Cardboard History History of Cardboard: 1980-1989

The 1980s were a pretty great decade. After all, I was born in the 80s, and I began collecting cards in the 80s, 1988 to be specific. I've never left the hobby, in fact, by 1988, I was already established in three of the 5 main hobbies of my life. (besides cards, I was already collecting car stuff and comic books. Historical objects and plastic models would come later.). Non sports cards from the 1980s are pretty slim, let's hope I can resist the temptation for taking the "easy out" of using both Star Wars sets for 1980 and 1983...spoiler alert, I can.

1980

1980 Topps Empire Strikes Back

1981

1981 K.F. Byrnes Fire Department

1982

1982 Topps E.T.

1983

1983 Topps Perlorian Cats

1984

1984 Topps Supergirl

1985

1985 A & S Racing

1986

1986 K.F. Byrnes Fire Department

1987

1987 Comic Images G.I. Joe

1988

1988 Leesley Bigfoot

1989

1989 Micro Machines Microcards

What a fantastic decade! I should note, from 1988-current, all cards in the project will have been added to my collection the year they were issued, unless otherwise noted. 1985 is the only year that does not have a non-sport card in my collection this decade, although 1988 is limited to only two Alf cards. 1988, of course, the year I began collecting, it all started with the Leesley Bigfoot set. I was a huge fan of monster truck racing at the time- I'm not now- having discovered it and kicked off my lifelong love of auto racing in 1986. Empire Strikes back is my favorite Star Wars movie, so 1980 was never in question. Although the 1983 Return of the Jedi cards were part of the cornerstone of my collection, I could not pass up the Perlorian Cats card, one of my favorite sets ever. Unfortunately I have only one pack's worth. The K.F. Byrnes Fire Department cards came to my collection as freebies at a diecast car show, believe it or not. The Supergirl card set, representing the year I was born, was a gift from Dave & Adam's, and the GI Joe set came as a gift/trade from Jon of A Penny Sleeve for Your Thoughts, I think. (I didn't record where cards came from until 2016). This is the first decade where I have a complete set of any of the cards shown, with 1981, 1984, 1986, 1987 and 1989 all being completed. (I've made significant efforts towards completing the Bigfoot set, but no luck) And just think...with how great the 80s were...the best is yet to come.

The Rodney Dangerfield of Basketball cards

This card gets no respect...no respect at all.

My dislike for 1980-81 Topps is fairly well known. It was a terrible idea and executed very poorly. Instead of giving each player their own, standard sized card, each card is 1/3rd of a standard sized card, perforated with the intent to split them up. They aren't in any sort of order, although there are repeating patterns- the middle card is always a subset card or the two end cards are subsets and the base veteran is in the middle. They don't vary from that at all. There are three subsets- checklists, of which there are 18, Team leaders, and Slam Dunk.

Because of the way Topps did things in that time, both Magic Johnson and Larry Bird appear on cards for the first time in this set. The key card- and the one that will sort of prevent me from completing the set- has Bird on one end, Magic on the other, and Dr. J. in the middle. (Actually 76ers Scoring Leaders, a team card) This is the only card that will prevent me from completing the entire Topps run from 1973-74 through 2008-09, although there were no Topps NBA cards issued between 1982-83 to 1991-92. Although I will never have the original, I do have the reprint from 1996-97 Topps Stars, when the first Topps card of each of the 50 Greatest Players was reproduced in original, Chrome and Refractor form.

Although it's not an exact reproduction, since the perforations are different. They also reprinted it twice, with the tiny reprint number on the back being the only difference. (If I had been in charge, only the actual card would have been reprinted, not the full panel.)

But...since the panels themselves generally don't matter to me...I still have Magic Johnson's Rookie card in my collection.

How, you may ask? Because there are several panels where two of the three cards don't change, but the third does. Because one of those versions is the Dr. J./Magic Johnson combo, but with Jan Van Breda Kolff instead of Larry Bird, I was able to add Magic's RC to my collection.

as you can see, the production quality itself isn't that high, either.

Yet, most people do not consider this to be Magic's RC. Even though, if you were to separate them, you would not be able to tell this #139 apart from the one that was originally stuck to Larry Bird via Dr. J. This card gets no respect...no respect at all.

