What Time Is It? Not Now, I'm Bowling

Travel and deadlines and work and death being what they are, it took me a little longer than expected to get back to writing about bowling cards as promised, but a promise is a promise and miles to go before I sleep and all that, so I’m back, better late than never, with some spewage on cards from the 1990 Collect-A-Card Kingpins bowling-card set.

#48 Ron Williams: Ever since I was a kid I’ve had a thing about cards of players wearing watches. Maybe it stems from the 1970 Topps Matt Snell card, which very clearly shows the bruising fullback in full pads sporting an Accutron. To me this means one of two things: watches were even more of a fashion accessory then than they are now, or Matt Snell is not really preparing to strap on his helmet and plow over Jim Cheyunski. To me, this discovery, when paired with the 1966 Philly Gum card showing Jumbo Jim Parker clearly wearing his Colts championship ring, was a there-is-no-Easter-bunny moment. I could buy the '64 Philly cards showing the Cleveland Browns posed in an impound lot; this was Cleveland in the ‘60s, after all. But I could never wrap my brain around the idea that these weren’t gameday, gametime, just-before-the-battle-mother shots. And if watches and rings were okay, couldn’t Joe Namath have left on his full-length mink?

Here’s the other thing about watches: Assuming you’re an athlete and not a manager (and even then I’m vaguely suspicious), why the hell do you need to know what time it is? You’re playing a freaking game. You’re done when you’re done. What reason would Ron Williams have for looking at his watch between balls in the sixth frame and saying, “Uh-oh. Gotta wrap this up. My Fantastic Sam’s appointment is at 4:30” – unless he’s trying to throw the match?

Tennis players, especially female tennis players, are the worst for this. They’re notorious for wearing watches. Why? You ever see Anna Kournikova look at her watch? I realize there’s an I-only-have-so-many-ways-that-I-can-show-I-make-more-playing-this-point-than-you-make-in-a-year thing going on, but if that’s the case, wear platinum panties or something. But ditch the watch.

On the other hand, the fireplace with the faux brickwork and the doubly faux oak paneling behind Williams are sweet. Kinda gives you the impression that he’s bowling in his living room. And he wouldn’t need to know what the hell time it is there, either.

#65 Glenn Allison: I can cut Allison slack for wearing a watch, because if I don’t cut him slack he’s going to wipe the alley with me and use the leftovers for chitlins. It’s obvious Allison spent a lot of time in his younger years bowling with sailors, on the docks, in Calcutta, and at Corregidor, and maybe on the Bataan Death March. Who cares if he was only 14 in 1944? If anyone could pull off the elusive teenage-bowling-phenom-war-hero-stevedore troika, it’s Allison.

#99 Charlie Tapp: Aviator glasses and science-teacher mustache aside, the troubling thing about Tapp is his haveily branded prosthetic forearm. “PW”? We are looking at the very real possibility that Charlie Tapp is using someone else’s prosthetic forearm, and who would want to do that? It has to be incredibly slimy and disgusting inside, especially since it looks like it‘s made out of half-inch steerhide. I know what my son’s hockey gloves are like after a couple of practices, and they’re not a pleasant place to be unless you’re a bacillus. The other question that follows naturally from the first is: If Charlie Tapp is wearing PW’s prosthetic forearm, how does PW feel about it? Does PW walk around with empty space between his elbow and his fingers, like one of those semi-invisible Disney characters from the ‘60s when the invisibility starts to wear off? Charlie Tapp, you provide more questions than answers.

#17 Bob Handley: What I want to know is: What happened to pinky rings? Watch any movie from the 1940s, and I guarantee that if you look closely enough one of the male leads is wearing a pinky ring. Cary Grant wore a pinky ring in His Girl Friday. So did Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Fred Astaire wore a pinky ring while he danced with Ginger Rogers. I’m betting James Cagney and George Raft didn’t leave the house without their pinky rings. Going through my dad’s stuff, he has a lion’s-head ring that could only have been a pinky ring, and he was a Kiwanian, for crying out loud. Today the only people who wear pinky rings run art galleries and wear black turtlenecks in August.

Bob Handley is wearing a pinky ring in the 1990 Kingpins set, which tells me that pinky rings went out of fashion in 1962. But if the sign behind him really says, “Beer 30 cents after 9 a.m.,” maybe the pinky ring is the right call after all.

#53 Mark Williams: The last time I saw this hair and smoldering look it was on Jennifer Grey.

#62 Billy Walden: Bowlers live on that special intersection between athletes and mere performers, like golfers or snowmobile-flippers or birthday-cake jugglers or slackline mimes or anyone who’s appeared on TLC. There’s no question in my mind which side of the intersection Billy Walden is standing on.

