The Box in the Closet

A Steve Yzerman rookie card
1984-85 O-Pee-Chee

A few months ago, in the course of my real-life job as a writer for a magazine in Florida, I got the chance to meet Steve Yzerman, the legendary former Detroit Red Wings captain who is now the general manager of the Tampa Bay Lightning. This was sort of a Big Deal, at least for one of us. Steve Yzerman was basically my hero when I was a kid. Like every other middle-schooler who ever lived, I was sure I was an under-appreciated genius. So I must’ve identified with a guy who played in the shadows of Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. At one point, in the early ‘90s, I’m pretty sure I had every mainstream Steve Yzerman hockey card. (This seemed more impressive at the time.) Twenty years later, I still had an Yzerman jersey hanging in my closet and, somehow, a commemorative plate with his autograph hanging on my wall.

I managed to make it through the meeting without fainting (though not without asking for a picture). When I got home, I went digging through a closet to fish out a small box of hockey and baseball cards my mother had saved from my childhood. Inside, I found about two dozen Yzerman cards. But I also found Eric Lindros and Ken Griffey Jr. and Teemu Selanne and Jose Canseco. All of them were safely ensconced in plastic top loaders that were beginning to yellow with age. And most of them (not the Griffey, turns out!) were basically worthless, as I shrewdly managed to time the peak of my collecting with the height of what, I’ve since come to learn, is now known as the “Junk Wax Era.” But, man, was it ever a nostalgic blast flipping through those cards again.

And that’s how it began. Since re-opening that box, I’ve slid back into collecting sports cards for the first time since I was about 13 years old. Four months ago, I had no idea what a parallel was. Now, I make sure to find out if an auto is hard-signed instead of stickered before placing a bid on eBay. But one of the things I’ve enjoyed the most in my second run at a collecting sports cards has been reading blogs about the hobby – sites like Shoebox Legends or Sportscards from the Dollar Store, where the enthusiasm for the hobby is downright infectious.  So infectious that I’ve decided to try blogging myself.

I have no idea how long this will turn out. But my plan is to use it as an outlet to write about some of the cards I like, and why I like ‘em. Expect to see a lot of Steve Yzerman around here, but also Ron Hextall and Kirk McLean and the Guelph Storm and the Toronto Blue Jays and who knows what else.