Larry Bird Signed 1979 NCAA Championship Elite 8 Ticket PSA 10 GEM MINT POP 3

$4,995.00

1979 NCAA Championship Midwest Regional Ticket Stub

Signed by Larry Bird

DUAL PSA GRADE: Ticket Authentic; Auto 10 Gem Mint

DESCRIPTION: Rare addition to any Larry Bird collection. This is a ticket stub to the Elite 8 Midwest Regional final of the 1979 NCAA basketball championship tournament. This is the game that launched Bird's undefeated Indiana State to the Final Four. His Sycamores would go on, of course, to face Magic Johnson and Michigan State in one of the most famous NCAA title games of all time, losing to the Spartans 75-64 on March 26th in Salt Lake City, Utah.

In this Elite 8 game on March 17th, Bird, playing close to his French Lick, Indiana home in Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, Ohio, posted a 31-point/10-rebound double-double to lead ISU over the Arkansas Razorbacks (featuring future HOFer Sidney Moncrief) by a score of 73-71.

SIGNED by Larry Bird in dark-blue Sharpie. Clean bold autograph, well-centered on the ticket with no smearing or streaking. Gem-mint auto grades are far from a given with PSA, which has proven to be a much tougher grader of signatures than Beckett.

SCARCITY: A much rarer ticket than that of the ISU-MSU championship game. There are only five total tickets from this Elite 8 game in the PSA population report (POP 2 unsigned; POP 3 signed). Compare that to the 43 tickets in the PSA population report of the championship game (POP 24 unsigned; POP 19 signed). Further, this may be the only ticket from this game with a gem-mint grade on a Larry Bird auto. Unfortunately, for the other tickets PSA's pop report does not state the auto grade, itself (only the ticket grade), or even the identity of the signer. This ticket is a POP 2 with this exact AUTH/10 combo, with one other ticket graded a 5 and with an unknown grade on an auto (presumably also Bird).