#96 Les Schissler: Speaking of which, the Kingpins set chronicles the transition of bowling from a sport inhabited by bowlers – that is to say, keglers, that is to say, guys for whom the beer frame was every frame, until their personal frame became a beer frame – to a sport inhabited by young, hairy people with prosthetic forearms who bowl because American Idol hasn’t been invented yet. There is no question the roots of Les Schissler’s raising run deep, down to Moonlight Madness leagues in basement alleys with two lanes and pin boys and lanes grooved like Booker T. and the MG’s. Les Schissler did not set out to find fame through bowling; Les Schissler set out to bowl, and fame found him because of how he bowled. It’s the old nature-versus-nurture argument: I have no question there are now bowl-with-the-pros camps, where prospective scholarship bowlers can learn the finer points of the back-pocket hook with class-2A PBA qualifiers. I also have no question that those camps would have taken Les Schissler and messed with his stride, delivery and follow-through until he looked like every other tour bowler, only without the results. However Les Schissler bowled – and I have no idea how that is – he bowled that way because he figured out that was the best way for him to bowl, and he made a damn good living as a result.[1] Is it in any way better to be a clone of someone else’s idea of perfect form, and mediocre?

Of course, this reminds me of mucilage. I was watching an episode of That Girl the other day (don't worry; it's not a habit), and Marlo Thomas was using mucilage to paste items in a scrapbook. It struck me sometime later that there was a rather severe dividing line with mucilage. There was a time when mucilage was in general circulation and there was a time when mucilage was not in general circulation, but there was not a time when mucilage was on the outs or falling from favor. There were just Mucilage Days followed by No-Mucilage Days.

The same with bowling. There were Bowlers-As-Bowlers Days and there were Bowlers-As-Psuedo-Athletes Days, but outside of this set there were not days when Mark Williams and Les Schissler sat around the fire like brothers.

This makes bowling different from other sports, and not really better.

#58 David Husted: Speaking of pseudo-athletes, let’s look at the arguments pro and con in response to the question, “Is David Husted a pseudo-athlete?”

First, the pro:

1)     He’s under 50.

2)     Several NFL quarterbacks, NASCAR drivers, and PGA golfers sported similar hair.[2]

3)     There may be actual muscles under his shirt.

Now the con:

1)     No athlete, pseudo or otherwise, not even Rocco Mediate, ever performed in a pink shirt with “La Mode” embroidered on the chest.

2)     I’m fairly certain he just dropped his beer after watching the last play of Super Bowl XXV.

3)     His belt matches his pants.

4)     He’s wearing a watch.

I’m guessing the cons carry the day, but I wonder: If Husted isn’t a pseudo-athlete, what is he? A pseudo-pseudo-athlete? A roller-discoer? Or Les Schissler’s wingman?

Important decisions like these take time. Tune in next time for the results.

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[1] The fact that he stole his glove from Mr. Fantastic probably didn’t hurt, either.

[2] Though it was more commonly found on Democratic presidential candidates.

The Card-Carrying Accountant

I had meant to write another column about bowling cards – and I will – but then Tom Mortenson, the editor of Sports Collectors Digest when it was at its best, emailed with the news that Richard McWilliam, the former head of Upper Deck, had died.

I don’t find it unusual that I never met Richard McWilliam, though we worked in the same small business and our paths nearly crossed a score of times. I was not the sort of person meant to hang out with Richard McWilliam, nor was he the sort of person destined to hang out with me. What’s more amazing is that we never talked. He was the only card-company chief I never spoke with, and I can’t remember the invitation ever having been extended. Currying favor with the hobby press (or later, sports-collectibles consultants) was not in Richard McWilliam’s self-penned job description.

The five or six executives that ran the business in those days each had, to paraphrase the Ol’ Duke, an image to perform: Topps’ Sy Berger was the oracle of the old days, always willing to discuss the way things were with members of the legitimate (read: non-hobby) press; Fleer’s Jeff Massien was the banty rooster looking to pick a fight; Frank Steele, from Donruss, was pure puritan, swift to chide and slow to bless, missing only the buckle on the hat; Pinnacle’s Dan Shedrick was the carnival barker, and his successor, Jerry Meyer, was the honey-voiced Baptist preacher; Pro Set’s Lud Denny was the schoolboy in disgrace, Angus Young with a gland disorder; SkyBox’s Frank O’Connell was the nicest guy on earth; and Richard McWilliam was the International Man of Mystery, with some Steve Jobs thrown in.

