Upper Deck's premium SP set of 1996-97 closed with twenty rookies under the heading Premier Prospects, numbers 127 through 146. Kobe Bryant is #134.
SP was still a couple of years away from numbering its rookies, so the card is not scarce in the way later SP rookies were. What it has instead is a picture: a posed studio portrait that fills most of the card, with a blue vertical stripe down the left side carrying his name.
SP had not yet begun numbering its rookies. It offered a portrait instead.
He holds an official NBA ball up near his face and looks straight into the camera.
The back holds an action photograph, his senior-year statistics from Lower Merion, and a note on the trade that had brought him from Charlotte to Los Angeles in exchange for Vlade Divac.
The card is known to chip, and on a design this clean, chipping is the first thing the eye finds.
