Flea market find: A rare success in the search for Sports Illustrated magazines

Finding vintage newsstand Sports Illustrated magazines has — predictably — become more and more difficult with the popularity of sports magazines as a valuable and gradable collectible.

Unlike baseball cards, Sports Illustrated wasn't inherently collectible. Your mom didn't throw them out — because you did. And while some subscribers kept their issues of SI, those issues often were well-read, well-worn and not really saved as a future collectible. (The subscription issue with a grade of 9.0 or better is becoming a commodity itself, but that's a story for another day.) When I was in college, I displayed SI covers on my dorm room wall — but the covers, not the magazine.

And newsstand issues? Forget it. When I started subscribing to SI in 1976, the subscription issue was 19 cents (with a three-year subscription). The newsstand issue had just been bumped from 75 cents to $1. You only bought those if you were about to catch a flight at the airport, and it was to read, not to save.

So while finding subscription issues is still fairly common, especially on ebay, every single search for a newsstand issue is like looking for a needle in a haystack. And as the hobby grows, we get closer and closer to the day when everybody knows what they have. So finding a stash of newsstand Sports Illustrateds is only going to get tougher and tougher.

But it's not impossible. I had rare luck at — of all places — at an outdoor flea market last year when a vendor had a table of mostly 1990s newsstand issues of SI, including several Michael Jordan covers. They weren't perfect, but for $2 a piece they didn't have to be. I ended up buying 50 issues, including 35 Jordans, plus 10 "white box" subscription issues with the blank labels on the cover. Not bad.

It wasn't quite the kind of bonanza collectors dream of, but just finding any newsstand issues in quantity is a victory these days. Many of the issues are flawed. And in the current market — where even many Jordan issues have to be ultra high-grade to be worth pressing and grading — it's questionable whether these would be sending to CGC ... or PSA.

But just to test it out, I had five issues independently pressed and graded by CGC and the average grade was 8.72. Four of the issues were graded at 9.0 or better. One 7.0 dragged down the average, but overall an encouraging return for a flea market find. (For what it's worth, the average grade of issues straight off the magazine rack that I've had pressed and graded is 9.47 — so a significant drop, unless you eliminate the 7.0.)

More than anything, the experienced kept my hopes up that newsstand SIs do exist. I never go to a flea market specifically to look for them, but I always keep my eyes open. You never know.

Oops!