From roughly 1991 through 1994 McWilliam called the shots in the sports-collectibles business. He set the bar for everyone else to jump over, and dared them to jump as high as he did. Upper Deck brought perceived scarcity, dealer allocations, color correction, high-gloss finishes, tamper-proof packaging, anti-counterfeiting holograms, Photoshopping, autographed chase, rookie-driven base sets, well-compensated celebrity spokespeople, and certified memorabilia to trading cards, and if I missed a few in there or if Richard McWilliam wasn’t entirely responsible, you get the idea. Richard McWilliam was at the helm when Upper Deck fundamentally reshaped modern sports collectibles.

In doing so, McWilliam and Upper Deck helped turn trading cards into a destination for investors, speculators, and their money. Sports collectibles were a backwater before he arrived, and a backwater after he abandoned the business. In between the money flowed into sports collectibles like the product was bootleg whiskey. Because of Upper Deck, the Bass Brothers got into the trading-card business, and marketing executives at Procter & Gamble signed on, and Lorillard Tobacco bought in, and Wall Street bankers called up at all hours looking for case counts and sell-through data. It wasn't necessarily a better world, but the shoes were nicer.

None of which should obscure the fact that Richard McWilliam was a benevolent despot minus the benevolence. He fired talented people on whims and brought in less talented people to replace them. He allowed backdoor deals to be cut and turned his head to reports of cases of high-demand products vanishing from warehouses. A former employee called him "tortured," but McWilliam spread it around.

The more successful Upper Deck became the more Richard McWilliam divorced himself from the elements that made it so. He was an accountant, and he ran Upper Deck the way most accountants who rise to the top run their companies: with their eyeshades on, sleeves rolled up, nose-deep in the books, with scant attention paid to changes in the landscape. Like Apple, Upper Deck set its own course, regardless of the prevailing winds. Unlike Apple, Upper Deck went its own way because of belief in the bottom line, not trust in a vision.

Personally, Richard McWilliam stiffed my partner and me for $2.1 million. We signed a contract stipulating that we would receive a 10 percent finders’ fee for any investment capital we brought to Upper Deck. We convinced Bandai America to toss $21 million Upper Deck's way, but we never got our contracted cut. Richard McWilliam figured we wouldn’t be able to afford to sue him for the money, and he was right. That doesn’t make him any smarter than he was, or any better or worse a businessman or a person. And it doesn’t matter anymore, for about a dozen reasons.

"I have known reformers and rogues, and in general much preferred the rogues," Red Smith wrote in his obituary for boxing promoter Jim Norris. Richard McWilliam was a rogue, albeit a silent one. Usually I side with Smith, but I claim an exception in this case, on personal and financial grounds.


Two days after I heard about Richard McWilliam's passing I learned that Krause Publications was killing Comics Buyer's Guide after 42 years.

Any proper tribute to CBG is a tribute to Don and Maggie Thompson, the paper's founders and editors. Don was an old newspaper salt from Cleveland; Maggie was as quick-witted and silver-tongued as any Billy Wilder heroine. Together they created a hobby magazine that stood any test as a paper. It was tight, entertaining, comprehensive, and journalistically sound as a dollar -- qualities you may not associate with the printed press any more because so few papers measure up.

Don and Maggie were finicky about things like the proper usages of "comic" and "comics," the punctuation of the paper's title, and the stylebook from A through P, and they covered the comic-book beat like no one has and no one ever will, because no one will ever again give it the hard-news treatment the way Don and Maggie did.

CBG at its best pinpointed where comics were and where they had been, celebrated them as art and literature, but never lost sight of the fact that comic books are inherently disposable, trashy fun. Think it's easy keeping all those balls in the air? Try it sometime.

As an interested third party, I found CBG too comic-y on occasion, but there was always something worth reading, a Peter David rant or a Mark Martin cartoon or one of Don and Maggie's wonderful up-front columns.

I had the privilege of sitting one desk over from Don and Maggie for several years, and it was never less than a delight. Sometimes I was sitting next to the Bickersons; open offices never meant much to Don and Maggie when there was a disagreement of substance. Sometimes I was sitting next to Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Some days I was sitting next to Woodward and Bernstein. There were lessons to be learned every day in how to be a good journalist, and a good partner in a marriage. I picked up what I could, and kick myself for not picking up more.

Don died too young from a variety of journalists' maladies. They buried him on a hill in Iola, Wis. It was late spring, a warm wind scattered the scent from the purple lilacs that lined the cemetery, and I cried. If memory serves, Maggie was back at work in a day or two, cranking out another dead-solid issue that included a perfectly modulated tribute to her mentor, co-editor, life partner, and friend.

