One of the hardest sets to collect in Topps’ history is the complete 1977 football set issued in Mexico, complete with team names and card backs translated into Spanish.
So the Bears are the Osos, the Giants are the Gigantes, and the Browns are the Cafes. Even the position abbreviations are translated. For example, WR for wide receiver is AA for Ala Abierta.
High-grade Topps football set collector Ken Gelman owns one of two of these sets where every one of the 528 cards is at least a PSA 7 (near mint) on the registry. According to PSA, there are only 7,617 PSA 7 or higher cards graded in total, barely enough for 14 sets.
“I started seeing a few of the cards pop up on eBay, and they weren’t in great condition,” Gelman said. “But I was so curious what they were, and I saw this one collector was posting a few of them, so I reached out to him. He had a great find of an unopened case where he was able to put the No. 1 and No. 3 set on the registry together and I found out he wanted to sell the No. 3 set.”
Process Years in the Making
Gelman initially tried to put together the set on his own, piecemeal. But the rarity of the cards made it next to impossible. He worked out a deal with the owner of the sets to buy the lower-graded one in installments. The first payment was for about 40% of the cards. The rest were purchases over a period of a few years, just before the pandemic.
Trust was not an issue. “We would talk every two or three months, and we just hit it off,” Gelman said. “We are both football fanatics.”
Gelman purchased the cards in sequential order based on the card numbers, so he received a lot of the rarest cards in the set in his initial purchase.
Gelman viewed the cards as a white whale because they were in his wheelhouse of featuring players he collected in the U.S. version of the set as a child. The set includes 60 Hall of Famers. He also learned of their history and what makes them so rare.
Gelman said they “were produced in a factory down in Mexico, all the cards were hand cut and most of them were destroyed. They weren’t stored well, and they got wet.” Most of the inventory had to be thrown away, he added. “They barely made them to market when they came out. So for a couple of decades, no one was sure if any of these cards survived.”
The Baker’s and Dirty Dozens
Every card in Ken’s set is graded. Today just that is at least a $15,000+ undertaking. Gelman says he has about 20 PSA 9s. Not one of the 1977 Mexican cards owned by anyone has ever graded a 10. They were all hand cut, so eye appeal on even the 7s is great given the solid centering and bright white borders.
The most prized 1977 Topps Mexican is the Walter Payton, one of which sold this October in a PSA 6 (EX-MT) holder for $2,313.
But the two biggest challenges in collecting the set are the short prints, especially given that the entire set was a short print. The rarest among the rare in the Mexican set are two groups of cards. One is called The Dirty Dozen. The other, The Baker’s Dozen.
Many of the players in these groups aren’t well known. That makes them even harder to find given people who opened packs with these players in 1977 had no particular reason to save them. These players include Mike Pruitt (Cafes), Eric Torkelson (Empacadores), Ray Jarvis (Leones), Rich Sowells (Jets/no Mexican translation) and Archie Griffin (Bengalies). The short prints do include some leader cards, a Super Bowl card, a couple of Hall of Famers in Cliff Branch (Raiders has no translation) and Fred Dryer (Carneros).
The value of each of these cards in grades NM or better is hard to know because they are barely owned and so rarely sold. But the list price for the non-star cards according to the PSA site is $800 for a PSA 7.
