The Rare 1948 Bowman George Mikan, Here Then Gone!
Having the nickname of “Mister Basketball” has to imply some sort of greatness. In the case of George Mikan it was that and then some. The 6’10” George Mikan might be a normal height in the NBA today, but in the 1940s and 1950s this was a towering player who became basketball’s first marquee player and who is credit for making basketball a nationally recognized sport. And leading his Minneapolis Lakers to 5 championships in 6 years sure brought about basketball’s first dynasty team.
One of basketball’s “Grail cards” for vintage collectors is the 1948 Bowman card #69 that is deemed to be the rookie card of George Mikan. The card’s image was from a larger photo with him aggressively dribbling toward a score. These cards now rarely come up for sale. Ogg’s Cards has just sold a CSG 1 example of this card as part of a larger collection transaction of vintage sports cards.
The terms and price of this transaction are not being disclosed because the card was part of a larger group purchase. Only five different known sales in online auctions or online venues are known to have sold in the first four months of 2023.
There are machine-cut versions and hand-cut versions of this 1948 Bowman card as some were from uncut sheets. Which one this happens to be is unknown but CSG did assign a 1 of 10 grade and the blemishes here are mostly wrinkles and cornering (see image below).
PWCC Marketplace currently had an auction at the time of this writing showing the larger Type 1 photo used for the basis of the 1948 Bowman card.
PSA does note some additional variations, such as those without red ink on the front (with only 20 graded examples) and other examples with no red and/or overprint backs (only 3 more examples. The primary Mikan card from the 1948 Bowman set with no designations has just 383 PSA graded examples with regular and “+” grades and another 15 examples with qualifiers. All in, with all variations, That’s just 421 total PSA-graded examples of all variations of the 1048 Mikan rookie. Here are the stats beyond PSA:
- SGC shows a total of seven variations with gray and blue colors, but adding all of these up the grading service’s population report lists just 118 examples.
- Beckett’s BVG service shows a total of just 29 graded examples.
- CSG’s population report shows just 1 graded example, which is presumably this exact card.
- GAI examples — unknown
- KSA examples — unknown
So if we add up all the known numbers (and not guessing for overlaps or double-counts) — THERE ARE ONLY 569 GRADED EXAMPLES!!! That is extremely scarce versus other vintage basketball star cards. For example, just the PSA graded populations are 1,133 for Bill Russell’s 1957 Topps rookie and there are now over 25,000 PSA graded Michael Jordan 1986 Fleer rookie graded examples before getting into any of the other card grading services.