I haven't yet cried for CBG, and it's too soon to smell the lilacs on the springtime breeze, but here's my tribute. It's not as well-crafted as something Maggie might have turned out, but it means well. CBG was a great paper, and I'll miss it dearly.

In those late, grand days of the hobby press, when CBG was just Don and Maggie and personal appearances forced them both out of town, sometimes they would let me proof the pages for CBG before it went to press. As a journalist, I've never been more honored.

Splits and Strikes and Spares -- and Hair!

It struck me yesterday that I have not written nearly enough about bowling cards.

I apologize. I apologize to the world’s bowling-card collectors, all 18 of you. I apologize to the world’s bowlers, who have had to stand idly by, their feet together, their hands over the dryer, while Woo Daves and Brad Lohaus and Steve Emtman and Clyde Booth and Olden Manynice hogged the spotlight, and whose bowling hands have been reduced to slabs of Jack Link’s as a result. I apologize to the myriad sponsors of these bowlers, and their suppliers of hair-care products, and their wives and children, and Chris Schenkel, even if he is dead, and golly, I hope I didn’t drive him to it.

In this season of redemption, I hope to make it up to you, starting now.

Ahem. Cards showing bowlers had been made sporadically before 1990, but were never given the full mani-pedi until that year, when Collect-A-Card issued its 100-card Kingpins set.

To say that Collect-A-Card spared no expense with its Kingpins set is wrong. One of the reasons Collect-A-Card was fairly successful over its decade-long lifespan was that it knew when and where to spare the expense. However, Collect-A-Card left no bowler uncommemorated, not even the AAAA bowlers, the C.J. Nitkowskis and Al Shirleys of the bowling world, who in the early 1990s were barely a toestep down that yellow-brick road that would take them to full athlete status – meaning intercollegiate feeder programs, Finding Bigfoot-level drama, and a primetime gig on ESPN.

This set was actually a revelation for many of us in the business at that time, whose knowledge of bowlers started with Earl Anthony and passed through Earl Anthony before returning to Earl Anthony, with perhaps a pitstop at Dick Weber. Even tennis, whose pool of recognizable talent is shallower than the lyrics on a Rhianna album, provided more star power than bowling.

That shows what you know about Collect-A-Card. The company’s greatest successes came with its Coca-Cola and Campbell’s Soup cards, properties whose talent pool went one (Santa Claus) and two (the Campbell’s Twins) characters deep, respectively. Its only misstep came with a property with zero recognizable characters – Dinotopia, a series of mildly interesting young-adult books (think Maxfield Parrish or Winsor MacCay collaborating with Michael Crichton on Jurassic Park) that spawned a truly misbegotten made-for-TV movie.

Collect-A-Card’s knack for making something out of nothing was sorely tested in the making of Kingpins, because as we all know, there are different grades of nothing. There is the total absence of matter, the total absence of matter except for several thousand leftover copies of Tubthumping, and then there is the nothing represented by Teata Semiz, Guppy Troup, Les Schissler, Jimmy Certain, Jon O’Drobniak, and 95 of their closest friends.

Upon further review, and after thinking harder than I’ve ever had to think about bowling cards, it’s amazing how much they resemble baseball cards. Both sports concentrate their action into rather small, explosive packages. The interminable wrapping and rewrapping of the batting gloves, the flex of the fingers on the bat, the demi-stretch, the quasi-yawn, the digging of the back foot into the batter’s box, the bat action prior to delivery of the pitch, and the stepping out to repeat the process all over again is awfully similar to what a bowler goes through prior to delivery. If Ryan Braun had a hot-air footswitch at home plate it would be virtually identical.

In both cases, the ball is delivered, something more or less dynamic occurs, and the process repeats. In neither case is sustained athleticism required, nor is there a target baseline metabolic rate. Male pattern baldness, aviator glasses, and pornstar mustaches are condoned, if not outright encouraged.

This leads to a score of déjà-vu moments in the Kingpins set. The three-images-in-one Andy Marzich card is straight out of ’89 Topps Baseball. If Don Zimmer had a recurring role on Cheers he’d be Billy Walden. Tommy Hanson is Rick Camp, but so is Ron Bell. Harry Sullins is Billy Stein. Dave Soutar is Dale Murphy. Mike Aulby is Matt Stairs. Bob Benoit is Rick Sutcliffe. Guppy Troup is Billy Loes with Lowell Palmer’s glasses and Gorman Thomas’ hair. Pete Couture is Kent Tekulve, with Tekulve’s glasses and hair. And Dennis Horan Jr. is Mario Mendoza, poor soul.

