Basketball Cards : My Mistress

 

Basketball was always an “other” to me.

            Of course, I’d see kids playing basketball in the park. Pick-up games or some solitary child shooting hoops. But it seemed foreign to me. I wasn’t weaned on the basketball like I was baseball. It wasn’t ever-present on a Sunday afternoon in the way the NFL was in my house or any of my friend’s homes. We didn’t have a pro basketball team in Pittsburgh. So, there were no players to route for. No team colors to wear.

            No cards to collect.

            Although, as you’ll see, the card part wasn’t really on me.

            I didn’t really come to basketball until my family moved to the Penn Hills suburb of Pittsburgh in 1982. I was eight-years-old at the point. Not ancient. But getting set in my youthful ways. My catholic grade school had J.V. and varsity basketball teams. Pretty successful ones, coached by my eventual nemesis, RickMiami. We played a lot of basketball in gym. At the very least, Miami had us haul out a bunch of carts with basketballs on them and we played pick-up games until our allotted 45-minutes of exercise was up.

            God, I hated gym class.

            And I wasn’t exactly catching basketball fever.

            It wasn’t until I met Miller that I actually started to get into the sport of basketball. Miller was a basketball fan. He’d grown up on it. I remember he had this…I guess it was an old wooden door or something…that he’d attached a Nerf hoop too. He and I and sometimes his dad; we’d play Nerf basketball in Miller’s living room. We’d pretend to be these NBA players that he knew and I had no honest clue about. Moses Malone. Magic. Isiah. Sometimes I was this guy named Larry Bird. Had to be this team called the Celtics.

            Miller was always Dr. J.

            Now Dr. J…I knew that name. If you had any small conception about the sport of basketball in the early 80s, you at least knew the name of Dr. J. aka Julius Erving. Knew about his slam dunks on the court. How he’d made the move an art form, to be perfected later on by a guy named Michael Jordan.

            In the fall of 1984, I started watching some basketball games with Miller. On weekends, or on weekdays when there wasn’t much in the way of homework (or homework I wasn’t going to bother to do), I’d go down to Miller’s house and we’d sit in his parent’s bedroom and watch basketball on WTBS. On those broadcasts I got to see all of those guys whom I was pretending to be when we played Nerf basketball. There was Magic Johnson. There was Moses Malone. There was Kareem. There was Larry Bird.

            Wait.

            Larry Bird was white?

            But more than all of the others on those WTBS broadcasts, there was DR. J.

            Dr. J on the court. Dr. J for real and not just some guy whom I imagined in my head. Dr. J leading the Philadelphia 76’ers up and down the court. Dr. J dribbling the ball. Dr. J passing the ball. Dr. J dunking over some dude’s head.

            And there this kid named Charles Barkley.

            Charles Barkley was a rookie in 1984. A highly touted one. A big bulky badass who seemed like everyone’s troublesome little brother. I don’t know if it was because the fall of 1984 was the inaugural year for basketball on WTBS or not, but it seemed like the 76’ers were on a lot. And they happened to be Miller’s favorite team at the time. Not only did I get to know Dr. J (and actually get to see him play), I got to see Charles Barkley in his rookie season.

            Sometimes I even got to see this guy play.

            1984.

            Who could forget that year’s summer Olympics.

            It felt like MJ was a legend before he even put on a pro uniform.

            When I look back on that time now, it feels like Miller and I were sitting in that bedroom watching pro-basketball morph from being a struggling, little-watched pro sport, into the multi-billion-dollar juggernaut that it is today. Not only were Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley rookies in 1984, but so were future NBA hall-of-famers John Stockton and Hakeem Olajuwon. They’d be joined in the next five seasons by Joe Dumar, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Chris Mullen, Dennis Rodman, Reggie Miller, Scottie Pippen, and David Robinson.

And those are just the hall-of-famers in the bunch.

            Can I get a Ron Harper anyone?

            That 1984-85 season even culminated in a Lakers-Celtics championship series.

            Add a dash of mass marketing…

            For a kid like me, the logical extension to watching NBA basketball and getting to know the sport, meant that I wanted basketball cards. Surely there had to be basketball cards. There were baseball cards to go along with baseball, and football cards to go along with football. It seemed logical that basketball cards would go with basketball. I mean, Miller had basketball cards. Albeit they were a few years old.

So, we went searching for basketball cards. Cards with Charles Barkley on them. Cards with Jordan. Cards of Dr. J where he wasn’t sporting a huge afro, but looked more like the elder statesman that he was by 1984. Problem was…we couldn’t find them. I always assumed Miller and I were going to the Thrift Drug at the wrong time of the day to get basketball cards. We were there when there was nothing but the football cards we’d already exhausted. Or hockey cards.

Who in the fuck wanted hockey cards?

