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- Wayne Gretzky's Forgotten Record
Wayne Gretzky once owned the most valuable card on the planet.
And it didn’t even feature his face on it.
Today, I’m telling one of my favorite stories in the history of collecting — a tale of big money, major hype, shocking crime, and one of the greatest athletes in history…
It was the 1st card ever graded by PSA.
David Copperfield performed a magic trick on the card in the '90s, destroying it & magically restoring it on stage.
Wayne Gretzky once owned the most valuable baseball card on the planet.
$500,000.00
& he let David Copperfield tear it to shreds...
I'm telling the whole story this morning in my newsletter + giving away a REAL Gretzky Rookie Card.
Subscribe below for a chance to win 👇 twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Will Stern (@WillStern_)
Feb 6, 2024
What's even crazier?
The card was faked.
Bill Mastro bought an ungraded T206 Honus Card as part of a lot of ~24 T206 cards for $25K in 1985.
Mastro then flipped the card — believed to be the finest-preserved example in the world — to Jim Copeland for $110K in 1987.
A 440% ROI in just two years.
A few years went by, and Copeland decided to sell the Honus, as well as the dozens of other cards that made up his world-renowned collection.
He turned to the man who sold him the card in the first place, Bill Mastro, to set up the sale.
Mastro was able to convince Sotheby’s to auction off Copeland’s 873 card collection.
The auction was held in March 1991. With ~800 enthusiasts in attendance and a pre-auction estimate of $114K, the auctioneer looked out into the crowd and declared: “Here’s the holy grail.”
It took minutes for the auction to double the estimate, easily hitting $228,000. A bidding war ensued. The contestants? Two card/memorabilia dealers. Plus a third bidder, an anonymous man conducting his Sotheby’s auction shopping via the phone.
Accounting for buyer’s premium, the final price hit $451,000, a new record. The winner? Mr. Anonymous.
The identity of the winner was soon revealed to be Wayne Gretzky, who purchased the card in partnership with Los Angeles Kings Owner Bruce McNall.
The card was sold & resold throughout the '90s & 2000s — becoming the first million-dollar card.
But swirling rumors caught up...(even after it was deemed authentic by PSA, receiving an 8 out of 10 as the first-ever card graded by the company).
In 2013, Mastro admitted to trimming the card.
He was sentenced to 20 months in Federal Prison.
The card is currently owned by Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick, who paid $2.8M for it in 2007.