I didn't separate my cards...I made that mistake with the 1996-97 Collector's Choice mini-cards, an homage to these. However, with the magic of Photoscape, I am actually able to see the cards in numerical order, something that's impossible to do in reality due to the way Topps made them.

There is a version where the Bird card is combined with two other cards, (Knicks Rebounding Leaders and Larry Drew) but I do not have it. Maybe some day.

So, while I won't ever have the Bird/Dr.J./Magic card, I do hope to someday have every number, if not every panel, and I will consider it a complete set when that happens...if that happens.

Surprising myself with what matters to me...and what doesn't

I actually have surprised myself with what matters to me, and what doesn't. When I started the Cardboard History Gallery, I expected that the part that shows how recently something had been updated would matter to me on everything...but it turns out, it doesn't. In actuality, it only matters to me on the sections by set.

For some reason, seeing how long ago I last updated a set's album is one of the most interesting aspects for me. Yet, for each person? I thought it would matter to me, but...it doesn't. Instead, the part for each person that matters to me is seeing where the newly scanned cards slot into that player's history. I suspect this may be because it's taking me so long to create each person's albums...it is going to take me about 2 years to create, whereas I was able to complete the "By Set" section in one month, so it's more of a barometer than an album that I may have created just a day or so before the monthly upload. I will be curious to see if that changes once the albums for each person get older...although I doubt it because the NASCAR albums are now well established and it doesn't matter to me there.

 Here's Larry Nance before the May 2020 Update. I actually pulled him up and uploaded him early specifically for this post- I'm only up to letter K for basketball otherwise.

And here he is after the upload. All the cards with the orange number were scanned and uploaded in the month of May, 2020. The two 1991-92 Skybox cards- base and mini- really illustrate it at this small scale, moving from 6th and 7th to 14th and 15th with the addition of the older cards. Seeing where the new cards slot in, like I said...THAT'S what I find the most interesting. The larger player pages are generally more interesting to me than those with under 10 cards scanned, although I do get a certain sense of joy if I am updating an album that only had one card scanned previously. Why that matters, and adding a third card to an album that has two doesn't "move the needle" the same way, I couldn't tell you. I don't understand the way my head works any more than you do. I went from 29 to 41 cards scanned of Larry Nance during the month of May, and I've already scanned one of his base cards from 1993-94 Hoops in June...so his album will be updated again on or shortly after July 1st. The orange "New" markers last for 6 days.

The fact that I have the website configured to put everything in place is really nice, too. I don't have to really do anything, other than of course create the scans, albums, and upload the pictures. I set the default setting to Title. Fotki, when you first sign up, the default is upload date. But you can change it for each album or the whole website. I went for the whole website, and it saves me from having to do so much more work. Every upload goes into place chronologically or alphabetically automatically...with one caveat. For names with apostrophes in them, it puts them first. I don't know why. So for example it puts O'Neal ahead of Oakley. That's a little disappointing, but overall, if that's the worst thing I'm dealing with in a day, that's OK. The other weird thing is that it doesn't really recognize how numbers work. If you label a card #2, it will put it AFTER card #111. That's why I use the 0 in the numbers. If you want them in number order, you have to put it as #002. If I forget how many cards are in a set and use the wrong code (02 when it should be 002, or 002 when it should be 02) it throws it off, but it's easy enough to fix using the bulk editor. I usually open up an album and just check when I'm labeling scans for sets I'm not sure on just to be sure and try to eliminate the problem, and I have to open each album to update them, but sometimes I still mess up. Nothing that can't be fixed later, but it can get frustrating if it requires  a lot of fixing.

For teams, I discovered two things that matter for me- the total number of images in each album (which tells me how many cards I have of each team- at least scanned) and also, surprisingly, seeing what it takes to get onto the first page of the album. For the NBA, it's pretty much settled out that other than the teams and names that came about later, a card basically has to be from 1992-93 or older to get onto the first page. In hockey it's much more wide open, since I'm still new to the sport really...some of the teams don't even have a second page yet, whereas some of the NBA teams are approaching 30 pages (of 108 scans per page).  I'm working on scanning a big batch of older cards as I type this, ranging in age from 1973-74 through 1994-95, for the NBA, so when I do this month's upload (May 2020) it may push the date required for making page one back even further. Time will tell...and once I take the screencaps to post in this post, you'll be able to tell as well.

