altogether. Both the O-Pee-Chee and the Topps version run off-centre from left to right.

Our sister site counted how often each early card in its records carries an off-centre label, and the Topps version of this card came out the most frequently labelled on the whole index. That is written up at which rookie cards PSA most often marks off-centre.

The explanation usually offered alongside it is that the Record Breakers sat at the front of collectors' piles and took the most handling. That is PSA's account, and our own read of the population does not support it.

The five Record Breakers that open this set gem at 1.12, 6.84, 1.35, 21.62 and 0.00 per cent. Card 4, Charlie Simmer, comes back a ten more than one time in five. If position in the stack were driving the condition these five would cluster, and instead they run from nothing to the easiest card we have measured in the set. The set as a whole gems at 7.68 per cent, so two of the five are well above it.

Something makes this card hard, and on the evidence it is the border rather than the card number.

The recorded sale

One individual sale qualifies: a PSA 8 at Fanatics Collect in May 2026. Topps copies of card 3 sell more often, but the Topps card carries the scratch-off and is a different object, so it does not belong in this record.

population

PSA

graded elsewhere

recorded 29 sep 2026. figures are a snapshot on that date, not a live count.

recorded sales

dated past results, not an estimate of what a copy is worth today. figures published by an auction house normally include the buyer's premium, so they are more than the seller received.

where to buy one

Buy the O-Pee-Chee rather than the Topps if you want the whole front. The Topps coating covers the player's name and most copies were scratched.

Expect the centring to be off. A well-centred copy is the exception on this card, and it is worth paying for.

If the label says Beckett, read the number rather than the word gem. Beckett's published 55 gems on this card are three Pristine 10s and fifty-two cards at 9.5.

Do not assume Beckett is the looser grader here. On tens it sits at 1.79 per cent against PSA's 1.35, which is close enough that the two ceilings are comparable in scarcity.

Check the year and the number together. Card 3 in 1980-81 is the Record Breaker; Gretzky's regular card in the same set is 250, and he appears on four others.

what to check before you buy

Check centring left to right first. It is the most common reason this card grades low.

Look at the corners and surfaces. Cards from the front of a set take handling, even if the population figures suggest that is not the whole story here.

Check the caption is bilingual. O-Pee-Chee reads 1979-80 Record Breaker and Record Battu en 1979-80.

On a Topps copy, look at the black coating over the player's name. Collectors quoted by PSA say a scratched-off coating does not lower the grade, but it changes what the card shows - and it is a different card from this one either way.

Read the label for a qualifier before you read the grade.

Verify the certificate before paying for a high grade.

sources