1986-87 Fleer Manute Bol #12

the card

notes

Manute Bol retired with more blocked shots than points, and he is the only man in NBA history who has.

That is the fact worth starting with, because it is not a curiosity. He finished with 2,086 blocks and 1,599 points across ten seasons. Nobody else has ever done it.

This is his rookie card, and the season behind it is the best of his career. In 1985-86 he played eighty games for the Washington Bullets and blocked 397 shots - a rookie record, and still the second-highest single-season total anybody has managed, behind Mark Eaton's 456 the year before. He led the league at five blocks a game. He made the All-Defensive Second Team. He was listed at seven foot seven, which made him one of the two tallest players ever to appear in the NBA.

He blocked a shot roughly every five and a half minutes he was on the floor. Against Atlanta in January 1986 he blocked fifteen.

He also gave away most of what he earned. He spent his money and the years after his career on relief work in Sudan, and he died in 2010 after kidney failure. His age was never settled - the figure usually given is 47, and reference works hedge his birth year by as much as a decade and a half.

The card

Bol is card 12 in the set that ended a five-year gap in basketball cards, so like everyone else in it he arrived at once alongside Jordan, Barkley, Olajuwon and Ewing.

PSA has graded 3,438 copies. A hundred and sixteen are PSA 10, which is a gem rate of 3.37 per cent.

That number needs a set to make sense of. It is comfortably easier than the Jordan at 1.19, the Wilkins at 1.20 or the Bird at 1.50. But of the 133 cards PSA lists for this set, only twenty-three gem less often than the Bol does. The easiest cards in the set run above eight per cent.

So this is a harder card than most of the set and an easier one than any of the headliners, which is roughly where a popular non-star rookie ought to sit.

The other graders behave the way they do on every card from this issue. Beckett has recorded 443 copies with thirty-eight at its 9.5 level and no 10 at all. SGC has 247 with two tens. CGC has 113 and no gem. PSA holds 116 of the 118 gem copies recorded anywhere.

What the sales show, and what they do not

Three PSA 10s have sold publicly at Heritage, all with different certificate numbers.

A plain copy made $1,500 in January 2024. Another plain copy made $2,520 two months later. And in May 2026 a copy carrying an MBA Silver eye-appeal designation made $2,318.

The stickered card sold for less than a plain one had twenty-six months earlier, and sits between the two unstickered results. On this card the designation is worth nothing that the record can detect.

That is worth setting beside the 1952 Mantle, where an MBA Silver PSA 8 made $3,721,000 against $1,555,500 for plain copies. Both figures are real. They cannot both be telling you what a Silver sticker is worth, which is the point - a designation is not a multiplier, and its effect where one exists is about the specific card and the specific room.

population

PSA

graded elsewhere

recorded 10 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

This is an inexpensive PSA 10 of a genuinely memorable player, and the price reflects supply rather than any verdict on Bol.

A hundred and sixteen PSA 10s exist. Three have sold publicly between $1,500 and $2,520, and the two most recent are within a few hundred dollars of each other.

PSA 9 at 1,020 copies and PSA 8 at 1,462 are both common and cheap. PSA 8 is the largest single grade in the population. If you want the card rather than the grade, that is where it lives.

Do not pay a premium for an eye-appeal sticker on this card. The one stickered sale on record made less than a plain copy had two months into 2024, and there is nothing in the record supporting a premium here.

Note the grading company. Beckett has never awarded this card a 10 - thirty-eight at 9.5 is its ceiling - so a BGS 9.5 does not price like a PSA 10.

At a 3.37 per cent gem rate you should expect about one 10 in every thirty raw cards submitted. That is better odds than most of this set's well-known cards and still not good odds.

Counterfeiting in this set concentrates on the Jordan and the Barkley. No fakes of this card are documented.

what to check before you buy

Check centring on both sides. It is the usual reason a 1986 Fleer card grades below expectation.

Read the red, white and blue border along all four edges. Colour runs to the edge on every side, so a chip shows immediately as white.

Look for print snow and surface specks under angled light. They are common across the set and are usually what separates a 9 from a 10 on a card that otherwise looks clean.

Check the back for gum residue or wax staining. Packs held twelve cards, one sticker and a stick of gum, and the gum sat against the top card of the stack.

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

Ignore any MBA or eye-appeal designation when you are valuing this card. The single recorded stickered sale made less than a plain copy.

sources