It started out quite simply: We were going to collect every Patrik Elias hockey card in print. This started after my son received several packs, boxes and piles of hockey cards as gifts for Hanukah and his birthday one year, and accelerated after I re-discovered my love of collecting things. Having eBay as a place to browse and discover what’s new certainly put fuel on the fire.
More than 30 years ago, card collecting was pretty simple. Cards came out in wax packs with bubble gum inserts, sometimes a small comic or a coin thrown in as well by the world-famous Topps company. You traded cards with your friends, flipped them before school and during recess, and built up a small pasteboard empire. The third estate of that same kingdom got stuck into the spokes of your bicycle wheels, held in place by clothespins that we deny, to this day, we stole from our mothers’ laundry rooms. There was no after market for cards other than the kids you knew from the neighborhood. Scarcity simply didn’t exist as long as the local 7-11 had Topps boxes strategically located near the cash registers.
Card collecting today is a hobby with a capital “h”. “Hobby,” of course, means it’s a child’s activity in which men spent inordinate sums of money because it’s given an air of seriousness and legitimacy. Those quasi-noble qualities come about from scarcity — in addition to the mass produced cards of nearly every player, today you can get cards with autographs, pieces of jerseys, sticks, gloves, pads, pucks, or nets, or “short printed” cards that are serial numbered. Shoving Richie Hebner into the back of my Schwinn wasn’t a crime because there were another 40 Richie Hebner cards around the corner; when you are holding one sample of a card that has only a few peers, you are a bit more careful. We can’t use the Way Back Machine to create more Honus Wagner baseball cards, but we can compete like crazy for the Patrik Elias Upper Deck Ultimate Artifacts Dual Patches Silver insert cards. Only five of them exist. Each one is worth (in collector terms) about the price of a good steak dinner. In New York City.
There is a market for such things. The economy of sports card collecting is created by the card manufacturers, the leagues, the players’ unions, auction sites, online card dealers, and grading services. Yes, you can have your sports cards graded, like a piece of fine art, and encased in an airtight container for posterity. Ten millenia from now, when a future civilization picks through the detritus of some avid card collector’s home, they’ll decide that these plastic-enshrined pictures of men in uniforms bore major religious significance in our lives.
Which isn’t that far from the truth.
But I digress from giving a mid-season report on the Stern Family Hockey Pasteboard Empire.
We began our informal Patrik Elias fan club in my home office around 2001, putting together a photo history of his career in 3×2 cardboard rectangles with occasional thumbnails of fabric. “How hard could this be,” I naively thought, proposing the collecting goal before adequately researching what I was promising to my 8-year old. Four years of online subscriptions to Beckett’s Hockey Card Monthly, several thousand eBay searches, approximately a dozen shopping sprees in Beckett’s marketplace, and two partial collection buyouts (one from Calgary, one from Finland) later, I have an idea of the degree of difficulty to which I subscribed.
With the most recent releases factored into the population, taking out the singular exceptions (anything that exists as a 1/1, or a single instance, is excluded from our collection due to financial reasons), adding in the interesting European print and some card show short print specials, there are (as of January 1) about 800 Patrik Elias hockey cards. Yes, 800. Of those, a full third are short print, serial numbered to 1,000, 100, 10, or whatever artificial limit creates an artifical pricing market for the wares. We own (as of today) about 680 unique Elias cards, including almost everything from his first 4 years in the NHL. A dozen of the cards have print runs of 10 or less, and one of them I believe to be one of only two discovered from a supposed print run of 10. Just because the manufacturer printed them doesn’t mean they’re in circulation; the cards may still be buried in sealed packs, in sealed boxes, in sealed cartons, in a warehouse somewhere in California.
What’s the point? It develops over time. Each card tells a story. Like the first-ever card of Elias, in which he looks like a fresh-faced teenager — it was printed about the month my son was born. Or the aforementioned extra-rarefied card, containing a corner of the Czech flag from Elias’ World All-Star Jersey in 2001. I have a grainy, blurry picture of my son standing in front of the glass at the Staples Center, Elias in the background, that particular jersey whizzing by during warmups. The card gives us something in specific focus. Or a hard to find rookie card, which was part of the collection I purchased from another Patrik Elias fan in Calgary. He sold me half of his collection to pay for a Stanley Cup finals ticket.
I don’t expect to retire from the net worth of three binders’ worth of hockey cards. But as I relate the stories of my baseball and basketball cards to my son, and together we uncover more of our hectare of glossy print sports memorabilia, I’m conveying storytelling skills. All of our stories have a king of the empire, of course — the little kid (of any age) around whom the cards are scattered.
That’s the point.
Welcome to the newest arena for rants and raves: golf. It’s only appropriate in that it was one of my typically horrendous golf adventures that led to the “snowman” nickname (after carding a series of 8s and picking up my ball, often before even hitting the green). But I like the game; it’s challenging; it doesn’t require inordinate strength or dexterity; and it involves equipment (which requires shopping, comparisons and bragging rights) and swag (balls, towels and headcovers).