COLLECTOR’S SHOWCASE INTERNATIONAL TREASURE By Dan Rafael
won the lineal/WBC flyweight title by knocking out Chatchai Sasakul in December 1998. The Pacquiao rookie card can be found regularly on eBay, but get ready to pay about $1,000 for an ungraded one and a lot more for one slabbed and in nice shape. Years ago, before they really shot up in price, I bought a complete issue of the magazine for about $200 with the mint panel intact inside. I cannot bring myself to remove it and cut the cards apart. But the set is more than just about Pacquiao. It includes numerous legends, such as Ali, Frazier, Leonard, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Henry Armstrong, Jack Johnson, Archie Moore, Jose Napoles, Emile Griffith, Masahiko “Fighting” Harada, Bob Foster, Carlos Monzon, Jersey Joe Walcott, Carlos Zarate, Sanchez, Gomez, Benitez and many more. Key rookies besides Pacquiao include Ricardo Lopez (who shares the first panel in the set with Ali), Bernard Hopkins, Felix Trinidad, Shane Mosley, Erik Morales and Kostya Tszyu (albeit with his first name misspelled as Costya). There are also non-rookie cards of many top champions and stars of the time who went on to become legends and Hall of Famers, such as Lennox Lewis, Oscar De La Hoya, Johnny Tapia, Terry Norris, Prince Naseem Hamed, Mark “Too Sharp” Johnson and Azumah Nelson. 2007 Rafo Fighters Borci Bosnia and Herzegovina isn’t exactly a boxing hotbed, but it is home to a tremendously interesting set of 324 stickers that are somewhat obscure but can be found on eBay, with top stars often going for $100 or more. I am quite pleased I found the ones I wanted many years ago for pretty cheap! Borci, by the way,
means “fighters” in Bosnian, at least according to Google Translate. The first 162 stickers are MMA fighters; 163-243 are pro wrestlers (including the likes of Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair and The Rock); 244-279 are the boxers; 280-315 are bodybuilders; and the last nine stickers include Bruce Lee and fictional tough guys such as Rocky Balboa, Rambo, Batman, Superman and the Terminator.
Y ear in and year football, basketball and hockey sets being released along with a variety of secondary sets. Boxing fans have never had it that good or even close. There have been some widely released boxing sets through the out, card collectors look forward to mainstream baseball, years, but they have been extremely sporadic. Industry leader Topps, for example, put out the iconic Ringside set in 1951 and did not release another all-boxing collection until 74 years later, when it issued the 2024-branded Chrome Boxing set in September 2025. There were four fairly mainstream sets in the 1990s: Kayo, which was wildly overproduced, All World Boxing, Ringlords and Ringside (no relation to the Topps set). There were also several Brown’s Boxing sets, sold in the 1980s until the early 2000s, which came only as complete sets – no packs – and had very low print runs. If those did not satisfy the collector in you, there were sets produced outside of the U.S. to pursue, some containing great cards or stickers. Today, the stars from those sets do not come cheap. There are three sets in particular I am a huge fan of that are filled with star power – the must-have 1981 Panini Sports Superstars sticker set from Italy, the 1996-1999 set from the Japanese magazine World Boxing, and the 2007 Rafo Fighters Borci sticker set from (seriously) the Southeast European country of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
included, it is absolutely loaded. The album has two facing pages dedicated to pasting the boxing stickers into their assigned rectangles. Whoever was in charge of fighter selection deserves a championship belt for the outstanding job they did. For basketball collectors, the 1986 Fleer set is the one to own. It is jam-packed with big rookie cards featuring Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone and numerous other superstars. The 1981 Panini sticker set is like that for boxing. It contains rookies of some
1996-1999 World Boxing In the United States, we have Ring Magazine, but in Japan, the go-to pugilistic publication has been World Boxing, which is home to one of the greatest boxing card sets ever. From 1996 to 1999, each monthly issue contained a panel of four cards that was printed on nice stock and meant to be cut apart. Overall, the set consists of 45 panels and 180 cards. On the front, the name of the fighter and his division are printed in English along with Japanese, and the backs are entirely in Japanese. But even if you can’t read Japanese, it is a star-studded set that includes many rookies and follows a theme – each panel typically featured two active Japanese boxers, a retired legend and one active non- Japanese boxer. The most important card in the set, without question, is the rookie of legendary eight-division champion, Hall of Famer and former pound-for- pound king Manny Pacquiao. His card appeared in the February 1999 issue, which was published shortly after he
of the most legendary fighters of all time in Hall of Famers Sugar
Ray Leonard, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, Larry Holmes, Salvador Sanchez, Wilfredo Gomez, Wilfred Benitez, Matthew Saad Muhammad and Hilario Zapata. It also contains the second appearance of Roberto Duran, whose rookie is in the 1973 Panini set. The other fighters included were world champions of the day: Maurice Hope, Cornelius Boza-Edwards, Ayub Kalule, Jim Watt and Alan Minter. The stickers are not particularly tough to find unless they are in high grade, and the big names in high grade also come with a big price. Panini stickers, regardless of the year, are extremely condition-sensitive because of the very thin paper they were printed on.
As far as the boxers go, the set has many top stars of the 2000s, which is a meaningful era to me because those were my relative early days on the beat and I covered most of those fighters. Over the years, I have bought the boxers I consider the biggest stars in the set: Tyson, Holyfield, Lewis, Roy Jones, Julio Cesar Chavez, Wladimir Klitschko, Vitali Klitschko, Hopkins, Joe Calzaghe, Hamed, De La Hoya and my all-time favorite fighter, Arturo Gatti, whose name was botched and spelled Gutti. The Ring copy editors are much better than the folks who handled this set in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
1981 Panini Sports Superstars Panini produced multi-sport sticker sets from the 1960s through the 1980s, with the stickers meant to be pasted into an album bought separately. Those sets always contained a smattering of top boxing stars. Muhammad Ali (disrespectfully listed as Cassius Clay on all of his stickers), Joe Frazier, the George Foreman rookie, Mike Tyson rookie, Evander Holyfield and many other legends were featured. The 1981 Sports Superstars complete set boasts 360 stickers of athletes from many sports, with 15 being boxers. Though not many boxers were
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