1986-87 Fleer Checklist #132

the card

notes

Card 132 is the last card in the set and the only one without a player on it. It has been graded 4,405 times, which is more than most of the commons in the same 132 cards. Alvan Adams at number 2 has 2,905. Jerry Sichting at 101 has 2,711. Nobody is grading a checklist because they love checklists.

They are grading it because the set is not finished without it. The PSA Set Registry requires all 132 items, so anyone assembling this set has to solve this card, and it is a harder card to solve than the number suggests.

The reason is what a checklist card is for. It was printed to be written on. Boxes down the back, a pen in 1986, a twelve-year-old ticking off what he had. Every marked copy is out of the graded population permanently, so the survivors are a self-selected pool of cards that were never used.

That self-selection shows in the figures, and it points the opposite way to intuition. This card gems at 2.02 per cent - higher than the Jordan at 1.19 and the Wilkins at 1.20. The checklist is not harder to find in gem than the star cards. It is easier, because only clean copies get submitted at all.

What is hard is centring. 172 copies carry a qualifier, and they cluster at the grades people actually want: 79 at PSA 8 and 77 at PSA 9. That is a card that keeps arriving at the grader as a 9 and leaving as a 9(OC).

There is a structural reason to expect it. The set was laid out on a standard eleven by twelve press sheet, which yields exactly 132 cards - so every card in this set appears once per sheet, in one fixed position, with no double prints anywhere. Whatever a card's position did to its centring, it did to every copy ever printed. That is also the likeliest explanation for why gem rates differ so much between cards in a set that came off the same presses on the same day, though no published source establishes which card sat where.

The back is the set's own table of contents, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at 1 through James Worthy at 131, with Michael Jordan on it at 57 as an ordinary line of type.

population

PSA

graded elsewhere

recorded 29 aug 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 unmarked, and read the description rather than the grade.

Marked copies are common, cheap, and worthless for a set build. Sellers who know what they have will say "unmarked" in the title. Sellers who do not say either way are usually not worth the risk on a card this inexpensive - move on rather than negotiate.

Graded, this is genuinely affordable. PSA 7 and 8 together account for more than 2,500 recorded copies. PSA 9 at 642 is the sensible target for a registry set, and PSA 10 at 89 is a real scarcity that costs real money.

Watch for the qualifier. With 172 recorded, most of them at 8 and 9, an 8(OC) listing is easy to mistake for an 8 at a glance and it will not do the same job in a registry set.

No counterfeits of this card are documented. The money in this set sits at card 57, and that is where the fakes are.

what to check before you buy

On a raw card, look at the back before anything else. Check marks, pen, pencil, or the ghost of an erased tick all matter, and an erasure is worse than a tick because it usually took surface with it.

On a graded card, read the label for a qualifier before you read the number. OC is the one you will meet.

Check centring on both sides. It is the defining problem with this particular card and the reason so many qualifiers exist.

Check the red, white and blue border on all four edges. Colour runs to the edge on every 1986 Fleer card, so a chip has nowhere to hide.

sources