You could buy a box for nine bucks–retail. Truth is, no one was paying retail for 1980-81 Topps Basketball boxes forty years ago. Heck, sports card dealers were taking just about anything halfway decent in trade for basketball back then. Baseball was king. Football was a distant second and basketball was third–or fourth if you 
were in hockey country.
There was no call for other types of packaging either. Demand just didn’t merit much of a marketing effort.
Times have changed. What was trash in the ’80s is treasure in the ’20s.
In this edition of Vintage Pack Facts sponsored by Vintage Breaks, we look back at packaging for the product that gave us one of the top basketball rookie cards of all time.
- Topps had increased the price of packs to 25 cents with the arrival of 1980 baseball cards, so it was no surprise to see basketball packs also required a quarter to own a single pack.
- The marketing department had to have worked overtime, though. There were only seven cards in a pack along with a team insert poster and a stick of gum. The 36-pack boxes featured the now famous Magic Johnson-Larry Bird-Julius Erving Leader card and an image of the card being torn at the perforations. Don’t do it, kid!
- Today, unopened wax boxes are well into five figures.
- Of course, with the three-in-one style format of the cards, Topps touted “24 cards” on the front of the box. Well, technically, they weren’t incorrect, but you had to tear the full card apart at the perforation to get to that total. It was a low budget magic act that existed only for that campaign.
- More Vintage Pack Facts after the gallery…
- Ads on the side of the wrapper featured the traditional standbys: The Topps card locker and Bazooka Gum although there were image variations on the latter.
- Topps didn’t produce any cello or rack packs in basketball during that era and ’80-81 was no exception.
- As always, there were 500-count vending boxes, packed 24 to a case for the dealers who wanted to create sets (what a nightmare that was with the trio format). Cases cost around $100 back then. Today, on the rare occasion they’re offered, single vending box runs $6,500 and up. We haven’t seen an unopened case come to market.
- Topps did utilize leftover packs of 1980-81 basketball inside its “Fun Bags” which were sold at Halloween the following year. The bags included five basketball wax packs, five 1980 football wax packs and additional non-sport packs of Star Trek, Empire Strikes Back and Mork and Mindy. Typically sold in department stores like K-Mart, they touted a “$5 value” and typically sold for a couple of bucks. There’s one on eBay now for $4,000.
You can participate in a pack, box, or set break anytime at VintageBreaks.com which offers a variety of options across all years and sports. Check out a 1980-81 Topps Basketball pack break from their archives here.
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