Portland Showstoppers
For four weeks, we have used the cards headed to Portland to tell stories.
We went back to the tobacco-card era. We watched the modern baseball card take shape. We celebrated the icons of baseball’s golden age. And last week, we entered the 1990s, when inserts, parallels, and scarcity changed collecting forever.
For our final week, we are changing the rules.
There is no single era. No single sport. No single set connecting these cards.
The connection is much simpler:
They are showstoppers.
Five cards. Four sports. Five very different corners of the hobby—all headed with Yesterday’s Heroes to the Front Row Card Show in Portland, October 3–4.
Basketball. Football. Hockey. Soccer. And five cards that can stop you in your tracks.
For the final week before Portland…
The Vault Is Open.
Tomorrow: We begin with a future Hall of Famer whose story started as one of the most unlikely draft picks in NBA history.
The Unlikely Superstar
Nikola Jokić entered the NBA as the 41st pick of the 2014 draft.
He went from an overlooked second-round selection to multiple MVP awards, an NBA championship, and a place among the defining players of his generation.
His cards followed a similar trajectory.
A 2015–16 Donruss rookie was not necessarily the card collectors were dreaming about when the product was released. A decade later, a Gem Mint rookie of Jokić represents one of the great collecting stories of modern basketball.
Sometimes the showstopper was not obvious when it first appeared.
Above the Rim
Before basketball stars routinely seemed larger than life, there was Dr. J.
Julius Erving helped redefine what basketball could look like above the rim. His influence stretched beyond statistics and championships into the style and spectacle that became inseparable from the modern NBA.
That makes an Erving autograph particularly fitting for this week.
This is not simply a card depicting an all-time great. It is a piece signed by one of the players who helped change how generations of fans imagined the game—and it is limited to just 25 copies.
Yesterday was about a superstar collectors did not see coming. Today is about one whose influence is still visible everywhere you look.
There Are Five
Some cards need a long explanation.
This one really does not.
Barry Sanders. On-card autograph. Numbered to five.
Sanders remains one of football’s most unforgettable players, a runner whose combination of balance, acceleration, and improvisation made seemingly impossible plays look routine.
And while scarcity became one of the hobby’s defining ideas, /5 makes scarcity remarkably easy to understand.
There are five.
This is one of them.
The Great One
Some athletes transcend their sport.
Wayne Gretzky is one of them.
“The Great One” does not require much introduction, and that is exactly why this card belongs in our final week. Autographs connect collectors directly to the people whose careers created the history we collect—and few signatures carry a name more synonymous with a sport than Gretzky’s.
Add a PSA 10 grade and one of hockey’s iconic autograph brands, and we have one of the centerpiece cards we are taking west.
Four cards down. One remains.
Before the World Knew His Name
Five weeks ago, we started this journey more than a century in the past.
It ends with a teenager who was about to become one of the most famous athletes on Earth.
This 2004–05 Mundicromo Las Fichas comes from the beginning of Lionel Messi’s senior career at Barcelona—long before the record books, trophies, and worldwide fame that followed.
In SGC 9, it is the kind of early Messi card that immediately commands attention.
That is also why it feels like the right card to close this series.
Over five weeks, we shared cards spanning generations, sports, and entirely different eras of collecting. Some were made when cards came with tobacco. Others came from the explosion of inserts and parallels in the 1990s. This final week took us from Jokić to Dr. J, Barry Sanders, and Wayne Gretzky.
And now Messi.
The vault is open. See you in Portland.
