CARDBOARDFILE
basketball / Fleer
132 cards
For five years there were no basketball cards. Topps left the market after its 1981-82 set, and the NBA licence sat with the Star Company, whose cards were short printed and sold to dealers in team bags rather than in packs at a corner store. A generation of players reached the league and never appeared on a card anyone could buy.
Fleer ended that in 1986 with 132 cards and eleven stickers, its first basketball set since 1961. Packs held twelve cards, one sticker and a stick of gum, and cost about forty cents. A box held thirty-six packs.
The consequence is the strangest rookie class in the hobby. Because the checklist is the first mainstream card for almost everyone on it, the set contains rookie cards for players who had been in the NBA for years. Michael Jordan at 57 was entering his third season. Charles Barkley, Hakeem Olajuwon - printed here as Akeem - Karl Malone, Clyde Drexler, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, Joe Dumars, Isiah Thomas and Dominique Wilkins all have rookie cards in a 132-card set. Twelve of them are in the Hall of Fame.
Whether card 57 is Jordan's actual rookie card is a genuine dispute rather than a settled question. Star issued three Jordan cards in 1984-85, two years earlier. The argument for Fleer is that it was the first licensed card sold in packs to the public; the argument for Star is that it was simply first. Both sides are held sincerely and this site does not adjudicate it.
The design is a red, white and blue border around a photograph, with the name, team and position in white on blue along the bottom, and the same colour scheme carried to the back. That border is why the set grades the way it does. Colour runs to the edge on all four sides, so any chip shows, and centring on a simply-printed 1986 card was never going to be consistent.
One claim worth carrying carefully: a Fleer executive told a hobby writer in the late 1990s that 250,000 of each card were printed. That is one person's recollection years after the fact rather than a company figure, and it is the only production number the hobby has.
This is the most counterfeited set in the hobby, and that fact should shape every purchase you make from it.
For anything with real value - Jordan above all, then Barkley, then the other Hall of Fame rookies - buy it graded, from a holder you can verify. Counterfeit Jordans have been made for decades, and counterfeit PSA and Beckett holders now circulate as well. Verify the certificate number against the grading company's own lookup before you pay, not after.
Commons are a different market entirely and are genuinely cheap. Nobody counterfeits a Jerry Sichting. If you are building the set, the sensible approach is to buy the commons raw in bulk and the key cards graded.
Complete sets turn up regularly and are usually priced almost entirely on the condition of card 57. If you want the set rather than the Jordan, ask for a 131-card set - they exist, and they cost a fraction of the price.
The eleven stickers are a separate insert set that came one per pack, not part of the 132. The Jordan sticker is its own card with its own market, and gum staining ruins most of them.