Case of vintage hockey cards discovered in Sask. sells for more than $5M

The weekend was a great one for a Saskatchewan family that discovered a sealed case of vintage hockey cards in a spare room in their dad’s home.

The case of 1979 O-Pee-Chee hockey cards — which could contain as many as 25 pristine Wayne Gretzky rookie cards — sold at auction for US$3.72 million. That total, which includes a 20 per cent buyer’s premium, equates to around $5.02 million in Canadian funds.

“The auction folks had predicted it would go for around $2 (million) to $3 million, so the price wasn’t necessarily out of that range,” the son of the man who owned the collection said Monday.

“With sports collectibles, you just don’t know because sanity sort of leaves the room a lot of times and people are paying a lot of money for something that is, at the end of the day, some cardboard.

“It was a lot for a box that had been sitting around in (my dad’s) house for a long time.”

980 CJME has confirmed the identity of the previous owner and agreed to withhold his name for security reasons.

The son found the cards while family members were cleaning out their dad’s house. The family then called Heritage Auctions and made arrangements to sell the case.

In its online listing of the collection, Heritage Auctions called it “the greatest unopened find of the 21st century.”

“It’s an incredibly popular set,” Jason Simonds, the consignment director of sports for Heritage Auctions, said in a previous interview with 980 CJME. “It’s probably the most important hockey set of all time.

“To have an unopened box is something incredibly special, but to have an unopened case — especially the only unknown unopened case — is something that collectors will really gravitate towards because it’s completely unique.

“(The Gretzky rookie) is the holy grail of hockey cards, and that’s not overstating it.”

The case, which was unopened until the point of being authenticated, contained up to 16 boxes of 48 wax packages containing 14 cards each. The significance of this particular year for hockey cards was that this was the first year it was possible to purchase Gretzky’s rookie card.

Heritage Auctions sold one Gretzky rookie card in mint condition for $3.75 million.

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That explains the interest in the auction.

“I’m told by the auction folks that it was, from a sports standpoint, the most-watched and -followed auction of all time that they’ve had,” the previous owner’s son said. “They certainly got a lot of press, mostly within Canada, on it.

“But just the fact that how many people were watching it and keeping an eye on it was quite high. I don’t think necessarily all of those people were people who were going to purchase it, but there was a huge amount of interest in the sports-collecting community for this item.”

In the end, a Canadian collector purchased the case. The previous owner’s son said his dad was happy with the amount of the winning bid.

“He wasn’t really fixated on the price of it,” the son said. “He sort of collected his sports stuff through the years just for a hobby. But I think he was happy to see something he had long forgotten about go for a decent amount of money.”

So, after a month of waiting and wondering, the family has discovered just what the collection was worth to someone.

The son used the words “a surreal experience” and “bizarre” to describe the past month.

“The notion of having something that valuable just doesn’t seem particularly real,” he said. “It’s been a bit odd, but it has been interesting.

“Different folks have contacted us … so it’s odd that there’s interest. You’re not used to being the centre of a news story. When we’ve seen it on TV stations and so on, it’s odd to see that that’s something we’re associated with.”