My First Football Card–the Second Time Around
November 15th, 2008 | Published in My Collection
I collected cards as a kid for about five years, then they went into a shoebox in the closet, as a lot of cards do. It wasn’t until 1989 that I picked up the hobby again. A friend of mine who sold sports cards in his store gave me a pack of 1989 ProSet cards. They were very cool, I thought, and I was hooked again. I bought a few packs of the ProSet cards, and I started going to card shops and card shows.
At the time, Don Majkowski was doing well with the Packers, so I started speculating on his cards. I must have bought a couple hundred at a dollar each. Unfortunately, I was one Packers quarterback too early: in a short time Majkowski got hurt, and Brett Favre took over. Having been burned by Majkowski, I didn’t buy any Favre cards–and I still couldn’t tell you what the best Brett Favre card is.
But ProSet and Majkowski had gotten me back into the hobby, and in the course of hunting for Majkowski cards, I also worked on the sets I had started 20 years earlier. My shoebox had survived the years in a closet in my parents’ TV room, so I had a good start on some mid-grade sets. I completed the sets, started other vintage sets, upgraded the beat-up cards, on and on. It’s now been nearly another 20 years, and I’m still upgrading. And I still have a couple hundred Don Majkowski rookie cards in a shoebox in the back of a closet.
