Which card would you rather pull from a pack of 1972 Topps baseball cards: A Carlton Fisk rookie or a Brucette A. Rumanyak card? A Hank Aaron or a Fred A. Sinopoli?
Imagine being a kid in 1972 and having your friends find your card in a pack of Topps baseball cards.
Such was the possibility for friends of Rumanyak, Sinopoli and others.
In 1971, Topps had a contest. Young collectors could fill out a sheet with all their pertinent information and send it to to Topps. The company then picked 25 winning entries.
The winners would get 1,000 cards of themselves and an unknown quantity was put into 1972 packs.
Due to their rarity, cards of the kids today can sell for as much as $1,000. On Wednesday night, a remarkable grouping of 14 of those cards sold for a total of $4,025 at Rockhurst Auctions.
“It’s one of the most fascinating and obscure Topps issues of them all,” collector Simeon Lipman said. “Ninety-nine percent of collectors have never even seen one!”
From what is out there, it’s not clear any of the cards actually made it to packs. PSA has graded only 59 copies of these cards.
Of the 25 winners, only 19 different cards have been found — thanks to the surfacing of a photo sheet in recent years. PSA has graded cards for 14 kids (the same 14 who sold in Wednesday's auction), and other companies have graded cards for five other children.
The possible reason six winners have never surfaced? Topps offered winners the chance of getting their own card or getting their choice between a 1971 or 1972 Topps factory set. Hard to believe any kid would choose the latter.
Two of the winners were actually sisters: Lisa C. Bole, who was 8 in 1971, and April D. Bole, who was just 6. "Mom was really great about entering sweepstakes and had good luck winning," Lisa told the Topps Archive blog in 2009.
In the rare subset, dubbed the "1971 Winners," most kids were featured in their baseball uniform, but the more hilarious ones are those featured in their school pictures.
No one became a professional baseball player in the group. Mark D. Audia went on to become a chief operating officer at a wireless company. Ricky E. Nobile was a barge captain, and Darren K. Lazzari had a stint as the lead vocalist of a heavy metal band called Axtion.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.