2002 Bowman Chrome Gold Refractor Tom Brady /50 #99 PSA 9 MINT

During the 2001 regular season, Tom Brady only threw for more than 300 yards once, but that was good enough to lift the Patriots into the postseason. That is where he outdueled the Raiders through the snow in Foxborough, dispatched the Steelers for the AFC championship, and shocked the Rams in the Super Bowl. Not too bad for a quarterback who did not open the season expecting to be the team’s starter, and after that performance, the Patriots committed to him instead of Drew Bledsoe, setting in motion a run of success like the NFL had never seen. And with that, Brady found himself entrenched deep in the trading card market, appearing in nearly every set that was not dedicated to rookies. When the Gold Refractor was introduced to Bowman Chrome in 1999, it started as a /25 parallel and was seeded once every 283 packs. After skipping a year in 2000, production increased to /99 sets in 2001 and the seeding ratio was 1:38. In 2002, the print run was lowered to /50, and that is where it settled until the brand was discontinued (the only exception being in 2005 when the Gold Refractors were 1/1s). Because Brady did not regularly play as a rookie in 2000, he did not have a card in the 2001 Bowman Chrome set, so the first Bowman Chrome Gold Refractor of Brady was produced in 2002 when the production run stabilized, and a PSA 9 example of the groundbreaking card, which could be found once every 60 packs, is available in this month’s Premier Auction. His new position as New England’s starter helped him anchor the veteran checklist for the 2002 set—and he would do so again for eight more iterations of the product, nearly one for every Super Bowl he eventually brought to the Northeast.