Rare LeBron James rookie card sells for record $1.8 million

Publish date: 2024-07-24

LeBron James has been named the NBA’s most valuable player four times and has won the Finals MVP award three times. He can now also lay claim to being featured on the most valuable — by far — modern trading card.

A rare James rookie card sold for a whopping $1.845 million during a sports memorabilia auction Saturday. That doubled the previous record for a modern card, widely considered to be anything produced after 1980, which was set at $922,500 this year in the sale of a 2009 item featuring baseball superstar Mike Trout.

In both cases, the cards were autographed, and the James card also came with, per the auction house, an “exceptional, tri-color James-worn jersey patch relic.”

Two other aspects of the 2003-04 Upper Deck Exquisite card also helped boost its price into the stratosphere: It was one of only two such cards rated at a 9.5, meaning near-mint condition, and it was one of just 23 produced, in a nod to James’s jersey number.

“There are only two of them; one of them is in private hands, and the other was up for auction,” Ken Goldin, founder of Goldin Auctions, which handled the sale, told ESPN. “So this really was the single best LeBron card that somebody could have hoped to get. It was very active bidding, a lot of bidders, and we’re happy with the results.”

Looks like the auction for the 2003-04 Exquisite LeBron James RPA is over at @GoldinAuctions
$1.5 million final bid + buyer's premium= $1.8 million price realized, the most ever paid for a modern era trading card. pic.twitter.com/5vLCOSXWan

— Sports Collector (@SportsCollector) July 19, 2020

The purchaser of the James card was Leore Avidar, the CEO of Lob, a firm that says it aims to help other businesses “increase the connectivity between the offline and online worlds.” Avidar said (via the Action Network) his splashy acquisition was part of a plan to “bring something big to the collectibles and alternative asset business in the coming months.”

“If we were talking about a T206 [Honus] Wagner, or a 1952 [Mickey] Mantle, it probably wouldn’t be that much news,” Goldin said. “But when you’re talking about a card that was literally produced 17 years ago and is for a guy still playing in the NBA, it’s just shocking news to a lot of people. It’s really where my particular industry has been going for several years.”

Proclaimed “The Chosen One” on a Sports Illustrated cover when he was still in high school, James has fulfilled predictions of NBA greatness and, as Goldin noted, is in the process of adding to his on-court legacy. In his second season with the Los Angeles Lakers, the 35-year-old forward is looking for the fourth championship of his 17-year career as the NBA resumes its 2019-20 campaign in an Orlando-area bubble amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The league will finish its truncated regular season with eight games played by the 22 teams invited to the bubble, at which point James will almost certainly have locked up the first NBA assists title of his decorated career. He is averaging a career-high 10.6 assists to go with 25.7 points, 7.9 rebounds and a 26.0 player efficiency rating.

Those numbers, plus the Lakers’ 49-14 record, good for second best in the NBA when the league went on hiatus in March, have James in contention for his fifth MVP award. Still, he said recently, he is in the bubble for “one goal and one goal only … to win a championship.”

A memento of James’s first season in the league has already won a very expensive title.

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Rare LeBron James rookie card sells for record $1.8 million