Why I Own An Unremarkable 1990 Mark Jackson Basketball Card | Defector

I bought the card in May of 2022. It was one of my many low-dollar purchases on eBay, made during one of my manic buying phrases; those tend to happen when I’m in a particularly good or particularly bad mood. “Stop buying things,” my wife will say when, say, a UK demo cassette of the song “Your Woman” by White Town arrives at the house. And I will reply, “But I’m in one of my manic buying phases when I am in a particularly good or particularly bad mood!” Eventually I toss the item in a box and forget about it, and then I try to remember to work on things in therapy and maybe ask for a medication tweak.

Anyway, this particular purchase was her fault for once. She was the one who told me about the card. Jan usually experiences sports vicariously through me, but she is a baseball fan. Our third date featured a long discussion about Bobby Estalella and whether he was the worst player named in the Mitchell Report. (Feel free to discuss in the comments.) So she knows a bit about sports cards. And one of the reasons we love each other so much is that she, like me, has a brain full of esoteric knowledge that could never, ever be useful in any scenario. Sometimes she tells me something wonderful and I just kiss her.

One such scenario was in May 2022, when she told me about the Mark Jackson 1990-91 NBA Hoops basketball card. I did not know the fun(?) fact about this otherwise common piece of cardboard. The front of the card is an image of Jackson on the Madison Square Garden court; he’s throwing an entry pass. Behind Jackson, watching from the front row, are the convicted murderers Lyle and Erik Menendez.

The card was first discovered by Stephen Zerance back in 2018. The brothers ended up in the background because they went on a shopping spree after the Aug. 20 slayings of their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez, buying multiple luxury items and cars; Lyle put a $300,000 deposit on a $500,000 restaurant in Princeton, N.J. The pair later said it was an attempt to deal with the guilt over killing their parents. They’d testified at their trials that the killings stemmed from years of sexual abuse from Jose, which Kitty knew about and did nothing to stop. At some point between the killings and their March 1990 arrests, the brothers purchased a pair of courtside seats to a New York Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, and ended up making this strange shared cameo on a basketball card.

Though Zerance appears to have been the first to have discover the gruesome fact about the card back in August 2018, it didn’t make waves until a tweet about it a few months on in late December. “I’m just glad it went viral, really,” Zerance, who has a Substack of his poetry, told Slam in 2018. “It’s a cool little tidbit.” Jackson even commented on the card, though he didn’t have much to say about it: “I always knew about it, unfortunately, because of the history behind it. I heard about it whenever it picked up steam. People recognized what it was all about and who was in the background. I’m well aware of it.”

The photo would’ve been taken sometime between Nov. 4, 1989 and late February. (Lyle was arrested on March 8; Erik turned himself in three days later.) So it could have been one of about 25 games. Jackson’s wearing a knee pad, but he appears to have worn it all season. I couldn’t get any closer than that to determining when the photo was taken.

I was in one of those phases—let’s say it was a good mood—so I went to eBay. I decided I wanted to make sure I got a real Mark Jackson card. “Card grading has become its own subindustry to the baseball card business,” Dave Jamieson writes in his wonderful book Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became An American Obsession, “and it is now so ingrained in the hobby that it’s virtually impossible to sell a card of any value without first having it slabbed by a reputable grader.” I wasn’t looking to make a big splash, but I’d never owned a graded card before. I decided to look for one.

I settled on one from SGC Grading. It wasn’t the top grader on the market, which I suppose kept the price down a little. I paid $16.12 for an 8.5/10 Mark Jackson Hoops #205 from the 1990-91 set. It arrived a week or so later, and I showed it to Jan. We didn’t have a fight conversation about it. She was happy with the deal I got, at least.

She should be even happier now. I put it into my little collection registry at PSA, the largest grading firm, and they estimate its value at $24 + $7.41. I am an investing wiz! And I might even make more on this card than it’s currently worth.

Well, maybe. The Menendez Brothers are in the news again for a few reasons. A few years ago, old stories of the trial and the brothers’ defense went viral on TikTok, with many users expressing sympathy for the pair. This helped cause a rush on Menendez content. There is a new drama series called Monsters, created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, running on Netflix. There’s also a new documentary, with extensive jailhouse interviews of the pair, on the streamer. There is maybe actually too much Menendez brothers content out there at the moment: “11 Menendez Brothers Documentaries to Watch After Monsters,” a recent headline on The Hollywood Reporter reads.

And who wouldn’t want to own a piece of the Menendez brothers, especially if it’s graded 8.5/10 and stuck in a lucite slab? Lots of sleazeballs like me, I guess! Plenty of news outlets have reported on a boom in prices for the Menendez brothers card, though the initial jump really happened when the otherwise 10-cent card boomed to a couple bucks in the initial wake of the front-row reveal. Right now, the cards are really just selling. A quick scan of eBay by yours truly shows the cards going for maybe a little uptick in prices, but not much. PSA’s database shows similar small jumps.

There’s a ceiling on all this, mostly because of the incredible glut of cards that companies like NBA Hoops were producing at that time. There are just too many of the card—it is too common a common card—for it to become all that valuable. PSA estimates that there are 7,200 of the card available just in their database alone. But the uptick in sales seems quite real. Some are rare, or at least rare-ish: Goldin is auctioning off a version of the card signed by Mark Jackson, and that one is currently at $110. But a quick search of eBay shows 15 sales today. Yesterday I counted 121. There were 101 on Oct. 9. I counted 53 back on Sept. 22. Back on Aug. 27, just 21 of the cards sold, but Monsters hadn’t hit Netflix then.

Even if prices aren’t really going up a ton, it may be time to make an arbitrage play: Sell now, and buy a new version when prices fall a little whenever Menendez Brothers Fever dies down. I might make a buck or two. One problem, of course: I have no idea where the card went. It’s somewhere in a box in the basement. I guess my wife and I will be having another conversation tonight.