Before the Rookie: George Mikan

Every installment of this series searches for the cards that came before a player's recognized rookie. With George Mikan, the trail leads straight to a landmark: the 1948 Bowman #69. No verified earlier Mikan card has surfaced — but that does not make his Bowman the first basketball card ever produced.

Basketball players had already appeared in multisport releases — Goudey's Sport Kings among them, a decade and a half earlier. Bowman's achievement was different: the first nationally distributed set devoted to basketball, 72 cards issued in two series of 36, with Mikan anchoring the high-number second series, #37–72. The high numbers are scarcer, reportedly because they spent less time on shelves.

The card deserves its mythology. Collectors call it "the T-206 Honus Wagner of basketball cards," and the top of the population shows why: PSA currently records one Gem Mint 10 and four Mint 9s. In March 2022, one of those 9s sold for $800,000 — a sale eBay confirmed to Sports Collectors Daily, and more than the lone PSA 10 had ever brought.

Look closely and the card tells on itself: Mikan wears #21, not his famous #99 — a detail that dates the source photograph to soon after his 1947 arrival from the Chicago American Gears. The dating is an inference, but the jersey number is there to see, and Heritage has since sold a Type 1 print of that photograph. Stranger still are the surviving printing experiments: gray-front, blank-back, and "Triple Back" versions documented as test material. One Triple Back carries overlapping impressions of Mikan's biography back, an America Salutes the FBI card, and a Hollywood Movie Star card — three Bowman subjects colliding on a single sheet.

Bowman was not his only early collectible. A small black-and-white 1948 Kellogg's Pep portrait pulled from cereal boxes; an oversized 1948-49 Exhibit Sports Champions arcade card with a facsimile autograph, vended from machines at 3⅜"×5⅜"; and a tiny 1948 Topps Magic Photos card, #5-Q, picturing him at DePaul. After that, no mainstream basketball set appeared until 1957-58 Topps — nearly a decade with no major set to follow them.

The man behind the glasses warranted it all. They called him "Mr. Basketball," and the Associated Press sealed it in January 1950, voting him the greatest player of the game's first half-century. Madison Square Garden's marquee said the rest: "George Mikan vs. Knicks." Seven championships across the NBL, BAA, and NBA. Three scoring titles. At DePaul, his shot-blocking alongside Bob Kurland's helped prompt the NCAA's 1944 goaltending ban, and the lane was widened in 1951 largely because of him. A 1959 inaugural-class Hall of Famer.

For collectors, the story is richer than one expensive rookie. The Bowman is the centerpiece; the cereal portrait and the oversized Exhibit show how many forms a first basketball collection could take.

Images: 1948 Bowman #69; 1948 Kellogg's Pep; 1948-49 Exhibit Sports Champions.