1983-84 Star Company Basketball Cards

With no one producing basketball cards for the 82-83 season, the Star Company stepped forward and began producing colorful sets, which were sold in hobby shops by team in sealed transparent bags. The team bags comprise a "set" of 275 cards that were released in the early months of 1984. The Star Company reported that they had produced 5,000 team sets but that they had to destroy many of the early sets because of quality control problems.

Rookie cards in these team sets include Mark Aquirre, James Worthy, Danny Ainge, Isiah Thomas, Dominique Wilkins, Buck Williams, Tom Chambers, Larry Nance, Clyde Drexler and Terry Cummings.

They also produced non-team sets that are not considered part of the 275 card set, such as the "All-Rookies" and the "All-Stars." I bought the All-Rookies bag, which featured '82-83 All-Rookies Terry Cummings, Dominique Wilkins, James Worthy, Lafayette Lever, Quintin Daily, Rod Higgins, Clark Kellogg, Trent Tucker, and Rob Williams. I made the mistake of sending the 'Nique card to him care of the Atlanta Hawks for an autograph and never got it back (despite the S.A.S.E.).

There was also the first in a yearly set of special team cards for the previous year's champions. In this case, it was the Philadelphia 76ers. There are 25 cards in the set and 10,000 were printed. They were sold at hobby stores and The Spectrum (home of the Sixers).

For years card dealers found the sets nearly impossible to sell, despite containing the rookie cards of some pretty good 'ballers like Charles Barkley, Dominique Wilkins, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, James Worthy, John Stockton, Akeem Olajuwon, and... oh yeah: Michael Jordan. I remember dozens of bags of team sets sitting in a wicker basket on the floor in a local card store (called The Shoe Box and located in Phoenix) priced between $3 and $5 and no one would touch them. I bought the Nuggets and the Suns as they were my favorite teams, but no one then had any idea how hot these cards would become in a few years when they were suddenly seen as the only legitimate basketball cards for the middle part of the Awesome80s. 

One problem in identifying what year the Star Company cards are from is that they changed the indication during the season and sometimes even within a 10 card set! For example, the '82-83 All-Rookie team bag mentioned above features a "Star '84" logo on the front, though it was made for the '83-84 season. The "Last 11 Rookies of the Year" set of 11 cards from '85-'86 shows nine players with a "Star '86" logo and the other two with "Start '85 logos.

Not everyone agrees as to the legitimacy of these cards - they were never released in wax packs so you had to buy them at a hobby shop or in the arena - and some just skip ahead to '86-87 Fleer. Another reason why many avoid these cards is that they were reprinted - allegedly by the founder of the company - in the mid-90s and there is no way to tell them apart (most companies that reprint their product have the integrity to denote the card as a reprint). In fact, the major card grading services won't go near these cards because of this. That is a shame as these were among the most complete sets of basketball cards produced until the 1990s.

1983-84 Star Company at a Glance Back All-Stars Phoenix Suns Atlanta Hawks All-Rookies Detroit Pistons

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