Michael Jordan is gone. Wayne Gretzky is no more. Marino, Elway, Sanders? Sorry. It's not just that these great players have retired so we can't watch them play anymore, it's our hobby. Without the big names we go from product to product hoping to find jerseys, autographs, and low numbered parallels to keep us interested in opening that next pack. For those of you who make your living with cards the loss of these big names means even more. It will be a long time before people are spending the same money reserved for Jordan or Gretzky on Kobe or Vincent Lecavalier. So, with this in mind we look to the new hope in our hobby, Tiger Woods.
In the past few weeks my email has been flooded with people asking questions about "that Tiger Woods rookie card". Just last month I was telling you all about the horrors of Shop At Home, and, while I stand by what I said, the one thing SAH is good at is creating hype in our hobby. In the case of Tiger Woods cards they were right there pushing the card along in their own unique way. Don West screaming "This will be the next Michael Jordan Rookie Card" made me laugh, but it made many of you starting writing me for information.
Rookie Card?
The majority of your email has been about the 1997 (and 1998) Grand Slam Ventures card from The Masters Collection. This retail set was made after Woods won the Masters in 1997 and then updated in 1998 (to add a Mark O'Meara card). Over the past few years I've seen the set marked down to $15 or lower in various discount stores (K-Mart for example). You won't find them anymore. SAH is quick to use the term rookie card and in the case of this Woods card I'm not sure it matters. By basic definition a rookie card is supposed to be a card that was the first card of a player released in packs. In recent years the "packs" part of that definition has started to become less important, as traded and update sets oftentimes have cards we consider rookies in them. In all, the Grand Slam Woods is probably a "rookie card", but as we'll see later, it is not the earliest Tiger card.
1997 Grand Slam Ventures This oversized card is anything but rare. A quick check of Ebay shows over 400 current auctions selling anything from a single card to lots of 10 singles, as well as sets and cases of sets. PSA shows over 500 of them graded already, while SGC is up to nearly 5000 Woods graded (mostly thanks to Ken Goldin and SAH). The SGC numbers are even more unbelievable when you factor in that over 1500 of these have been graded SGC96 Mint. I don't think this would qualify as rare. RECENT AUCTION PRICES
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I think the information we've gathered makes it look like SGC graded cards are substandard when compared to PSA. When we took our look at the various graders we recognized that PSA cards would get higher prices then SGC in most cases, but not to this extreme. What we are seeing here is a numbers game. For a long time PSA would not accept the odd sized Woods card so everyone sent their card to SGC. One of the largest contributors was Shop At Home who seems to have hundreds of SGC 96's ready to ship every night.
As exciting as these prices might seem, we're far from done. Doing a search for Tiger rookie by bid price on Ebay brings us some incredible prices, but it's not the Grand Slam card pulling in the big bucks.
Next Page: Do you have a $12,000 Tiger Woods Rookie?
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