After the uploads of what I scanned in May, all teams now need to be from 1991-92 or older, with the exception of the late 80s expansion teams which simply don't have enough cards to change that. Many are now to the point where they need to be from 1990-91 or older, and some teams, especially the long running teams, now need newly scanned cards to be from the 1980s to make it onto page one. That is generally only the case with teams that got cards all the way back to 1957-58 Topps but once I finish scanning the 70s and 80s cards more teams will probably be there as well.

As it turns out, something else I thought would matter to me on all the albums, also, doesn't. With Fotki, one of the options is to have the sample image for the album change with each refresh or each time you navigate to a page. I thought that would be really interesting, but in practicality, it just added more time and more scrolling, and I stopped caring by the second month of doing the uploads for each person. I still like seeing it on the teams, and I like seeing it on the years and subjects for non-sports, but for the people...one of things I looked most forward to creating...really didn't matter to me.

One thing I did NOT anticipate, but turned out to be interesting...on Fotki, the What's New page shows each album in reverse order of updating it...so if I go to the last page, I can see which albums have gone the longest without an update. Since I began with the NBA teams, which are generally the largest albums, that's quite interesting to me. Some of the teams I have more cards waiting to be scanned, but some of them are pretty rare, and I don't have any other cards of them, although they exist. For some, like the Chicago Zephyrs...that's all there is. They have only one card ever made, I have it, end of story...eventually that team will make it's way to the end of the list, and likely will be there forever, unless Panini starts actually covering NBA history...so like I say, forever.

This was the last page when I started the monthly upload.

notice how it's now 1590 pages, which when full show 10 albums each!

It's interesting how it's taken on a life of it's own...and how certain things matter to me on some aspects, and on some not at all, even though the process for creating each and every part is pretty much the same.

I doubt anyone else will really care, but I thought it was interesting enough to get a post out of it.

Basketball Hall of Fame Commemorative Half Dollar

I don't really talk about coin collecting too much...I've been mostly forced out of the hobby due to my severe allergy to the metal nickel. However, it is something I enjoyed immensely when I was able to collect, and to be honest, when I was mostly away from the card hobby in 2008, it's because that was the year I really took up coin collecting, and it got most of my attention.

But, I still keep an eye on what's going on in the hobby. When I saw that the US Mint would be producing a series of Commemorative coins for the Basketball Hall of Fame, I knew I had to have one. It arrived to me on June 22nd, and it is very cool indeed!

I love the way it scanned! The coin is curved- a technology that the US Mint created for the Baseball Hall of Fame commemorative several years ago. Since I scanned it with my scanner lid open, and it was raised up off the tray due to the holder it comes in, it reflected color...in this case, the sunlight coming in my window, giving the scan an orange tinge. The real coin is not colorful at all, it's normal silver/gray of nickel.

It's funny, I'm not a NCLT collector- Non-Circulating Legal Tender- I generally only get them if they are a subject that's really important to me, or if they are too cheap not to pass up. Since I began collecting coins fully in 2008, I've only added three of the commemorative half dollars to my collection, and two of them are curved! (I also got the one for the 50th Anniversary of the moon landing last year.) For those of you who are not coin collectors, NCLT have become a major factor in the coin hobby. They are generally created solely to be sold to collectors, and some of them are very interesting...but it's not my thing as a general rule. They do have a monetary denomination- you could spend this coin for 50 cents at any store, but you'd have to be an idiot to...because it cost $41.95 to add this to my collection!

