Topps wanted children to tear Larry Bird's rookie card apart

This is the strangest major rookie card in American sport, and almost every odd thing about it follows from one production decision.

The set nobody else has made

For 1980-81 Topps did something it had never done with base cards. Every card in the set is a standard two and a half by three and a half inches, and every card is three smaller cards with perforations between them.

There are 264 numbered mini-panels in the checklist, which makes a complete set 88 full-size cards. Some of the minis even carry checklists on their backs.

The perforations were not decorative. The design invited children to separate the panels and collect the small cards individually, and as far as anybody can establish this is the first time a manufacturer produced multi-player cards specifically intending them to be torn up.

They were cheap and everywhere. Twenty-five cents a pack, eight cards and a team poster.

The card

One panel carries Larry Bird as mini number 34, Julius Erving as number 174 in the Scoring Leader subset, and Magic Johnson as number 139.

Bird and Magic are both rookies on it. Erving is the veteran in the middle.

Which means a single piece of cardboard is the accepted rookie card of two players who between them won eight championships and six MVP awards, with a third Hall of Famer sitting between them. There is no equivalent in any other sport. Two of the greatest players of a generation share a rookie card by accident of printing.

The naming problem

Here is where it gets practically difficult, and where our own data shows the damage.

That one physical card is catalogued as panel number 6. Its three minis are 34, 174 and 139. Sellers write it as 34/139/174, as 139-174-34, as simply #6, or by whichever single number they care about.

Across the Bird listings this index tracks, classes appear under card number 6, under 34, under 139, under 174, and under no number at all for a substantial share of them, where the title describes the card as "Bird Magic Erving Scoring Leaders" and leaves the numbering to the reader.

Five naming conventions for one object. We keep them as separate classes because we report what listings say rather than what we think they meant, but anybody comparing prices needs to know that four of those numbers describe the same card.

Bird also has team leader minis at 30 and 31 in the same set, which are genuinely different cards and are easy to confuse with the rookie when a listing gives a number and no description.

What the perforations did to the population

Now the consequence.

A card with perforations running through it is a card designed to fail. The scored lines are weak points. Bending, creasing and separation at the perforation are all ordinary handling outcomes on a card that was built to come apart.

And a separated panel is not a lesser grade. A detached mini is considered damaged and cannot grade above Poor. The moment a child did what the card invited, the object left the graded population permanently.

The figures follow. Of roughly 9,693 graded examples, PSA has awarded 24 tens. That is about a quarter of one per cent. Below that sit 613 nines, 2,791 eights, 3,037 sevens and 1,884 sixes.

The bulk of the population is in the sixes and sevens, which is where a card ends up when it was handled normally and the design punished that.

Two more problems the set has

Black print defects. PSA's own account of the card notes it is notorious for black specks scattered across the front. Sellers describe them constantly, often as an apology. They are a characteristic of the printing rather than damage anybody caused.

And centering. The same account calls it fairly difficult to find well centred, which is unsurprising on a card that had to be cut accurately around three separate images and two sets of perforations.

So a gem example had to survive a design that encouraged destruction, a print run that speckled the fronts, and a cutting process with three times the usual opportunity to go wrong. Twenty-four did.

What to check before buying one

Four things.

Confirm it is intact. Separated panels are freely available and cheap, and they are a different product. A listing saying "Larry Bird rookie" with one panel showing is not the card discussed here.

Read the perforation line in the photograph. Partial separation, soft scoring and fraying along the perforation are the commonest faults and the easiest to miss in a small image.

Do not read a low number as a different card. 6, 34, 139 and 174 may all be the same object. Look at the picture rather than the number.

And expect print specks. A completely clean front is unusual enough that its absence is not a reason to walk away, though it is a reason to pay less.

The thing worth sitting with

Topps perforated the set to give children more cards for their money. Three small ones instead of one big one, for the same quarter.

It worked. Children tore them up, exactly as intended, and in doing so destroyed most of the surviving population of what became the joint rookie card of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.

The twenty-four that grade ten are the ones somebody left alone, and leaving it alone meant not using the card the way its maker suggested.

This index tracks Bird's early-career cards across every number and grade they are listed under, including all the ways this one gets described. You can read how we work the numbers out, and there is a companion piece on how a design decision rather than the cardboard decides which cards grade.

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