It is not surprising that Lonnie Morken, athletic director and coach at Mabel-Canton School, collects trading cards – basketball, baseball, football, and boxing. His favorite is basketball. He is also eager to share what he has learned with others.
Morken started off the interview by describing his collection. “At one point, I had close to 250,000 cards but have flipped my collection many times, about four times, and now I am more interested in quality, not quantity. Now I have fewer than 100 cards; most of them are graded and in two display cases.”
The oldest card in Morken’s collection is an 1887 Allen and Ginter Jack Dempsy, a famous boxer in the late 1800s.
His favorite card is a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card which was pulled from a pack purchased at Alberts, a store in Caledonia in 1989. The store’s owner, Tony Denstad and Morken were equally excited when they pulled. Morken sent it in about six years ago to get it graded, and it came back a 10!
“I am very proud of many of my childhood cards that I sent in to get graded have come back as 9s and 10s, which means I took excellent care of them,” proudly announced Morken.
Another memorable story regarding his collection. “I had probably 10 Larry Bird rookie cards back in 1980, but the design Topps used that year had perforations on the card, and many young kids ripped the card into three separate cards, which destroyed the value of the card.” When he got older, he purchased an intact card.
“The more packs you buy, the more commons you get.” Commons is a term used to describe the least expensive cards in a set. There are several commons in a pack.
Professional Sports Authority (PSA), www.psacard.com, and Beckett Grading Service, www.beckett.com, are reputable companies that grade sports cards. You mail them in to get graded. The cost to grade cards starts at $15 can take 30 to 200 or 300 days to get graded. Then the cards are slabbed.
Simply put, there are four criteria used for grading cards – centering, corners, edges, and the surface.
“Getting cards professionally graded exploded about 10 years ago. If you have a card and it is graded an 8, 9, or 10, your card is worth a lot more than if it received a lower grade of 1, 2, 3 or is still raw (ungraded),” explains Morken, who has not brought a raw card in over 15 years because there are a lot of fakes out there.
According to Morken, the value of vintage basketball cards is exploding right now. Cards become more valuable when a player dies, retires, or is inducted into the Hall of Fame. Junk-era cards from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s are also worth a lot of money if they are a 9 or 10.
Morken began collecting sports cards in the late ‘70s as a young boy. “My progression as a collector and treatment of cards was normal. As a young kid, the last thing I was concerned with was the condition of my cards. I would buy them at our local store and spend hours setting up pretend games with them. When I would get done with them, I would put a rubber band around them and put them in a shoebox.”
During the mid-’80s, when Morken was a teenager, he started putting his cards in binders specially made to store the cards. A few years later, in his late teen years, he started putting the more expensive ones in individual holders to help protect the four corners and keep them from getting creases and wrinkles.
Start your online search in the comfort of your own home by visiting online forums. There are many Facebook groups where you can trade, sell, and discuss cards online.
Morken mentioned that he had purchased a lot of cards over eBay. Other online options include Craigslist and Amazon.
WikiHow recommends visiting flea markets, antique stores, thrift stores, garage, and estate sales and check to see if there are any collector shows in your area.
Card shops are starting to make a return. They were extremely popular in the ‘80s, and then by the mid-’90s, most went to selling online. Morken expressed his opinion, “I am glad they are coming back because it is a lot more assuring dealing with someone face to face than over email.”
Morken plans to attend the 2021 National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago this summer. This will be his second trip to the convention. The convention is fun and a great way to connect with people.
Advice for would-be sports card collectors from Morken: “Keep your cards in as good of shape as you can and buy a graded card from the most reliable and trustworthy source for grading cards.”
“The prices of sports cards have exploded during the pandemic. For example, Michael Jordan’s documentary “The Last Dance” certainly helped his cards skyrocket, and just this past week, a basketball card that sold for over four million dollars,” shared Morken.
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