The 1991 Upper Deck Jerry West Heroes autograph card is a hobby classic. West signed and numbered 2,500 of card #9, but unopened cases surfaced late in the release cycle with shocking clusters of autos—one in Texas had 23!
I discovered the tale of these loaded Upper Deck high series boxes from the September 1992 issue of Sports Collectors Digest’s Sports Card Price Guide Monthly, which had a few paragraphs of basketball commentary. The story begins with the last sentence of the first image below and continues through the start of the text in the second image.
Here’s the text from the article in case the images are a bit too small for you to read on your device:
Some of the later cases of Upper Deck high series cards contained pleasant surprises. One case that turned up in Texas in May wielded 23 autographed Jerry West cards, including six in one box. Another sent to a drugstore in North Carolina in mid-May included six autographed cards. In each case, the cards were numbered either sequentially or within one or two numbers of each other. It’s believed that when the final cases were prepared, an overrun of autographed West cards was discovered and the cards were simply packed close together.
Happy hunting, and I hope someone picks up one of these hot boxes someday soon! Happy collecting!
