The Beginning...

Today I've got a special post to share with you, one that is long overdue.  In fact, looking back on it, this probably should have been the very first post on my blog all the way back at the beginning of 2008.  It's the story of how I got started in this hobby more than 25 years ago now...

My two younger brothers and I began playing ice hockey in early grade school after I brought home a pamphlet that the local league had left at our school, begging and pleading for a chance to get involved.  I still remember my first time out on the ice, at 6 in the morning in an unheated rink with barely half of the equipment I needed.  I was miserable, I'm pretty sure I cried like a baby, and I recall my Dad offering me $5 to stick it out and give it a shot.  Thanks in large part to that bribe, I did stick with it.  Before long I was having the time of my life, and I ended up basically playing year round straight through until my college years.

Well, anyone that has played ice hockey knows that it's a sacrifice not just for the kid who is playing, but for the entire family.  Leagues being run on a shoestring budget often take whatever ice time they can get, which meant many late night and early morning practices, entire weekends sacrificed traveling all over the place for tournaments, thousands of dollars and countless hours of time invested.

As a way to further develop our interest in the sport, my dad began surprising my brothers and I with packs of 1989-90 Topps (and sometimes O-Pee-Chee) hockey cards.  It seems like at least once or twice a week (my memory is getting foggy as the decades roll by), he would arrive home from work with a small brown bag of packs that he picked up at a card shop on his commute home.  Some extra three-ring binders from work became our method of storage, and he even printed out a custom cover for each of them.  To this day, I still have mine:

Keep in mind, this was 1990, so at the time this cover was pretty damn high tech!  My brothers and I would sit at the kitchen table and open our packs, excited for each new card.  It was a lot of fun slotting them into our binders, swapping dupes, and learning all we could about these players who were so foreign to us at the time.

I would diligently sort my cards out by team in my binder, with the team sticker first if I was lucky enough to have it.  If you click this image of my Bruins page for a larger view you'll see that my OCD was setting in from an early age, as I sorted all the players on each team alphabetically by last name!  This resulted in a lot of shuffling and reshuffling of the cards as each pack was opened, but that was half the fun.

This was a time before 24x7 sports coverage like we have these days, so these cards were in many cases the only exposure I had to many of these players.  All these strange names and faces, it was like a sneak peek into some alternate hockey universe, and I was hooked.

Here's a look at my Joe Sakic rookie card, which at the time I was convinced would finance my retirement decades later.  As it turned out these didn't exactly hold the value that many predicted, but that's fine by me.  Whether these are worth thousands of dollars, or mere pennies each, I'd never remove them at this point or dismantle this childhood gem in any way.

Of course, my favorite cards were the ones representing my beloved Hartford Whalers.  I was fortunate enough to see many of these guys in action when my parents would load us all up in our van and make the trek out to Hartford once or twice a year.  I have fond memories of those trips as well, and I remember thinking at the time as a sheltered kid who grew up in the woods that Hartford must have been one of the biggest cities in the entire world!

As time wore on and I became more heavily involved in both the sport and in collecting, I ended up with a couple of other small binders to house my "star cards".  Here's a peek at a couple of pages my my Gretzky section.  The 18 cards that are visible here are probably worth no more than a dollar or two these days, but to me they're priceless.

One of the first things I did when I got back into collecting as an adult was to pick up full sets of the '89-90 Topps and O-Pee-Chee releases.  They were cheap and provided a fun trip down memory lane, though nothing could ever replace my originals.  Well, recently I started to wonder if there was anything else I could pick up from these sets that were such a foundation to my collecting.  I recently found a new addition that I am beyond pleased with:

As I mentioned, we knew little to nothing about most of the players when we were collecting this first set of cards early on, but one thing I remember clearly was our knowledge that Al MacInnis possessed one hell of a slapshot!  I can clearly remember pretending that I was Al as I wound up for a slapshot playing "street hockey" in the patch of dirt on the side of our house.

I was beyond excited to find this hard-signed '89-90 O-Pee-Chee card of the HOFer on eBay recently, and was even more excited to bring it home as the sole bidder for less than $15.

This was actually a buyback autograph inserted into 2007-08 O-Pee-Chee, and to me it's the perfect accent piece to accompany my very first hockey cards.

Here's the proof card that came with it in the pack, guaranteeing that the autograph is authentic.

I can't believe I never thought to look for something like this sooner, but I'll certainly be keeping my eyes peeled going forward for any other autos from this set.

So there you have it, the beginnings of my sports card collection from over 25 years ago now.  I'm forever grateful to both my parents, and especially my dad, for all of the time, money and patience they spent over the years encouraging my brothers and I to stay involved in sports.  It's something that's retained my interest to this very day, and I'm sure always will.

Do you remember what your very first cards were?  If so, I'd love to hear about it in the comments...