I told myself right then and there that any time I got ahold of some change, or God-willing a whole dollar, that I’d search the end of the earth for a pack of basketball cards.

The ten-year-old equivalent of the end of the earth.

Basically, the drug store across a dangerous road.

            But not so fast there kid.

            In 1984 there were no basketball cards.

            No basketball cards? Yep. There were no basketball cards that a ten-year-old kid could get his hands on at the local drug store. No basketball cards to buy after our marathon sprints into the American Coin hobby shop. No basketball cards at Hills Department store. Turns out Topps hadn’t produced basketball cards since the 1981-82 series. No other major trading card company had yet taken up the mantle. The cards that Miller had at home were the last basketball cards anyone had made in at least two years.

(Yeah, yeah, I know…the bloody Star Company. They’d started producing small sets in 1983 and, let’s be honest, they were about as easy for us kids to find as the Holy Grail itself.)

So, let’s just say there were NO basketball cards.

            But with the massive growth of the sport that was quickly going to change.

            In 1986, the Fleer company produced it’s first set of basketball cards, and the first major set of basketball cards since 1982. The set was met with an initial shrug, and not many kids bought them. Even in my hunt for basketball cards I don’t remember buying any 1986-87 Fleer cards. I wish I had. The set is damned near priceless today. 

            A Dr. J card will cost you $50. 

            If you want the Michael Jordan rookie card, graded, you better pony-up a good $350,000-$500,000.

            Honestly, I think the 1986-87 Fleer cards are pretty sharp. The red, white and blue border stands out, and the yellow border surrounding the player adds a nice color contrast. Just a nice-looking inaugural set. Of course, by 1986, Fleer was no slouch at making cards. And they were in the midst (1983-1987) of making some of the best baseball cards out there. These were card makers who knew what they were doing.

            Case in point, I give you 1987-88 Fleer basketball.

            Sleek, gray and white border. Colorful team name on the top. Very businesslike…but fun.

            But, of course, 1988-89 Fleer is where the fun really started.

            Love how the team color borders blend into each other. Just compliments the white into gray into black outer border.

            The 1989-90 cards stepped up the color game.

            Someone wanted to channel 1985 Fleer baseball.

            And so on and so on with just some great looking Fleer sets.            

            Looking back on my own collecting, I didn’t get hip to the fact that basketball cards were back until that gray/white bordered set Fleer produced for the 1987-88 season. That was the year I finally got to buy my first packs of basketball cards. I got a Michael Jordan card. A Charles Barkley card. One of Magic. One of Kareem. One of Larry Bird.

            I even pulled a Dr. J card.

            His last.

            But there was a problem.

            While I enjoyed watching those initial basketball games with Miller. And while I wanted basketball cards, knew all of the players, and could probably tell you the number on their jerseys; my enjoyment of the game itself never deepened beyond curiosity. My fandom didn’t ascend as basketball ascended in popularity. And even though I played my share of pick-up game, basketball never became a must-watch sport like baseball and football had been for me. It hung there on the periphery.

            It was probably all of the 3 on 3 Rick Miami made us play in gym.

Truth be told, basketball cards were probably the first cards that I collected just to collect. My conspicuous consumption of trading cards. The last drink of whatever for an addict. Shoot down some packs of Fleer. Buy a box two of Hopps when they came out for the 1989-90 season. 

Feed The Hobby Beast. It’s not like I was going to save the money I was making slinging newspapers and eventually working at the mall. That would’ve been smart.

The only thing that saved me from total financial obliteration, was the fact that I was essentially done collecting cards by the time Topps came back with its brand for the 1992-93 season.

But I still bought a pack or two.        

Now, I look at basketball as a mistress I go back to from time to time. I pay more than a passing glance at the sport. When we were all stuck inside in 2020, I admittedly watched my fair share of the NBA playoffs down in that Florida bubble. And I got just as sentimental for the 1990s as everyone else, watching that Chicago Bulls documentary. The sport is so huge and ubiquitous now, even if I didn’t want to know any players it would be kind of hard.

Even I’m subject to succumbing to the zeitgeist from time to time.

As a collector? Yeah…I’ve dabbled in basketball cards. Mostly singles because of how outrageously expensive basketball cards are to buy in hobby box, blaster box form. At the very last card show I attended before the pandemic, I bought a Hoops Zion Williamson rookie card. 

Picked up my fair share of cheap MJ cards when I finished watching that damned documentary. Got a few of today’s rookies.

But I had to go back to my youth when I thought of a basketball card that I really wanted to add to my collection. Back to 1984 and watching game with Miller. Looking at his collection of older basketball cards. Back to that hoops player who gave me my first thrill.

And the kid in me bought this.

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!

             If you'd like to know more about the career and stats of Julius "Dr. J" Erving you can do so both HERE and HERE.

            NEXT FRIDAY: Yeah...I bought Hockey cards.