One collector sent in a card, then told them it was wrong

We have written about what the Star Jordan is and why it sits outside the usual rookie card arguments. This is the other half: why the card spent three decades unable to be graded by the company most of the market uses, and what changed.

Star had the league to itself

From 1983 to 1986, the Star Company held the only NBA trading card licence there was. When it lapsed, the licence went to Fleer.

Which means Jordan's first licensed card is Star #101, from the 1984-85 set, issued in his rookie season. The 1986-87 Fleer that everybody calls his rookie card is a third-year issue.

The Star card was never sold in packs at a shop counter. It came in a sealed plastic bag as part of a Chicago Bulls team set, through hobby dealers and direct mail order.

That distribution matters later.

Four cards, and a grade that should not have happened

The account of how this started comes from Steve Taft, who has spent decades researching Star cards.

Around 1992 he was offered four cards that felt wrong to him immediately. He bought them, and sent one away to be graded.

It came back a Mint 9.

In the week he spent waiting for it, he kept researching, and by the time the holder arrived he was satisfied the card was not from the original printing. So he contacted the grading company and told them what he had concluded.

They stopped grading Star Company cards.

Taft does not name the company in his account and the interviewer assumes it was PSA, which fits the timeline and everything that followed. We will leave it at that rather than assert it.

He went on to meet NBA attorneys and the league's lead investigator on what became the Shop At Home affair.

What they were actually afraid of

Three separate problems got tangled together, and keeping them apart is the key to the whole story.

Outright counterfeits. United States Marshals eventually recovered more than 125,000 Star cards believed to be fakes. The Shop At Home All-Rookies cards, for instance, have blue borders where the authorised 1985-86 version has red. The man who produced them went to prison.

Stolen legitimate material. Separately, and earlier, a former print production employee is reported to have taken pre-production press samples and factory rejects and released them. Those are not counterfeits. They came off Star's own presses. They were simply never meant to leave the building.

And the cards are physically awkward. Star's cutting was poor. Cards are frequently off-centre, often not cut straight, and sometimes not cut to the standard two and a half by three and a half inches at all. Diamond-cut examples of the Jordan are common enough to be unremarkable.

Put those together and you have a set where a grader cannot easily distinguish a genuine card from a reprint, cannot assume an unusual card is fake because unusual cards legitimately exist, and cannot even rely on the dimensions.

The safest answer to all of that is to grade none of them, and that is the answer PSA gave for about thirty years.

The irony sitting underneath it

Here is the part that is hard to get past.

Taft, who found the problem in the first place, has since said plainly that Star counterfeits exist but the numbers are not out of the ordinary, and that fakes of the Jordan #101 are a fraction of the fakes of the 1986-87 Fleer Jordan.

The Fleer Jordan is the most counterfeited card in the hobby. We have written about that separately: grading companies describe encountering no fewer than a dozen different fake variations of it.

PSA graded that card throughout. It refused the Star.

The difference is not how often each is faked. It is that a Fleer counterfeit can be told from a real one, and for a long time a Star counterfeit could not.

Which is an entirely reasonable position for a grading company and an entirely maddening one for anybody holding the card.

Meanwhile, Beckett

Beckett began grading Star cards in 2008 and was the only major company doing it for well over a decade.

Part of the reason it could is unglamorous: Beckett does not enforce the same strict minimum size requirement PSA does. A card cut small is a card PSA's process rejects on principle, regardless of whether it is genuine.

So for years the entire graded population of the Star Jordan was a Beckett population, and the market had one opinion available to it rather than two.

What changed, and when

In July 2022, PSA began accepting the 1984-85 Star set, the one with Jordan, Barkley and Olajuwon. In March 2023 it opened up most of the remaining Star sets from 1983 to 1986.

Three things brought that about.

Research. PSA's president cited new verified discoveries by their research team. Three decades of collector work, Taft's included, had made the counterfeits identifiable in a way they had not been in 1992.

A new holder. This is the detail I find most satisfying. The same statement credits advancements to the card holders with the recessed area. Star cards that are not standard size can now be encapsulated properly. A physical problem got a physical solution.

And a chief executive who collects basketball cards. PSA's CEO, Nat Turner, is a noted basketball card collector and is reported to have pushed for the resumption. Collectors had been asking for years.

What it did to the market

The Star Jordan cards moved sharply on the July 2022 announcement, which is what you would expect when a card becomes gradable by the company most of the market trusts.

And there is a counterpoint worth noting. Over the same period the 1986-87 Fleer Jordan has been falling. One card became easier to authenticate and rose; the other stayed exactly as authenticatable as it always was and drifted.

We would not read too much into that. But it is a reminder that a card's price includes what a third party is willing to say about it, which is not a property of the cardboard at all.

What to take from it

Three things.

A refusal to grade is not a verdict on a card. For thirty years an ungradable Star Jordan and a fake Star Jordan looked identical from outside, and they were not the same thing.

Check which company graded a Star card and when. A Beckett holder from 2010 and a PSA holder from 2023 were issued under different policies, by companies applying different size rules, using different research.

And remember the population reports start in 2022. PSA's figures for these cards describe two and a bit years of submissions, not forty years of survival. We have written about how badly population data gets misread, and this is an extreme case of it.

The thing worth sitting with

A man bought four cards he did not trust, sent one for grading, got a Mint 9 back, and then told the company they had made a mistake.

They believed him, and stopped grading an entire manufacturer for three decades. The most valuable basketball card of the 1980s sat outside the system that whole time, not because anybody had shown it was fake, but because nobody could prove it was not.

This index tracks Jordan's early cards across every issue and grade, including both the Star and the Fleer. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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