But Bo Jackson never broke no pencil! A look at 1988 Topps Football...and Freshman Year of High School

 

By nature, I’m adverse to change.

            I think I’ve mentioned that on here before. If I haven’t it’s still true. That isn’t to say that I can’t accept change. One can’t function in the world if they can’t accept change. Change is inevitable. Change is a fact of life. It is ever-occurring. Either through insult or injury or plain good old happenstance, none of us are the same person we were just yesterday. Yesterday I had no clue that the idea for the modern amusement park is some 900-hundred years old. Today I know that fact.

            I’ve been changed by knowledge.

            By the late summer of 1988 change was happening again. To me. Why me? I liked to ask. I was moving from grade-school into high school. An all-boys, Catholic high school that made us wear ties. The school was run by Christian brothers. I didn’t know much about Christian brothers except that, like priests, they didn’t marry. And that, as stewards of a good and pious Catholic education, they had a hard-on (no Catholic pun intended) for hair-length on both the head and face.

            I should’ve been ready for change.

            That all-boys, Catholic high school would be the fifth school I’d be attending by the winter of my fourteenth year. From kindergarten to third-grade I had attended four different schools. Four years of different kids. Four years of new teachers. New buildings. New cafeteria smells. No wonder I didn’t like change.

But the last school, at least I’d been there for a steady six years. I’d gotten used to the routine. The grind. Mornings watching cartoons. The hard eight in class with classmates I’d learned to tolerate. Afternoons slinging newspapers. Homework. Evening sitcoms. The insomnia that comes with being an anxiety-riddled kid who worried that his parents forgot to lock the front door.

Did I mention that I’m a man of routine?

My anxiety dictates routine.

I get very sore when my routine changes.

High school not only meant a new school but it meant a new location. Gone were the fifteen-minute walks to and from my grade-school. Now, I had to stand in a desolate strip-mall parking lot with Miller and the varsity QB whom everyone calls The Duck. I wait for a school bus to take me and other kids going to single-gendered Catholic high schools into the Oakland-section of the City of Pittsburgh. These would be the first new kids that I’d be confronted with. The first hurdle.

By fourteen I didn’t like meeting new kids. By fourteen I was aware that I was an overweight teenager, prone to moodiness and depression, and sad and helpless to that fact. I didn’t like meeting new people because I felt instantly judged. Being overweight, it’s usually the only thing people ever see. It doesn’t matter what you say or what you do. Okay, it matters to some people. But they’re harder to find when looking for friends. And even friends have used my weight against me in jest or in fits of anger. For most, you’re a fat kid. And that’s that.

I wonder what Bo Jackson was thinking about in the photo on his 1988 rookie football card?

It was clearly taken on-field before a game during his rookie season in the NFL. A rookie season initiated after having already played in 116 games of baseball for the Kansas City Royals, during the 1987 season. I don’t feel that I need to get into the legend of Bo Jackson here. Or the what could’ve been. But for a fourteen-year-old kid obsessed with baseball, and pretty okay with football; I thought the fact that Bo Jackson played both sports, for two professional teams, in their same, respective season was...well…pretty cool.

Way cooler than being an overweight freshman.

Bo looks like he’s getting some instruction in this photo. Looking up. A bit of a squint, like he might be suspect of what’s being said to him. Or maybe he’s caught in the whirlwind. One week he’s playing outfield for the Kansas City Royals. The next he’s barreling through defensive lines out in L.A.

I imagine it’s quite a change going from playing professional baseball to playing professional football. Not at all like changing from wiffle balls and bats to Nerf footballs on the street the second the weather changed, like us kids did. The physicality required of both is tremendous. Same with the mentality behind both sports. Baseball is poetry. Football is war.

            Maybe Bo Jackson was wondering what in the hell he was doing on a football field.

            A rookie anew.

            A freshman, if you will.

            I was wondering what in the hell I was doing on that school bus going to high school. Our stop was the last stop before we went careening into Oakland. And I mean that literally, considering the bus driver we had. Because my bus stop was the last stop, it usually meant that I had no seat to sit in alone. That usually meant I had to bother some poor, sleep-deprived kid, and have them scoot over so my, overweight ass could slide onto the edge of the seat they’d previously had all to themselves.

            Most mornings I was met with sighs of resignation. Most mornings I put on my Walkman and endured. I needed the music to tune out the angry, sleepy kid next to me. I needed the music to tune out the loud, popular, in most cases older, kids in the back of the bus, who maybe were looking for an overweight freshman to mock on a daily basis. And I didn’t want to become that kid. I needed the music to help me blend in and disappear.

            I needed that music to survive.

My favorite albums to listen to back then were New Edition’s Heart Break and Bobby Brown’s Don’t be Cruel. 

