An unopened case of 1979 O-Pee-Chee Hockey cards featuring the iconic Wayne Gretzky rookie card sold for $3.72 million during the Winter Platinum Night Sports Auction at Heritage Auctions.
The sealed, unopened case, which was recently discovered in Canada, is believed to be the only unopened case of the 1979 OPC set to surface in the 21st century. Heritage estimated the rare find could sell for $2.5 to $3 million.
Heritage Auctions
Jason Simonds, Heritage’s New York City Consignment Director for Sports, called the unopened case “a unicorn in the hobby.”
“It’s a mythical creature,” he said. “It just doesn’t exist. Finds like this don’t happen. It’s a once in a generation thing.”
Steve Hart of the Baseball Card Exchange, which authenticated and sealed the case, called it the “holy grail of any sport, [1970] and on up.”
The case was found in Saskatchewan, Canada, at the home of a hockey card collector who collected countless Canadian-made cards to trade with collectors in the U.S. According to Heritage, he had so many cases and boxes of cards that his family eventually lost count. The 1979 OPC case was found by his son behind “stacks and stacks of other stuff.”
The case contains 16 boxes with 48 wax packs per box, with 14 cards in each pack, for a total of 10,752 cards. With 396 cards in the set, Heritage estimates there could be as many as 27 or more Gretzky rookie cards in the case.
Heritage Auctions
Gretzky’s 1979 O-Pee-Chee rookie card sold at Heritage Auctions in 2020 for $1.29 million. (Two years later, Heritage auctioned the 1979 Topps version of the card for $1.2 million.) Heritage later brokered a private sale of a Gem Mint 10 copy of Gretzky’s OPC rookie card for an astounding $3.75 million, shattering the previous record.
If one of the Gretzky rookies winds up being graded GEM MINT 10, it would be rare indeed, as only two OPC Gretzky rookies have ever received a perfect grade compared to more than 300 Michael Jordan rookie cards. There have been 93 OPC Gretzky rookies graded PSA 9 that have sold for as much as $150,000.
The Heritage Winter auction, which totaled more than $25.9 million in sales, also featured another seven-figure sale as a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card, graded PSA 8.5, sold for $2.37 million.
Article courtesy: Sports Collectors Digest
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