Sunday, June 28, 2020

The Rodney Dangerfield of Basketball cards

This card gets no respect...no respect at all.

My dislike for 1980-81 Topps is fairly well known. It was a terrible idea and executed very poorly. Instead of giving each player their own, standard sized card, each card is 1/3rd of a standard sized card, perforated with the intent to split them up. They aren't in any sort of order, although there are repeating patterns- the middle card is always a subset card or the two end cards are subsets and the base veteran is in the middle. They don't vary from that at all. There are three subsets- checklists, of which there are 18, Team leaders, and Slam Dunk.

Because of the way Topps did things in that time, both Magic Johnson and Larry Bird appear on cards for the first time in this set. The key card- and the one that will sort of prevent me from completing the set- has Bird on one end, Magic on the other, and Dr. J. in the middle. (Actually 76ers Scoring Leaders, a team card) This is the only card that will prevent me from completing the entire Topps run from 1973-74 through 2008-09, although there were no Topps NBA cards issued between 1982-83 to 1991-92. Although I will never have the original, I do have the reprint from 1996-97 Topps Stars, when the first Topps card of each of the 50 Greatest Players was reproduced in original, Chrome and Refractor form.

Although it's not an exact reproduction, since the perforations are different. They also reprinted it twice, with the tiny reprint number on the back being the only difference. (If I had been in charge, only the actual card would have been reprinted, not the full panel.)

But...since the panels themselves generally don't matter to me...I still have Magic Johnson's Rookie card in my collection.

How, you may ask? Because there are several panels where two of the three cards don't change, but the third does. Because one of those versions is the Dr. J./Magic Johnson combo, but with Jan Van Breda Kolff instead of Larry Bird, I was able to add Magic's RC to my collection.
as you can see, the production quality itself isn't that high, either.

Yet, most people do not consider this to be Magic's RC. Even though, if you were to separate them, you would not be able to tell this #139 apart from the one that was originally stuck to Larry Bird via Dr. J. This card gets no respect...no respect at all.

I didn't separate my cards...I made that mistake with the 1996-97 Collector's Choice mini-cards, an homage to these. However, with the magic of Photoscape, I am actually able to see the cards in numerical order, something that's impossible to do in reality due to the way Topps made them.
There is a version where the Bird card is combined with two other cards, (Knicks Rebounding Leaders and Larry Drew) but I do not have it. Maybe some day.

So, while I won't ever have the Bird/Dr.J./Magic card, I do hope to someday have every number, if not every panel, and I will consider it a complete set when that happens...if that happens.

13 comments:

  1. I was 15 years old when I order this set (80-81 Topps BK) from an ad in the Sporting News, having no idea what these cards WOULD LOOK LIKE. When the UPS guy delivered the set and I opened the box and viewed the cards it was probably the 2nd worst feeling I ever had collecting cards (The worst would be in the fall of 1982 where I read in The Sporting News that Topps would not be making basketball cards that year).

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    1. That must have been a terrible feeling. I saw them in Beckett before I ever saw any in person.

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  2. I always sort my cards into teams so when I got the set in 1980(I hated the set just as much as you did) naturally I separated them into to teams,so in 1990 when basketball cards spiked I was SOL.

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    1. I wish now I had kept the 1996-97 Collector's Choice mini cards together. No other reason than they fray when separated.

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  3. I didn't buy many of these when I was a kid. Of course I didn't put them in sleeves or anything back so a few separated just from handling them.

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    1. I've got a couple that came to me loose, that I fully expect to just separate on their own at some point.

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  4. I remember seeing these when they came out and I felt sorry for anyone who collected basketball cards. No wonder Topps shut everything down in basketball for the next several years.

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    1. I have to wonder if Topps NBA sets were not selling well because of the decisions they made the first two years of the 80s. I may explore this concept in a future post.

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    2. At the time in 1982 Topps said due to the big sales of ET cards,they were not gonna make basketball cards.

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  5. I opened one pack of these back in the 80's and pulled a Magic. It doesn't have the Bird... but like you pointed out... at least I pulled a Magic Johnson rookie card.

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  6. I never break my cards apart my hobby OCD would eat me alive

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    1. These get my OCD no matter what. Number order is my OCD focus.

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