Second Look: 1995 Fleer Ultra Football Gold Medallion
Seven years before the release of Austin Powers’ “Goldmember” film, I found myself a bit like the villain in the movie. I became fascinated with gold. But, instead of turning everything else to gold including myself, I found gold in a 1995 product that appropriately brought me all that I needed.
1995 Fleer Ultra Football have a parallel called Gold Medallion. Falling one per pack, they’re easy pulls but eye-appealing ones at that. The fronts are completely covered with a gold foil background with a full color player in the forefront. This helps differentiate it from the base card.
I can’t quite explain what my fascination was with this golden parallel, but it just made me smile. Not with golden teeth, though that would have been cool.
There are 550 cards in the Gold Medallion set split between two series with the second series called Fleer Ultra Extra. The first series consisted of veterans and rookies while the second series focused on veterans and multiple subsets including Rookies, Extra Stars, Roll Out and Extra Effort. All have the same odds of pulling as the first series.
The checklist has Hall Of Famers such as Emmitt Smith, Brett Favre, Troy Aikman, Steve Young, Jerry Rice, Barry Sanders to name a few. There are also the key rookies like Kerry Collins, Kordell Stewart, Steve McNair, Tony Boselli, Joey Galloway, Ki-Jana Carter, Terrell Davis and Warren Sap among others. On top of this, there were also names you didn’t find on every checklist like Michael Bankston, Joe Cain, Simon Fletcher and Mike Jones. This is great for those team collectors. We rarely have checklists like this anymore.
I slowly began chasing the set back then and recently started it back up again in 2023. With cards being inserted one per pack you would think the chase would be easier, especially almost 30 years later. But it’s not. The deep checklist is making the chase a bit of a challenge but I’m halfway through completion.
As I continue the chase, I get excited to add new ones to the binder where they look even better. But it did take an entire binder just to store them properly. I’m hoping to finish this project soon to and call myself the real Goldmember.
