68. Air Jordan Hysteria

With all the Jordan hysteria going on and the 1986 Fleer Jordan so called rookie card selling for $10,000 or more in PSA 8 (see below) it was to be expected that the Jordan Nike cards that predate the rookie would catch on sooner or later. 

I'm writing this blog because I hate to see anyone taken advantage of, especially because they were unaware of accurate and true data on the subject. 

It appears that there is significant confusion over what the Nike Jordan rookie card really is. Who better to answer that question than the Nike poster card web page. 

As we explained in blog 15, Jordan signed his Bulls contract and his Nike contract in the fall of 1984. In quick order in early 1985 Nike put out the first Jordan poster 290850 and the corresponding Nike poster card and labeled it 290850 Air Jordan - Michael Jordan. If we look up the PSA population report as of March 30th 2021 there have been 29 graded including (4) 7's, (9) 8s, (7) 9s and (0) 10s

There was also a set released in 1985 by Nike called a promo set which included cards of the 1985 posters of Jordan, Gooden, McEnroe, Lofton and Lance Parrish.  To date PSA reports that more that 2,960 Air Jordan "promo cards" have been graded including more than 1000 8's, 1000 9s and 168 PSA 10s. These are 3 x 5 (not 5 x 7) and are all shown in blog #2. It is probably a safe guess to say that more of these were released than NPCs

So when you see adds like this :

Clearly understand that these are the Jordan promo cards and there are more than 3000 of them graded. Since there are literally 100X more of these graded than the actual Nike poster cards (NPC) (290850) does that mean the NPC should be selling for $500,000 in PSA 9 ??

Lastly the official 1986 Fleer "rookie" (card #57)  in the PSA population report as of March 31 shows more than 20,000 pieces graded with more than 8000 PSA 8s, 3000 9s and  316 PSA 10s. 

This mans logic tells me that the pricing that is out there for these cannot be sustained. 

It also tells me that the best buy in Jordan rookie cards is the Nike poster card rookie 290850 that only 29 of us currently own !

 

67 OSP 5 x 7s are not 5 x 7 Nike Poster Cards from the 1982 - 1992 set

 Continuing our discussions with Nike Mike, we asked him about some unusual 5 x 7s that we have come across over the years and that have popped up on EBay recently. 

The Barkley shown below was recently for sale. Note it would not be included in our 1982 - 1992  5 x 7 set because it does not have a Nike number , i.e. 290XXX but rather what we call an OSP number 5XXX  

Remember OSP is the printing company that Nike turned over poster production to in late 1992. So I'm not saying they are not real or are not collectable, just that the 5 x 7 Nike set with Nike numbers was ended in 1992 and the last number that we have found in sequence is 291015.

Mike says " First of all Nike never released any poster cards that had hand written numbers on them like this one. (NIKE) did not produce them. They were produced by the distribution partner (OSP). I can tell because of how they were produced- very sloppy and also rather than reduce the poster mechanical, the printed poster was photographed. I do have a copy of  5337 Barkley (photo below) as it was finally released with OSP number."  

So it looks like all of the 5 x 7s with handwritten numbers were OSP development pieces done in 1993 or later that some worker brought home. In fact a lot of these were sold a few years ago that included the film that the picture was developed from (see below) This substantiates Mikes recollection to a tee. 

Below is a film that our buddy Bruce "paqrat" Fisher obtained a few years ago for a Strawberry "Cream of the Crop" that they must have been getting ready to reprint. 

BEWARE - having this piece of film means anyone could begin reprinting these. In fact that looks like it has already happened. Bruce has sent a photo of the back of one of these and it is printed on Kodak paper like you'd get today from a drug store printing process. To my knowledge OSP never printed anything on paper with Kodak watermarks on it.  

Happy collecting !