There are three coins in the series, each available in both basic and Proof versions. I chose the basic clad half dollar version, because it's the one I wanted...it's also the cheapest. The others are the silver dollar, which starts at $64 before tax and shipping, and the gold half eagle, which starts at $634.50....well out of my price range. All three denominations/sizes feature the exact same designs on both sides. (US Mint listing) While I would like to have the gold one since it was made at West Point, a building I've seen in person, there's no way I am going to spend that kind of money on anything that's not a car. The coins come from different mints- the uncirculated half, which I got, is made in Denver. The proof version is made in San Francisco, while both versions of the dollar were made in Philadelphia and both the gold versions at West Point. You can also get a uncirculated San Francisco version from the Kids set, and there may be more versions coming later...including possibly a colorized version. To be a coin completist is a very expensive proposition- it would cost someone $1533 before tax and shipping to get all the versions currently available, and they all have the same design. I'm happy with my one version.

You don't just get the coin though. Each item in the Commemorative series comes with some fancy packaging....

an outer slipcase, with a hardwood pattern.

 The coin itself comes in what looks like leather but is actually patterned paper, and when you open that up there is an info card and the coin itself in it's plastic case, inside a felt form, with a Red, White & Blue ribbon that is glued down at the top, and you use the bottom to pop the coin out- it's a tight fit.

I don't plan to ever take it out of the plastic case it came in, by the way.

The info card, which is folded to fit inside the case, has a textured basketball and info about it. The text in the black banner on the info bar is actually foil, but not mirror foil. It looks really nice in hand.

One thing about the US Commemorative coin program is that each issue helps a cause. Of my $41.95 spent, the Basketball Hall of Fame is going to get $5 of it. They get more from the more expensive coins. I certainly like that idea, and I can't wait to visit the Hall of Fame when the virus is done...it was on the list of places we were going to visit in 2020. It's literally 2 hours (to the minute) away from home so it's not a bad ride at all.

This also ended up being my first coin from 2020. I believe that's the latest in the year I've gotten my first of the year since I began collecting in 2008, but, due to my general state of despair, especially as related to having to essentially give up the hobby, I gave up on keeping records...so I can't be fully sure when I got things or even what I actually have anymore.

Now I have to decide...keep this with my coin collection, or keep it with my NBA card collection?

7 day Card Challenge Day 7: Favorite hobby trend of the year

So, we've reached the end. This was fun! I shouldn't have dragged my feet for so long. and it's nice to be able to bang out quick posts that don't require the long form historical essays I tend to write.

Best hobby trend to emerge this year....I'm going to have to modify it a little. Because 2020 is pretty crummy. (yes, that is meant to rhyme...humor me). We have sports on hiatus, although some are back now, all the events I look forward to cancelled or postponed indefinitely, and the ones that have come back I don't feel are safe enough for someone with my pre-existing health problems, and most importantly, we have people dying all over. Including some people I know. People being threatened or worse just because of their skin color...so yeah, not a great year so far, and it's probably going to get worse...let's just say, the old phrase about people ignoring history are doomed to repeat it, 2020 is your year folks. Of course, the people who are literally doomed, not just figuratively, it's not really going to matter too much, but I digress.

So for year I'm going to go to the year in two of my sports...both the NBA and NHL's year starts in October and goes to June...or whenever, this year. Cards on demand is not a new trend this year, but they have been very expensive and only came one card at a time. What I've chosen is the Topps Now NHL set. Because UD has the exclusive card license, they are stickers, but so what? And you get a whole week's worth, instead of a single card! For what Panini charges for one NBA or NASCAR card, you get 9 hockey stickers (cards). THAT is an awesome trend.

 They capture moments in time....

 give us unusual angles...

 document history (and those awesome chrome helmets!)

 get people onto cards for the first time...

 even get the whole team in on the action.

 Of course, they don't always proof read.

 There's even inserts...

 and parallels!

I discovered these totally by accident. when I saw some get posted to the Trading Card Database. If I had known they existed at the start of the year, I'd have been buying them all year long. This is probably my favorite set of 2019-20, even if I have less than half of it. Next year, I will be ready...and if this season ever gets going again, I will be ready then, too. I hope they keep it up for a long time.

Thanks for reading my entries in the 7 day challenge. I did, as I mentioned before, write them all up in one night. It was a fun diversion but now I have to go back to thinking up my own topics again. Not a problem, as I have a lot to post about, just have to find the motivation. Hopefully you enjoyed reading them as I much as I enjoyed writing them. And thanks to Tim of Cardpocalypse for the inspiration!

