🏈 Graded 1989 Kenner Starting Lineup #NNO Jerry Rice Football Card PSA 7 NM — The PSA 7 Near Mint Graded Kenner Starting Lineup Card of San Francisco 49ers Wide Receiver Jerry Rice, From the 1989 Kenner Starting Lineup Series That Paired Plastic Action Figures With Individual Trading Cards and Created One of the Most Beloved Hybrid Collectible Formats of the Late 1980s — a Card That Carries the Full Weight of Rice's Legacy as the Greatest Wide Receiver in NFL History

🏈 The Kenner Starting Lineup product line, launched in 1988, solved a specific problem that the collectibles market had not fully addressed: the combination of the action figure and the trading card in a single package, creating an item that appealed simultaneously to the child who wanted to play with the figure and the collector who understood that the card inside had long-term significance. By 1989, the Starting Lineup series had established itself as a legitimate collectible format, and the football release of that year included among its subjects the player who was already emerging as the standard against which every other wide receiver in professional football would eventually be measured. Jerry Rice's 1989 Kenner Starting Lineup card, graded PSA 7 Near Mint by Professional Sports Authenticator, is the specific document of Rice at the moment when his first Super Bowl championship (Super Bowl XXIII following the 1988 season, where he won MVP with 11 receptions for 215 yards and a touchdown) had just been confirmed and the full scope of what his career would become was beginning to be understood by even the most conservative observers.

🏈 Jerry Lee Rice was born on October 13, 1962, in Crawford, Mississippi — a small town in Oktibbeha County whose football tradition fed into the Mississippi Valley State program, not one of the blue-blood college football powers but a school where Rice developed under head coach Archie Cooley into one of the most statistically accomplished receivers in the history of the college game. His 1984 NFL Draft emergence — selected 16th overall by the 49ers after some teams passed on him due to questions about the level of competition he faced at Valley State — produced immediate results. Rice in Joe Montana's West Coast Offense was one of those combinations where the scheme and the talent interacted at a level that made both the scheme and the talent look better than they might have been separately, but the reality was that Rice's route running, his hands, his yards-after-catch ability, and his willingness to go over the middle in contested situations were genuinely transcendent regardless of the system that surrounded them.

🏈 The records that Rice holds — 1,549 receptions, 22,895 receiving yards, 197 receiving touchdowns — have not been approached since his retirement in 2004, a gap between the first and second place statistics at his position that is wider than at virtually any other in the professional game. Thirteen Pro Bowl selections, three Super Bowl championships, the Super Bowl XXIII MVP. The 1989 Kenner card captures Rice at the beginning of that record-construction era — after the first ring, before the second and third, at the point when the career was established but the full magnitude had not yet accumulated. PSA 7 NM condition means the card grades as Near Mint: minor handling characteristics that keep it from the highest grades but that present as a well-preserved piece of late 1980s football collectible history from the unique Kenner format.

🏈 Jerry Rice. Crawford, Mississippi. Mississippi Valley State Delta Devils. San Francisco 49ers. 1985 NFL Draft. 13x Pro Bowl. 3x Super Bowl Champion. Super Bowl XXIII MVP. Greatest WR in NFL History. 1989 Kenner Starting Lineup. Card #NNO. PSA 7 Near Mint. Hall of Fame Sports Memorabilia. Condition: NOS.