10%
of cards off the line that could ever have graded gem mint, per a former plant manager
Start with the thing almost nobody knows.
O-Pee-Chee was a confectionery company. They made chewing gum in London, Ontario. They did not print trading cards.
The printing was done by Lawson & Jones, a commercial printing house also in London. There is a nice piece of corroboration for this: Derek Smith, who captained the Buffalo Sabres, has described his father working at the printing company and bringing home uncut sheets carrying his son's card. As it happened, Smith was printed on the same sheet as Gretzky.
So a professional printer produced the sheets. And then they went to the gum company to be cut into cards.
The most specific account of the cutting comes from Ken McAvoy, described as a former factory plant manager in 1980, and reported by collectors who have dug into the production history.
Three details, and each one shows up in the cards.
The blade was dull. Not occasionally, as a standard condition.
The cutting rig was set up in the basement of the gum company. Not in a print works with proper equipment.
And there was no cutting clamp. A clamp holds a stack of sheets rigid so the cut goes through them square. Without one the stack shifts as the blade descends.
His estimate of the result is the number worth remembering: about ten per cent of what came off the line could ever have qualified as gem mint. His explanation was simply that quality was not the priority at the time.
There is a long-running argument about the mechanism and we are not going to pretend it is settled.
The widely repeated version is that O-Pee-Chee cut their sheets with a wire rather than a blade, and that the wire dulled progressively through the run, producing edges that look torn rather than cut.
Others insist that is a myth and describe seven rotating blades with sheets fed underneath, slicing a sheet into strips, with the blades going blunt over time.
McAvoy's account says a dull blade.
The three versions disagree on the tool and agree completely on the outcome: a cutting edge that was not sharp, working on stacked sheets, in a facility that was not built for it. That is the part that reaches the card in your hand.
Four characteristics, all of them factory conditions rather than handling damage.
Fibrous edges. The cut tears the stock rather than slicing it, leaving a fuzzy edge that catches the light. PSA's own account of the set lists rough edges alongside centering problems and border chipping as the things that hamper the appearance of many cards in it.
Centering that will not sit still. 60/40 is common and worse exists.
Chipped blue borders. A dark saturated border on stock that flakes. Any contact with the edge shows immediately, which is the same mechanism that makes black-bordered sets so hard to grade.
And a yellow print mark on Gretzky's left shoulder. Every card in the print run carries it. It is a printing artefact, not a defect on your copy.
Here is the turn that makes this worth knowing rather than merely interesting.
Counterfeiters have a great deal of trouble reproducing that edge. Modern cutting equipment produces clean cuts, and faking a dull-blade tear convincingly across all four sides has proved close to impossible. People who examine fakes for a living report never having seen one with stock and cuts that genuinely resemble an authentic O-Pee-Chee.
So the rough edge is doing two contradictory things at once. It is suppressing the grade, and it is evidence the card is real.
Which leads to the warning. A 1979 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky with suspiciously clean edges deserves a second look. There are innocent explanations, including cards cut early in a run and cards taken from an uncut sheet more recently. But clean edges are the exception on this issue, and trimming to improve centering or remove edge chips is the commonest alteration there is.
We have written separately about what PSA means when it adds a qualifier, which is the other half of this problem.
The numbers follow directly from the factory.
More than ten thousand examples have been graded. Two are PSA 10. Fewer than a hundred are PSA 9.
Put McAvoy's estimate against that. If roughly one card in ten could theoretically have graded gem mint on the day it was cut, then forty-five years of handling, storage, rubber bands and shoeboxes had to get through that ten per cent before a card reached a grader.
Two did.
And collectors who have examined the two PSA 10s closely note that they do not obviously look like tens. They are tens because of what they are being compared against.
The same photograph, the same card number, the same season. Printed by Topps in the United States, cut with proper equipment.
Topps copies from 1979 are not perfect, but they do not have the fibrous edge, and their centering is better. That is the whole physical difference between the two cards, and it is most of the reason the O-Pee-Chee commands its premium.
The Canadian card is harder to find clean because a sweet factory cut it with a blunt blade in a basement. Scarcity produced by incompetence.
Do not read a rough edge as damage. It is original to the card and it is present on high-grade copies too.
Do read a clean edge as a question. Not an accusation, but a reason to want certification from a grader who measures dimensions.
And judge the centering against the set, not against modern cards. A 60/40 O-Pee-Chee from 1979 is an ordinary card. A perfectly centred one is a genuine survivor of a process that was not trying to produce it.
Sources. Ken McAvoy's account of the dull blade, the basement setup, the absent cutting clamp and the ten per cent estimate, along with O-Pee-Chee being a confectionery company using Lawson & Jones for printing and the Derek Smith uncut-sheet story, are as reported by Traffickerz. Rough edges, centering problems and blue border chipping as characteristic faults of the set come from PSA's Set Registry entry. The wire-cutting account and the objection that it was seven rotating blades appear in Beckett's guide to spotting fakes and its comments, and in Collectors Universe forum discussion, which also describes roughly a hundred sheets being stacked. The yellow shoulder mark, the difficulty of faking the cut, and 60/40 centering being common come from Cardboard Connection, Beckett and Sports Collectors Daily. Population figures of two PSA 10s and fewer than a hundred PSA 9s from over ten thousand graded are as published and change. Checked on 14 September 2026.