Lindros was the White Whale of hockey-card collecting when I was a kid. Quite possibly the most hyped hockey prospect of all time, everyone was convinced that the 6-4, 240-pound man-child from London, Ontario, would dominate the NHL like nobody before him. And his early cards were *gold*. Everybody wanted them. These were going to be the 1952 Mickey Mantles of our generation.
As an 11-year-old kid in 1990, there was no way I could afford to buy individual Lindros cards, which back then were insanely expensive (at least to someone earning about $20 a week in allowance). So my only hope was to rip picks. And oh how I did.
This was the Big One -- his official rookie card in the 1990-91 Score set. I tore through so many packs of this stuff looking for this card that the garish red, white and blue hockey-rink design is forever seared in my brain. I don't remember the moment where I actually opened this card, but I'm sure it involved extensive celebrating and retirement planning.
Lindros, who was still playing junior hockey at the time with the Oshawa Generals of the Ontario Hockey League, had signed an exclusive agreement to appear in Score's inaugural hockey set. That meant that Upper Deck, which also released its first hockey cards that year, didn't have its own Lindros rookie. Upper Deck managed to cheat a little bit, by including Lindros on a "Canada's Captains" card from its World Junior Championship subset (which, as a quick aside, remains my favorite card subset of all-time). If memory serves, packs of Upper Deck cards were priced quite a bit higher than the Score and O-Pee-Chee ones and I couldn't really afford to buy too many. So that card never made it into my collection as a kid. But I did manage to find another beauty.
This was the first card in the 1990-91 Ontario Hockey League set produced by 7th Inning Sketch, a now-defunct company that for a few years produced cards from Canada's major junior hockey leagues. I somehow conned someone (probably my parents, although possibly a grandparent or an aunt or uncle) into buying me a box from each of the company's releases that year, which also included sets from the Western Hockey League and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. I remember thinking I'd outsmarted everybody else who was chasing NHL rookie cards by focusing on even earlier cards. It wasn't until a little later that I learned that this wasn't even Lindros' first 7th Inning Sketch card, which might have explained why these boxes were so affordable at the time. Lindros, it turned out, was also in the 7th Inning Sketch's 1989-90 release, which are probably best-remembered (if they are even remembered) for an astonishingly ugly yellow design and impressively poor photo quality. I *will* collect that set someday.
Lastly, I found not one but three of these -- Lindros' first official Upper Deck card, from the Canada Cup subset in the 1991-92 release. I must've had more luck persuading my parents to pay the Upper Deck premium that year. By that point, Lindros had been drafted by the Quebec Nordiques. But he refused to sign and spent the entire 1991-92 season playing for the Canadian National Team until Quebec finally relented and traded him to the Philadelphia Flyers (in a deal that sent Peter Forsberg, among many others, to the Nordiques and laid the foundation for the dominating Colorado Avalanche teams of a few years later). Like a lot of people, I turned on Lindros at the time, dismissing him as a spoiled brat. Twenty years later, I've done a 180 on this, and now think of him as a something of a workers-rights hero. Sort of.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that, back in 1991, I could have sold these three cards for close to $100. Today, I might get $1. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere.
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