This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 6/22/2018
Offered here is an item that is nearly akin to a Hope Diamond, an item reputed to exist but so absurdly rare its very existence can be questioned. A 2000 Upper Deck SP Football Unopened case. At a time when trading card manufacturers were just starting to see the magnitude of releasing a high-end product with an absurdly limited print run, the perfect storm manifested. That perfect storm you ask? The aforementioned print run with its exceptionally limited quantity and Tom Brady! Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback in NFL history. That’s just my opinion, and that opinion is fungible. If someone else had made the same claim five years ago, I would have disagreed; five years ago, I didn’t even think he was the best quarterback of his generation. But the erosion of time has validated his ascension. Classifying Brady as the all-time best QB is not a universally held view, but it’s become the default response. His statistical legacy won’t match Peyton Manning’s, and Manning has changed the sport more. But Brady’s six Super Bowl appearances (and his dominance in their head-to-head matchups and that's hard for me to admit as a Denver Bronco season ticket holder) tilt the scales in his direction. He has been football’s most successful player at the game’s most demanding position, during an era when the importance of that position has been incessantly amplified. His greatness can be quantified through a wide range of objective metrics. Yet it’s the subjective details that matter. America’s fanatical, perverse obsession with football is rooted in a multitude of smaller fixations, most notably the concept of who a quarterback is and what that person represents. There is no cultural corollary in any other sport. It’s the only position on the field a CEO would compare himself to, or a surgeon, or an actual general. It’s the only position in sports that racists still worry about. People who don’t care about football nevertheless understand that every clichéd story about high school involves the prom queen dating the quarterback. It serves as a signifier for a certain kind of elevated human, and Brady is that human in a non-metaphoric sense. He looks the way he’s supposed to look. He has the kind of wife he’s supposed to have. He has the right kind of inspirational backstory: a sixth-round draft pick who runs the 40-yard dash in a glacial 5.2 seconds, only to prove such things don’t matter because this job requires skills that can’t be reliably measured. A perfect storm indeed, and truly a Hope Diamond! 12 boxes each containing 24 packs with 1 autographed card per box.