They seem kind of peppy for such a weighty task as "survival", huh? But, see, I knew that high school wasn’t going to be it for me. I wasn’t going to be popular. I wasn’t going to get the girl. People can talk all they want about it’s being what’s on the inside that counts. We all know that’s not the case for teenagers. And, yeah, I could’ve changed my situation. Could’ve lost weight. Put myself out there. I wasn’t motivated then. That didn’t happen until I was seventeen and a senior. By then it was too late. I was who I was to those kids. All I had were those albums and daydreams.

And, boy, did I love those albums. Still do. I played N.E. and Bobby out so much that by Christmas of my freshman year, the printing of the song listings on both sides of both tapes had worn out, and I had to guess which side I was putting on.

Sometimes when I put one of the albums on now, I’m still on that bus.

Or I’m in a car because I missed the bus. Crammed into a back seat with Miller and The Duck. I’m in Devon Scaramucci’s car. He’s the linebacker for the varsity football team. And The Duck’s friend. He’s only driving me and Miller to school because The Duck put him up to it. Otherwise, we’d be doing the walk of shame back home. Becky Klein is in the front seat. She’s a sophomore and Devon’s girlfriend. Becky is short with long curly hair and the brightest blue eyes that I’ve ever seen. To say that I had a crush on her would be an understatement.

I’m in Devon Scaramucci’s car.

As a freshman.

Becky turns back to look at me.

At me...the freshman.

And she says, “Do you like Guns?”

As in Guns’n’Roses.

As in W. Axl Rose and Co.

I’d never listened to them up until that point.

I fancied myself an R&B man.

But I shake my head and say yes anyway.

Because it’s Becky Klein's world.

And I just live in it.

Bo Jackson survived the NFL in his rookie season. Actually, he did quite well. Playing in only seven games, starting in five of them, Bo ran for 554-yards on just 81 carries. He even knocked a loudmouth, over-rated jackass flash-in-the-pan on his ass on Monday Night Football.

Bo rushed for, a then-Raiders-record, of 221-yards in that game.

Not too shabby of a “freshman” year.

I wouldn’t say that 1988 Topps Football cards got me through freshman year. Us kids in the neighborhood would’ve been buying and trading those things by late July/early August at the latest. By the start of school my football-card buying budget would’ve been shot, or going toward music cassettes. If I thought about cards on those morning bus rides to Oakland, or at all while daydreaming in class, I was already casting my eye toward the 1989 Topps baseball release which I could often find by December.

The Pirates were in 2^nd place in 1988 after years of bad seasons.

The Pirates were going to be champs in 1989.

They ended up in 5^th place.

But I do like the 1988 Topps Football release. The 396-card set has a pretty crisp design. A bit of a bigger, white border. Then there’s a color border that matches the player/team. The cards have a cool slant design at the bottom, for the players name and position. I like how the helmet logo is slightly off center. The backs of the cards have a nice, icy blue and white design. Just a sharp set overall, even if it lacks more hot rookie cards like Bo’s.

I’m slowly creeping back into football cards as I move further into collecting. Mostly buying older stuff. Singles to be honest. Condition of no real consequence. Steelers from the 1970s and 1980s. I do have the Bo Jackson rookie card though. And I’m about ten-cards away from completing the 1984 Topps set, but only because I found a lot of singles for ten-dollars. And no, the Elway, Marino and Dickerson rookies were not in that lot.

But as with everything in The Hobby these days, football cards are pretty expensive. Expensive to the point where I won’t even consider buying a hobby box of new football cards. $345 for a hobby box of 2021 Donruss? Get bent. And the old stuff in wax box form ain’t cheap either. I’ve seen from-a-sealed-case wax boxes of 1988 Topps football cards going for $200 online. 

Guess people really wants a PSA-10 Vinny Testeverde. 

While it would be fun to open a box and try and put a set together, I can’t really justify that price.

I’ll have to be happy with my Bo for now.

But if only the greedy kid snagging packs in that Thrift Drug back in 1988 knew how much those boxes would be worth years later...

As for freshman year…I got through it. I kept my head down and got my mediocre grades. I made a few new friends, but mostly kept up with the ones that I had in grade school. I didn’t become that fat kid on the bus. The worst that actually happened to me was breaking my pencil tip in an art class. Instead of letting me sharpen it, the psycho art teacher made me leave the room and search the school’s campus for an errant pencil laying on the grass or in a bush. Guess he didn’t like the sound of a pencil sharpener. I actually did find a pencil during that excursion. And I made sure not to sign-up for his art class come my sophomore year.

...oh and my old man fell asleep on the night of my first co-ed dance and didn't pick me or my friends up until almost midnight.

In essence, I survived.

And Bo Jackson never broke no pencil!

But he broke some bats!

Thanks for Reading! Happy Collecting!

If you’d like to learn more about the life and career of Bo Jackson, you can do so HERE and HERE and HERE.

Or if you want to dig a little deeper into the 1988 Topps Football card set you can do so HERE.

NEXT FRIDAY: Ugh...I'm going there. I told my first and only racist joke, got caught and called-out for it....and I lost a friend. That and a look at 1990 baseball cards.