If you’ve never been to the Pro Football Hall of Fame before, this might be a good time to put it on your summer travel agenda. The Hall is opening an exhibit showcasing the highest graded and most valuable football card collection in the world.
The Hunt/Casterline Pro Football Hall of Fame Card Collection exhibit opens this July at the Canton shrine.
The collection’s creators are Dan Hunt, President of FC Dallas and son of Lamar Hunt, the founder of the American Football League and Kansas City Chiefs and a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame; and Robert Casterline, an avid football fan who specializes in investment quality art and is the owner of Casterline Goodman Gallery based in Aspen, Colorado.
The value of what the two men own is well into seven figures.
Together, Hunt and Casterline have selected about 700 of the rarest, most-valuable and most significant pieces of the 300,000-plus card collection to be displayed publicly for the first time. Their set of Hall of Fame rookie cards is the only 100% complete collection on PSA’s Set Registry, with a rating of 9.78, but there’s much more to what the two men have managed to accumulate in only about five years.
Hunt and Casterline own the highest graded card available for each member of the Hall of Fame.
“Dan and I are excited to share with the fans one of the most important and valuable investment grade football card collections in the world,” Casterline stated.
“Each individual card or set tells a great story,” explained Hall of Fame Executive Vice President and renowned football historian Joe Horrigan. “This collection has been meticulously preserved and will evoke emotional memories from football’s past.”
The Hunt/Casterline Pro Football Hall of Fame Card Collection not only includes one of the four Joe Namath PSA graded mint 9 cards, it also includes seven others graded 8 and a whopping 16 cards in all.
The history and development of football cards can be traced back to Henry (Harry) Beecher, the captain of the Yale football team, who in 1888 became the first football player depicted on a trading card. One of these rarest of rare cards will displayed in the exhibit along with several other one-of-kind cards from the 1880s and 1890s.
The exhibit features countless noteworthy individual cards and complete sets from every era of the game. Featured sets include the 1894 Mayo’s Cut Plug set, the first to focus solely on football players. Also included is the 3
6-card 1935 National Chicle Football Set, considered to be the “Holy Grail” of football sets, the 1957 Topps Card Set that includes a “who’s who” of future Hall of Famers like Johnny Unitas, Bart Starr and Paul Hornung and other rare and valuable cards and sets that tell the story of football from the earliest days to the present time.
Supplementing the exhibit will be a number of pieces from the Hall of Fame’s collection of ephemera, photos, and even a few pieces of game-used artifacts.
The Hall says its exhibit “is designed to engage and appeal to audiences from the casual observer to experienced collectors. It will provide a look into the world of card collecting and how it has inspired, entertained and provided lasting memories to generations young and old. It tells the story of how small paper portraits of sports figures originally created by tobacco companies promoting their products, has grown into an industry of dedicated hobbyists, sports collectors and enthusiasts as well as investors and speculators.”
The exhibition, scheduled to open in mid-July, will be featured in the Hall’s temporary exhibit gallery located adjacent to the museum’s grand entrance lobby and will be included in the Museum admission fee.
Below is a promotional announcement the Hall has put together.
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