7 day Card Challenge Day 6: Favorite Non-Sport

This is the second toughest one after only favorite NBA card. Non-Sports cards are actually one of my favorite aspects of the hobby, but I don't talk about them that often because there's not really a whole lot of modern stuff to collect, and I don't really have access to the older stuff all that much.

It's unfortunate, but that's just the reality of what it is at this moment in time.

So, I'm going to let the Cardboard History Gallery Randomizer work for me again...only this time, I'm not going to pick a favorite season and pick the random card chosen. I'm going to go to the Non-Sports by subject page, and look at the list of all the randomly chosen cards...whichever one I want to write about will get the nod.

Here's a screenshot to show you...can you guess which topic I chose?

But first, you may notice the date stamp if you're paying close attention. Yes, I wrote up all 7 of these in one night, the night of the 10th into the 11th of June. I tend to write in spurts...in the 30 Day Challenge of several years ago, I wrote the first 28 posts one Saturday and literally fell asleep at my computer while working on the next post.

Back to our regularly scheduled topic...

I chose Other Comics. This is a section of my collection I only broke out when I created the listings for the Cardboard History Gallery back in January of this year. Previously, all other comics were mixed into the "everything else" section. I grew up a DC fan- I had my first DC comic read to me at 5 days old and I'm still in the hobby...and while I've never been a big fan of Marvel they have a much better cardboard presence than DC does. But there are other comic companies...lots of other companies.

For a short time I was a big Archie fan. From roughly 1996-2001 I collected over 1000 different Archie comics. In fact, from sometime in the 1990s until 2017 an Archie comic was my oldest comic, although I have not actually seen that book since 2002. Archie is not particularly popular and the comics sell cheaply- or at least they did, back then. In 2001 or so, I got "saturated" to the stories...I had read enough by then that I was starting to recognize that many of the stories being published were pretty much old stores with slightly modernized artwork. I stopped reading them at that time, and I've only read a handful of issues since- maybe 4? Mostly from the Free Comic Book Day events. I do have some nostalgia for them, and am looking forward to getting to them whenever I do, in my long-delayed-but-at-least-finally-started project of scanning the covers and reading every single book in my collection, a project I began in April of 2020.

Archie got a card set in 1993...I remember doing a box of them at one point. The sad thing is...those cards are all lost. I did that box when I was totally immersed in the NBA- nothing mattered except NBA cards. Even NASCAR got ignored. They are somewhere in my storage unit, but who knows where, or if I'll ever see them again...the crazy thing is that I found a gift bag, that apparently was made up of duplicates...(based on what else was in it) and so I was able to add some of the Archie cards to my collection proper. They've been lost so long they are not counted because I didn't fully document my non-sports cards since 2010. (the duplicates I've found are) It's roundabout, but the cards I considered duplicates in the 1990s are now part of my collection proper...and due to the conditions in my storage unit, even if I ever do find them, odds are they may be damaged or worse, so the duplicates may stay in my collection forever.

Kinda crazy, almost like something that hapless Archie would have happen to.

And the question you may be wondering but are too afraid to ask- Betty. There's about zero question that is who I would have chosen if I was Archie.

Henrik hits a hundred...for real this time!

Last month, I celebrated prematurely when I believed that Henrik Lundqvist, my favorite NHL player, had become the first hockey person to hit the 100 card mark in my collection...but when I went to create something for the post, I realized I had miscounted, he was only at 99.

Well, thanks to Shane of Shoebox Legends, he's at the 100 mark for real this time!

Shane has made me the recipient of much of his collection thinning, and I am very grateful for that, even if most of the cards are being held in reserve for the time being. Whenever a box shows up from him, I open a couple of the team bags he uses to absolutely stuff the box, and when a box arrived on June 1st...I can't even say most recent box, because he hit me with another one on the 17th...and on that box on the 1st, I was going through a stack of 2010-11 Score, and I allowed myself to feel some anticipation when I hit a small run of Rangers...knowing I did not have his card from that set.

And now I do!

Card #335 in the set turns out to be card #100 in my collection of him!

