Many of us have some of these Bleachers 23KT Gold cards in our collections. If you haven’t seen them, they were made by attaching two thin sheets of gold to a cardboard insert. But they’re not really sought after and have limited value for a variety of reasons. Basically, they are chaotic to collect and it’s hard to find an organized source of information for them. First, although the cards were produced by Bleachers, different companies gave license for the production. So there’s some confusion there…is this a card from Classic, a Fleer card, a Bleachers card? Second, they were produced over a span of years starting in 1994, so they’re sort of an ongoing set. Third, variations in design and box design exist. Some of us bought one of these in a different box and ended up disappointed realizing we had that exact same card. Finally, they issued them at various times when opportunities arose instead of having a fixed set each year. The Bulls won 72 games for a new record? Off to the presses for some more cards. Finally, the gold is irrelevant. You can see on this COA a mention of 17 square inches of gold, but we all know that square inches are a measure of two dimensional area. The gold could still be very, very, very thin. So believe it or not, the gold is kind of irrelevant in terms of value.
I still think these are very fun cards for a collection, and they’re reasonably priced, so as we look at them, we’ll try to simplify and clarify things. On the site, if they were produced by Bleachers, they will all be grouped under “Bleachers” regardless of the licensing company. I’ll alphabetize them regardless of the year of production, so we’ll have one complete, ongoing list. And we’ll also identify and list variations separately whether it’s a variation in the box or printing.
A complete Bleachers 23KT Gold card usually consists of a card, an acrylic holder, a small plastic bag, a certificate of authenticity and the cardboard box. It’s obviously the card and box that are of most concern to collectors, and the boxes are sometimes hard to find. We are going to start our discussion of these cards with this Scottie Pippen/Dennis Rodman card produced in honor of the Bulls 72-win season and their 1996 NBA Finals victory. By the way, the Rodman Bleachers cards are always fun to collect because of the colored foil applied to his hair. And this one features some tattoos as well. The reverse has statistics for both players and the highlight here is that Rodman’s rebounds are broken down into offensive and defensive rebounds. Amazing number here! He led the league in rebounds per game this season. But believe it or not, it was David Robinson who still had the highest total. This COA is fascinating in that it says the card was licensed by Pippen and Rodman. This isn’t completely accurate. You see on the box for this card that it is an officially licensed product. This card was limited to 25,000, but it’s one where the total is not displayed with the serial number. This leads to some confusion. I have a price guide that says there are only 10,000.
Let’s talk about the box! There are two different boxes associated with this card. I’m calling this the “Pippen/Rodman” box since that’s the order the names appear on this variation. The front features the players in their warm-ups and there are profile pics on the back, Rodman with a towel draped over his head. In my opinion, this is the more interesting box because it has four photos total. We will discuss this card a second time because there is an alternate box, and again, being aware of box variations is important when building this set.
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