In 2020, a Kansas City man traded for 100 Patrick Mahomes rookie cards; the forgotten haul was later valued at around $7,000, helping his family through a crisis

A box of 100 Patrick Mahomes rookie cards once looked like little more than a mystery find at a thrift store. In 2020, Trevor Hayes ended up with the cards after his brother made a blind trade involving Pokémon cards. Neither knew what they had at first.Once collectors identified the 2017 cards, Hayes realised the unusual haul could bring in real money. He eventually made around $7,000 from most of the cards and used part of it to help his family during one of its hardest periods. How did a box nobody understood end up containing 100 Patrick Mahomes rookie cards?Thrift stores were already part of Hayes' routine long before the Mahomes cards appeared. He told FOX 4 that he visited them about four times a week, searching through items that could easily be dismissed as somebody else's unwanted belongings. Pokémon cards, Magic: The Gathering cards, electronics, paintings and antique toys were among the things he and his brother looked for.The brothers were familiar with collecting, but the Mahomes cards presented a different problem. There were 100 of them, all connected to the quarterback's 2017 rookie season, yet their exact identity and value were not immediately obvious.Mahomes had been selected No. 10 overall by the Chiefs in the 2017 NFL Draft, but his name alone was not enough for the brothers to understand what sat inside the box. The cards were from a less familiar Panini release, later identified as 2017 Panini Rated Rookie Personal Edition cards.Instead of discovering their value straight away, the box changed hands again.Hayes and his brother made a blind trade for a box of Pokémon cards. At the time, they did not have enough information to know they were giving up something collectors would eventually chase.Once Hayes had the cards, he knew he needed somebody familiar with sports cards to take a closer look.“I thought it was awesome,” Hayes told FOX 4. “I have to get these checked out and have somebody look at them.”That search eventually brought the cards to collectors. Hayes listed one card on Facebook Marketplace, and collectors recognised the unusual release. Sports Collectors Daily reported that a Kansas City card dealer bought 50 cards for $4,000, while collector Justinn Patton purchased another 20 for $2,500. Hayes also sold individual cards for around $200.FOX 4 reported that Hayes received around $7,000 for most of the unsigned cards and kept several for himself. Why did collectors find the story behind the 100 Patrick Mahomes cards so unusual?The cards were connected to Mahomes' first NFL season, but they were not simply a regular retail product that somebody had purchased and stored away.Sports Collectors Daily reported that the cards were linked to the 2017 NFLPA Rookie Premiere, an event involving 37 rookies that year. Panini produced personal-edition cards connected to the event, with some intended for players to sign.Collector Justinn Patton researched the release and contacted Panini while trying to understand the cards' history. According to Patton, Panini told him that 100 unsigned cards for each player were supposed to be destroyed after the event.That made the survival of the Mahomes batch particularly curious. Somehow, the cards avoided destruction and eventually reached a Goodwill store before making their way through the Hayes brothers' Pokémon-card trade.There was no public explanation for exactly how the cards left the event or who eventually donated them to Goodwill. Sports Collectors Daily reported that Panini did not provide an explanation for what happened to them.The box also contained an NFLPA watch and several bobbleheads, adding more memorabilia to a collection that initially looked like an ordinary thrift-store find.Hayes had another personal connection to Mahomes memorabilia. Before finding the 100 cards, his mother had bought him what appeared to be a signed Mahomes card. The family later discovered that the autograph was fake.For Hayes, that disappointment had been significant because the card meant something to him.“My heart hurt for him because I know how much that meant to him,” his mother, Marla Mosby, told FOX 4.The new collection gave Hayes another chance to own something connected to Mahomes' early NFL career. He eventually kept a few cards, with one hope still attached to them: getting Mahomes himself to sign one.“Keep it going. I’m loving everything that I see you’re doing on the field,” Hayes said in a message directed toward the Chiefs quarterback. “Maybe one day I can get one of these signed by you and cherish it forever.”How did the unexpected Patrick Mahomes money help Trevor Hayes' family?The cards became valuable to collectors, but their most important destination was not another sports-card collection.The money arrived during a difficult chapter for Hayes' family. Mosby had worked as a nurse before contracting West Nile Virus, after which she had to leave her job. She was also living with fibromyalgia.The family's financial situation had become severe enough that they had lost their home and cars.“It’s just been really rough on everybody,” Mosby said. “We lost our cars. We lost our house. We lost everything.”Hayes suddenly had thousands of dollars that could help his family. He put a down payment on a car for his mother and bought a used car for himself.“I was so grateful for the opportunity to make some money to help out the family and help myself out because it’s been a rough couple of months,” Hayes said.Mosby had spent much of her life being the person other people depended on, which made accepting help from her children an emotional experience.“I’ve always been the one to help everyone else my whole life. I’ve always been the one to give, and to be in a place to accept things from my kids is difficult,” she said. “It makes me proud. I feel humbled. I’m grateful.”Hayes also explained what he wanted to do with the opportunity the cards had given him.“It feels awesome,” he said. “That’s my whole thing. If I can help out my close friends and family, that’s all I really need in life.”There is an unusual irony in the way the story came together. The cards had been difficult for the brothers to identify, were traded away in exchange for Pokémon cards and had already passed through a Goodwill store without anyone apparently recognising their connection to Mahomes' rookie year.Their exact journey before Hayes found them remains unclear. Their value became much easier to understand once collectors recognised the release.A thrift-store box had travelled through Goodwill, a blind Pokémon-card trade and an uncertain period in which nobody knew exactly what it contained. Once collectors recognised the cards, the forgotten haul became around $7,000 in sales and gave Hayes a way to help his family.Among the few cards he kept, one unfinished part of the story remained: the hope that Patrick Mahomes might one day put his signature on one of them.Get the latest Sports News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.