Shane, I can't thank you enough. If I am ever able to get the museum started, you will have some sort of honor in it as a major contributor to the Museum!

When I thought I had hit 100 back in May, I did something I said I should do...and I actually did. I looked up which card was #1 in my collection for him. He joined my collection on January 31st, 2015, when a friend sent me over 3000 hockey cards, thinking I would enjoy the sport. (he was sure right!)

Three of his cards joined my collection that day, but this was the first. Unfortunately the scanner I was using at that time didn't do a very good job. I should probably pull it out and rescan it, considering the importance it would take in my collection. It's most noticeable in the stripes over his face, and on the blue especially in the shoulder pads.

What I was trying to make when I discovered I was one short...is this.

Using the PhotoScape combine tool, I made this cool collage of all 100 cards...and they are order of release, too, and numerical order if more than one from a set. I went with image full, so there's a lot of space. If you want to see it bigger, just click on it. it doesn't include the two multi-sport cards, which is what threw me off when I originally counted them...I counted one of them by mistake. You can see all of them on Cardboard History Gallery, as well, except the Score card that was #100. That will be uploaded when I do my June upload on July 1st (or shortly after, depending on how many I can get scanned this month)
I also tried it with 20 cards across:

I can't decide which one I like better, so you get both.

I know I still have a ton more cards I can add over the coming years, even have a couple more waiting to ship at COMC. But this is a pretty big milestone and one I've been looking forward to since last year, when I realized he was getting close. It was a close race, too, as Wayne Gretzky is at 93 cards (still). He will probably cross the 100 card threshold by the end of 2020, and I would not be surprised if Mark Messier gets there as well...but Henrik will always be the first to 100!

Accomplishing something I've been wanting to do since the 1990s (major milestone!)

In the month of May I finally finished a quest I started sometime in the 1990s. That is to have every Nets card from the Star company! For those that don't know, Star had the exclusive NBA license from 1983-84 through 1985-86, three seasons. Each set used the same basic design, just with different colors, and they are not particularly common cards. Unlike most brands, they were not sold in mixed packs, but in bags of each team. They are all great sets, but 1984-85 is the best. Mostly because it's the largest, and includes the most players...but also because it includes the actual true rookie cards of Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley, John Stockton, and the rest of the legendary 1984 draft class. Unlike most brands, Star actually included rookies in the sets, not waiting until the next year for most of the players, which Topps and Fleer did not do. Unfortunately for me, those cards are way expensive. I do have the Jazz set with Stockton, but I will never be able to add the others to my collection. The 1985-86 set is much smaller and isn't as comprehensive. For example, Patrick Ewing has a card, but Karl Malone does not.

I had gotten the 1984-85 and 1985-86 Nets sets sometime in the 1990s.The Nets, luckily or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, didn't have any major superstars that would put any of the three sets out of my price range...but even so, the Star team sets are expensive. I lacked the 1983-84 set. And what's more, there were no teams where I had all three years.

Thanks to Ebay, that has now changed, as I added the 1983-84 Nets set during the month of May!

 Here's the 1983-84 set, which I put together with PhotoScape. This is the rookie card of Buck Williams, who was the biggest name on the Nets for most of the 1980s. Reggie Johnson and Bill Willoughby were both new to my collection! Note the oddity of leaving Michael off of Michael Ray Richardson's card. Both Albert King and Foots Walker are wearing the alternate jersey, which is exceptionally rare on cards.

 The 1984-85 set uses a lighter blue, and is 13 players-most of the teams in the 1984-85 season got sets this large. Albert King again wears the alternate, which, until I got the 1983-84 team set, was one of only three cards in my collection to show it.

 The 1985-86 set is the smallest, at only 8 cards. The '85-86 set is also the rarest of the Star sets, and the least-well represented in my collection.

For good measure, I was also able to add the Lifebuoy promo set! I had previously gotten the Bobby Cattage card at a card show sometime in the 1990s. It's his only NBA card and thus is the key to this set. The Gminski- which mis-spelled his name as Gminsky on the back- was the 94,000th NBA card in my collection. I specifically held off on going through cards from the collection I purchased so that one of the Star Nets would be the milestone, the first time ever that a Star card was the milestone. Star was the first brand ever to make NBA coach cards, although they were never in the main set- always in related sets and promos, of which this falls under the latter.

