Gretzky and McNall Buy Wagner Card for $451,000

Wayne Gretzky has signed only one copy of his first hockey card as a King, making it a rare gift to his 2-year-old daughter, Paulina.

“I’ve been told that when I die,” Gretzky said, “it will be worth a lot.”

Undoubtedly so. But Friday, he may have come up with something even better. Gretzky and his boss, King owner Bruce McNall, bought a Honus Wagner baseball card for $451,000, setting a record for any piece of sports memorabilia sold at auction.

The auction took place at Sotheby’s in New York, but the McNall-Gretzky team bid by telephone.

The winning bid was actually $410,000, but a 10% commission must be added.

“From a showpiece perspective, it’s the finest piece in the hobby,” Mark Friedland, an Aspen, Colo., dealer who dropped out of the bidding at $405,000, told the Associated Press.

Neither McNall nor Gretzky was available for comment. At first, they asked that their bid remain anonymous, but later agreed that their names could be released.

McNall, a multimillionaire, began to amass his fortune by collecting coins. Gretzky, of course, collected Cups with the Edmonton Oilers, four Stanley Cups in the 1980s.

But since McNall traded for Gretzky in the summer of 1988, they have become partners in several ventures. They co-own race horses and recently completed a deal to buy the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League.

The card, from about 1910, was a multicolored portrait of Wagner, a Hall of Famer who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates. On the back, it advertised Piedmont cigarettes.

Ironically, Wagner himself disapproved. He was not a smoker and felt his picture on the card with a pack of cigarettes was bad for his image. So, he asked that his card not be circulated and few were.

“The person who got this,” Friedland said, “has the cornerstone of the hobby. . . . To me, this is a historical document or a historical piece of memorabilia as much as it is a baseball card. It’s the best card I’ve ever seen.”

Wagner’s was not the only card to soar in value. A 1952 Mickey Mantle Topps baseball card, expected to sell for between $12,000 and $15,000, went for $49,500.