1962 Topps #17 Mike Ditka RC — Zero PSA 10s in 1,273, and Only Four Nines in Sixty-Four Years
PSA has put 1,448 copies of Mike Ditka's rookie card in holders. Not one of them is a Gem Mint 10, and the entire top of the population is four Mint 9s.
The 1961 Rookie of the Year got card #17 in the 1962 Topps set — a black-bordered design that has spent sixty-four years failing to come back clean. It is one of the most-submitted vintage football cards there is, and its ceiling is four cards.
PSA Population Report
| PSA Grade | Population |
|---|---|
| PSA 10 | 0 |
| PSA 9 | 4 |
| PSA 8 | 54 |
| Total Graded (All Grades) | 1,273 |
* Population data as of September 8, 2026. PSA population counts are dynamic and increase as more cards are submitted for grading.
Read the Whole Curve
The four rows above are the standard summary, and on this card they compress the interesting part into a single number. Here is where the 1,273 straight grades actually sit.
The peak is the PSA 5, with 282 copies — and the PSA 4 is right behind it at 272. Grades 3 through 6 hold 938 of the 1,273, very nearly three in four. Above that the ladder empties fast: 193 sevens, 54 eights, four nines, no tens. Fifty-eight copies of this card — 4.6% — have graded PSA 8 or better in the entire history of the hobby's largest grading company.
The bottom of the curve is unusual too. Beyond the numeric grades sit 12 copies graded Authentic, meaning PSA identified them as genuine and assigned no grade at all. Vintage cards collect a few of those; a dozen on one card is a lot, and it is the same story the low grades tell — this card has been handled.
The Qualifiers, and What They Do to the Top
Beyond the 1,273 straight grades are 76 half-grades and 99 qualified slabs, bringing the card to 1,448 PSA holders in all. The qualified copies cluster where you would expect on a card like this: 26 at the 7 and 15 at the 8, against 193 and 54 straight grades at those levels.
At the very top, the numbers get small enough to state plainly. There are four straight PSA 9s and two qualified ones. Six copies of this card have ever graded a 9 in any form, and a third of them carry a flag on the label.
The Scan Is One of the Four
The image PSA publishes for this card on its own CardFacts page is not a stock photograph. It is a slab: 1962 TOPPS · MIKE DITKA · #17 · MINT 9, cert 02029545 — one of the four highest-graded copies known.
What it shows is a card designed to fail. A thick black border frames the whole front, with a black-and-white action photograph inset at the upper left, a colour portrait of Ditka filling the right, and a yellow nameplate at the bottom left reading MIKE DITKA · CHICAGO BEARS · END. Black borders show every chip, every touch of white at a corner, every fractional miscut, and 1962 Topps put one on all 176 cards.
The likeliest reading of the curve above is that the border is doing most of the work — that is this blog's inference from the shape of the population, not a finding from PSA, which publishes counts and not causes.
The Player
Ditka was the No. 1 draft pick of the Chicago Bears in 1961, out of Pittsburgh, where he had been a consensus All-American the year before. He moved straight into the starting lineup and caught 56 passes for 1,076 yards and 12 touchdowns as a rookie — a Rookie of the Year season, and, at the time, an almost unrecognisable stat line for a tight end.
The Hall of Fame's account is blunt about why that mattered: the position "once was viewed primarily as an assignment for a tough, talented blocker," and Ditka was a superior blocker who also became one of the first tight ends to catch a large number of passes. In 1964 he caught 75, a season record for the position that stood until 1980 and the arrival of the 16-game schedule.
He was All-NFL four straight seasons from 1961 through 1964 and a Pro Bowl choice after each of his first five. He did not miss a start in 84 games as a Bear; the streak reached 86 before an injury with Philadelphia ended it in 1967. Two years later he moved to Dallas, and in the Cowboys' first championship season he caught the final touchdown of their 24-3 win over Miami in Super Bowl VI. He finished with 427 receptions for 5,812 yards and 43 touchdowns across twelve seasons, and went into Canton with the Class of 1988.
The Verdict
This is a card the hobby has graded to death and never solved. Nearly 1,500 copies in holders, three quarters of them between a 3 and a 6, and a summit of four Mint 9s and nothing above them. The rookie card of the man who changed what a tight end was is, sixty-four years on, still a black-bordered card from 1962.
