Collector Stories | 1957 Topps Basketball Set Collectors

Immaculate Collections for 1957-58 Topps Basketball

Date: Nov 3, 2025

Author: Greg Bates

Topics: 1957 Topps Basketball, basketball, Cards and Culture, Collector Stories, Topps Basketball

Length: 881 Words

Reading Time: ~5 Minutes

Walking into Harold Sturner’s dental office, his love for sports memorabilia is immediately apparent. The walls are plastered with pieces from his personal collection. It’s Sturner’s 1957-58 Topps Basketball items that really stand out.

Sturner has a true, one-of-a-kind collection of Topps’ first year producing basketball cards. He owns the entire set, with each of the 80 cards being signed by the players.

It’s a star-studded set with 25 rookie cards and 28 Hall of Famers. Boston Celtics legends Bill Russell and Bob Cousy are the two biggest names. A labor of love, the collection took Sturner 20 years to complete.

“That was aggressively buying,” Sturner said. “So many of them are difficult. And I have a couple 1-of-1s, so it can never be reproduced. It’s the one and only and at this point, cannot be completed by anybody else, no matter how much money they have.”

To accompany his autographed cards, Sturner has all but one of the players’ Topps contracts to use a player’s likeness on the cards. Sturner was outbid through an auction for Cousy’s contract.

“Which you can imagine, that’s a pretty big omission for me,” Sturner said. ”I’m really sad about it. That happened 17 years ago. I know who bought it. I still have to reach out and try to cajole him into selling me, trading me, whatever. I want to put the Cousy contract where it belongs, which is with me. I still have that job to do.”

Building a One-of-a-Kind Topps Basketball Collection

Several of Sturner’s autographed cards proved particularly difficult to acquire. Larry Friend of the New York Knicks was one such challenge — a player who played in the 1957-58 NBA season and then quit basketball.

“Who’s going to hunt down Larry Friend for an autograph?” Sturner said. “My card, I don’t have it graded currently, and the reason I don’t have it graded is because PSA doesn’t have any exemplars of his autograph. So, what I have that nobody else has is I have every check and every contract that was signed by every player.”

Sturner has two examples of Friend’s signature on legal documents: his contract and an endorsed check from Topps.

Sturner is always trying looking for player proof cards from the 1957-58 set as well. Topps only manufactured one proof card of each player. They were printed to make sure the color and everything else on the card was all set for production.

“That’s what the whole collection entails, are the transparencies, as many Type 1 photos that I can get that match the card — I probably have seven or eight of those,” Sturner said. “Then the proofs, the checks, the contracts, and the actual signed set.”

He’s also constantly trying to upgrade his autographed cards in the set, striving for playing days signatures, preferably with ballpoint ink. His Bill Russell autographed card is his favorite in the collection.

“His autograph when he was a rookie is different from any other time period, if you know what you’re looking for,” Sturner said. “So, you can tell if you’ve got a rookie era signature, a second or third-year era signature, or ’60s, or whatever. Matching up the period type autograph for some of these players is pretty fun, because it did change over time.”

Another 1957 Topps Basketball Set Rules the PSA Registry

Hoops collector Michael Rakosi completed the 1957-58 Topps Basketball set in PSA grades in the early 2000s. He’s been upgrading his collection ever since.

Rakosi owns 23 cards in the set that are true 1-of-1s in the highest grades that exist. He has the only 10 ever graded in the set, a card of Dick Atha. Out of the 80-card set, Rakosi has 67 cards in the highest grade. His Russell rookie card is one of just three in a PSA 9.

Rakosi’s set has a GPA weighted average of 8.66. That’s the highest-ranked 1957-58 Topps Basketball set in the PSA registry.

“It means a lot to me,” the 78-year-old said. “I think the registry created a competition, but it also created collegiality. A collegiality brought all these people together.”

One of Rakosi’s favorite players in the set is Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, one of the first African American players in the NBA.

“There were no Black players in the ’48 [Bowman] set,” Rakosi explained. “Topps was obviously interested in promoting the Black players. Therefore, Clifton became the number-one [card] in the ’57 set.”

Rakosi joins a group of his fellow vintage basketball collectors at the National Sports Collectors Convention every year. The guys trade amongst themselves and help each other out in obtaining cards they need for their sets.

“I updated just recently with two cards, the Ed Fleming 9 and the Mel Hutchens 9,” said Rakosi, whose latest two cards are the only 9s that exist of those players. “You don’t have to get everything in 8s and 9s. It’s very hard and unbelievably expensive. But it’s something special. It’s something really, really special. And the friends that I’ve made, these people have become focal points of my life.”