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Imagine paying $515 to get in on some card pack breaks at a local sports card shop and having that investment return more than $8 million.
That’s how it happened for South Carolina machine shop owner Jason Williams, 50. He, like many sports fans and collectors, reportedly started participating in online live sales of unopened packs of cards, which were then broken open on the stream so that everyone watching could see what was pulled during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Today, Williams ought to be glad he stuck with it, as his Cooper Flagg 1-of-1 Topps Chrome Update NBA Debut Patch Autograph card, sold at auction for just over $8,040,000. The auction closed early Friday morning. Williams was identified as the lucky SOB who pulled the card last month. The pull came on a live stream hosted by Rhody Breakers, a collecting streamer associated with Baseball Cards of Rhode Island, a local shop eight states away from Williams’ living room.
“They slid that card over and I just slid to the floor crying,” Williams told ESPN at the time. “… It took me about five seconds to realize what I was looking at on that screen.”
In the run-up to the auction, most of the speculation was that the card may fetch “over $1,000,000.” It’s hard to predict what the market will do in a one-of-one situation like this, but a similar Paul Skenes 1-of-1 rookie autograph patch card sold for just over $1.1 million in 2025.
According to The Athletic, the sale of just over $8,040,000 makes this Flagg rookie card the fifth-most expensive trading card purchase of all time, topping a $7.25 million sale of the famed Honus Wagner 1909 Sweet Caporal T206 in 2022. That Wagner card has traditionally been viewed as the “Holy Grail” of card collecting through the years.
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The 1-of-1 card features the NBA Debut patch Flagg wore during his first NBA game, along with the Mavericks star’s autograph. The rookie patch was removed from Flagg’s jersey following his Oct. 22, 2025 debut against the San Antonio Spurs and was later embedded into the Topps Chrome Update card.
Flagg scored just 10 points in that game before going on to win NBA Rookie…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/1-1-cooper-flagg-rookie-174215963.html
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Publish date : 2026-09-25 17:42:00
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