Fleming MacKell had a successful NHL career by most metrics, playing 13 seasons for the Bruins and Maple Leafs, earning two All-Star nods and winning a Stanley Cup.
But other than the answer to a trivia question — MacKell held the Bruins record for fastest goal at the beginning of a game (nine seconds) until Brad Marchand broke it in 2016 — he isn’t exactly the most memorable player and certainly doesn’t fit the mold of the type of athlete generally seen as highly collectible.
However, one copy of his 1953 Parkhurst card sold for $18,500 this week on eBay — a higher price than any Jaromir Jagr card sale in history for reference.
The reason has nothing to do with MacKell’s on-ice performance. Instead, it's because of a coincidental rarity born of Canada’s bilingual regulations and production errors.
Parkhurst produced the 1953 set with both English and French biographical language on the card-backs, however, this feature — said to be a result of Canadian regulation — was not applied consistently throughout.
When a printing plate for the English text on the MacKell card broke early on in the production process, the majority of the run was produced without any biographical information in either language, with just a handful featuring French-only bios.
The one that fetched $18,500 via "Best Offer" in an eBay auction this week, which was graded PSA 6, was the rare French bio version.
PSA has graded 109 copies of the MacKell error card (no bio), with the top public sale clocking in at $468. Fewer examples of the non-error version (including the English bio) have been graded by PSA (51), with a top public sale of $2,255.82.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture.