This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 11/11/2016
The current high bid for the complete set, $24,439.00, is greater than the aggregate total of the bids on the single cards that comprise this set, $21,044.00 (this lot is currently winning)
Since 1959, the Bazooka Gum Company had issued baseball cards in the United States on the side of their boxes, switching to a 3-card panel after the inaugural series, which lasted from 1960 to 1971. But not commonly known to most collectors, Bazooka also experimented with a hockey series as well in that final year, patterning their product as a smaller sized, blank backed version of 1971-72 O-Pee-Chee cards and distributed them in a limited area of Canada for only a very brief period of time. Thus, the 36-card 1971 Bazooka series is the rarest of all hockey issues ever produced. Over the past 20 years, a few panels and some hand-cut individual cards have surfaced, almost exclusively in very low or AUTHENTIC grades and garnering prices in the thousands, with advanced hockey collectors simply grateful for the opportunity to get their hands on any specimen they can. PSA has graded a total of 17 panels from the entire series, the highest of which was tagged PSA 6.5, while SGC has seen a total of 46, including one SGC 96 MINT 9, one SGC 92 NM/MT+ 8.5 and nine SGC 88 NM/MT 8. Of these 11 finest examples, the top 10 are included in what is the most incredible collection Mile High Card Company has ever offered; a 1971-72 Bazooka Hockey Panel complete set with each and every panel ranked as the finest specimen ever graded. While two of the panels share top honors with one other, most of the others are the finest graded by a wide margin, two, three, up to five grade levels above the next best example. The SGC 96 MINT 9 panel of Unger/Bouchard/Edwards and the SGC 92 NM/MT 8.5 panel of McKechnie/Esposito/Gilbert rank first and second as the single highest graded examples for the entire series, but the grand prize of this unbelievable collection is an SGC 88 NM /MT 8 example that features the card of all-world icon Bobby Orr, the single most elusive Orr card ever produced, and far and away the finest one on record. Any one of the panels in this collection would serve as the cornerstone to an elite hockey card collection, which is why this set is being offered complete as well as in individual lots, with the final sale determined by whichever total (the set versus the sum of the individual lots) is higher.