So, I finished off two major goals here- I completed the Star Nets, and I got a run of all three years of a team! But when I was typing this up, I realized I completed another pretty awesome Milestone...I now have all mainstream Nets base cards issued from when they joined the NBA in 1976 up through 1990! I'm missing the Panini stickers, but I have all the base cards from 1990-91 through 1992-93 as well. Completing two decades' worth of my favorite team (even if one of them is not a full decade) is actually pretty amazing.

I need to find a source for those early Panini stickers....I need pretty much all of them before 1995-96.

There are promos and parallels to chase from that era, but for mainstream base cards...they are complete. That's actually kind of amazing and the ONLY team I can say I've ever completed a decade of.

This turned out to be a bigger milestone than I originally realized!

7 Day Card Challenge Day 5: Favorite other sport card in your collection (NSFW?)

Hmm, another tough one but only third toughest I would say. You would think that naturally I would go with NASCAR or the NHL, but I've touched on both of those already in this challenge. The other "sport" I collect is not a sport so much as a sporting event, or convention, if you will...the Olympics.

When I think of Olympic cards, there really aren't that many choices. The Olympics didn't start getting cards regularly until 2012, although there were other sets available earlier...and several for the 1996 games, held in Atlanta. I was/turned 12 years old in 1996, and while that year began the NBA's dominance, I still got some of the Olympic cards. In fact, that was the first year I really became an Olympic fan. While I had watched previous events, it was the 1996 games where I became a true fan of the event, and I've watched them regularly in every Olympiad ever since.

One card from that 1996 set, I got it when it was new...and considering my age, at that time, it became a favorite.

You may or may not consider it NSFW, just on the off chance that you do I thought I would give a warning.

Yes, they actually gave a card to a giant naked lady statue. Even back then, when I was first starting to notice...such things...I always wondered what the front of the statue looked like. I'm not a "butt man", and even back then I knew I wasn't, but this card still represents...and is, since it's a scan of that very same copy of the card...the very first image of a naked woman I ever saw. Even though she's made of stone, is ~20 feet tall, and not of a real person, that's still pretty important.

Fun fact: the ancient Olympics in ancient Greece, all the athletes were fully nude. And so were the spectators! They'd probably get a lot more viewer ratings today if they were naked...
The Greeks didn't really care about nudity. Nor did the Romans, for that matter. It's really the Catholic church that made that a bad thing. Not that I consider it a bad thing...

It's too bad I'm not doing a "match the card to a song" thing like Nite Owl has popularized. A seven day card challenge, and a giant naked lady statue...that would play perfectly to the Barenaked Ladies' One Week.

7 Day card Challenge Day 4: Favorite Basketball card.

This is the hardest one of all. Really, how can I pick? The NBA makes up about half of my collection. Of the roughly 180,000 cards I have more than 94000 NBA cards...and that total doesn't include the WNBA or college cards. (Using just the basics of those numbers percentagecalculator.net says it's 52% of my collection.) Both numbers are actually higher than that, I'm just using the basic numbers.

So, picking just one...impossible. The gears in my head started turning, how could I post something here? I could go for a easy way out, and post this picture from one of my sortings...

but that's kind of like weaseling out of it, so I won't do that. And besides, I've added a LOT of cards to my collection since this was taken in 2011...about 22 thousand if I am doing the math correctly in my head.

So, what to do? I will let the randomness of the Cardboard History Gallery decide what I will post. Every time you view the list of albums, the sample image changes, so I will go to the NBA listing, and see what card it shows as a sample for my favorite season, which is 1996-97.

A screenshot to show what I used...

and this is the card it chose.

It chose 1996-97 Upper Deck #57, Loy Vaught. A good choice, he was my favorite Clippers player before they traded for Elton Brand in 2001! This is my favorite Upper Deck flagship as well, scans don't do the foil, basketball textured border justice. I like that every card is dated as well!

With 3,782 cards scanned for that season, I really had no idea which card it would choose, but I'm happy with this result.