You may have noticed that with the exception of Stairs[1] all the bowlers are from the ‘90s and all the baseball players they resemble are from the ‘70s and ‘80s. This is no accident. Bowlers have never been the most fashion-forward sportspeople, so looking like the baseball players of 15 years previous is about right for them. This creates the very real possibility that in 2027 Parker Bohn V will be sporting cornrows and full-body tats.

Still, this only hints at the overwhelming otherworldliness of the Kingpins set. There has never been a sports-card set with so many pictures of people in striped polo shirts. Three people out of 100 are not in polo shirts, and that’s because they’re announcers in suits and ties (including the aforementioned Mr. Schenkel). The mustache count is at 34. This is also a constituency to whom flowing hair – from side to side, in ripples cascading across either temple, or sent straight back, like a killer wave from the Banzai Pipeline – is important. There is no hair on these cards that is not either falling out or being sent in purposeful swells across the head. This is taken to frightening extremes on the card of Pete Weber, whose noggin appears to be sporting either a forehead extension or a muskrat.

There are other frightening cards in the set, to be sure. Who would not be terrified by the sight of “Skee” Foremsky going off Gundam style, or Don McCune poking himself in the eye, or Mike McGrath adjusting his prosthetic forearm, or Dave Davis sitting astride the ball return in a pose both suggestive and frightening, or Curtis Odom, playing to the hilt the role of token-black comic relief?

If you want a genuine time capsule, a document of how far we have come as a society in 22 years, as well as the most comprehensive professional-bowling set ever made, you cannot do better than the Collect-A-Card Kingpins set.

But I wonder: Who would want that?

[1] Who, as a sawed-off, beer-bellied, power-hitting occasional right fielder was nothing if not an anachronism most of his career.

Canadian Railroad Thrillogy

I’m on one of my periodic “I Love Canada” jags. I just picked out my Christmas present: a Saskatchewan Roughriders toque. I’m making plans to visit my wife’s aunt in Kingston, Ontario, despite the fact that she lives in a convent and I wouldn’t actually be able to see her, though I will definitely wear my Saskatchewan Roughriders toque when I go[1]. I read the Canadian news first in my Google News feed, ahead of even the latest Lindsay Lohan news borrowed from TMZ.[2]

I think one of the reasons for my latest I Love Canada jag is that I watched the Grey Cup last weekend. Everyone who sees this column on a regular basis – shout-out to Sparky, the reader who puts the “one” in “everyone” – knows I have an unhealthy love for the Canadian Football League. It’s Division I-AA pro football, stripped of the artifice and hype and pretention and inflated everything, from egos to biceps to nosebleed-section ticket prices to the stentorian tones of Kevin Harlan.

Players are getting paid relative peanuts in the CFL but it’s not the burlesque football of the arena league, and there are enough fun rule differences to make it something other than just minor-league NFL product.[3] I don’t know who decided to let just about everyone go in motion before the snap, but I’m guessing Angelo “King Kong” Mosca left the rulebook with Groucho Marx for a couple of minutes, and when he came back from pounding on Joe Kapp the section outlawing motion before the snap was gone, three timeouts a half were whittled down to one, and someone had crossed out the two-minute warning and written in “three-minute warning.”

The combination of these rules changes and the lack of eight-minute TV timeouts is exhilarating. Games move at an Oregonian pace driven by short (but dynamic) quarterbacks airing it out to shorter (but dynamic) wide receivers, everyone goes home entertained, and no one cares that the team you played this week was the team you played two weeks ago because it’s an eight-team league, a 16-game season, and the Labatt’s is relatively cheap, by Canadian standards.

The Grey Cup is especially fun. It has some of the traditions of the Stanley Cup with some of the trappings of the Super Bowl, all for the price of a bleacher seat at Petco Park, and it’s even money that three-quarters of the Grey Cup games will be played or extreme cold and/or snow.[4] 

This year’s game was the 100th Grey Cup. I shudder to think of what the United States will do when the 100th Super Bowl rolls around. Fold over itself, drool at the mouth and babble incoherently is my guess, and that's just ESPN. I'm also thinking Gussie Busch XII's head is going to explode and the remnants of Joe Buck are going to pop out.

Not so much Canada. They put out a coin and put the trophy on a train (more on that later), but basically the 100th Grey Cup meant more Mounties and more bilingual announcements – two of the necessary evils that go along with being a CFL fan.[5]

I loved the game, though. It was like Brett Favre leading the Vikings to a Super Bowl win in 2009, only without a 12-men-in-the-huddle penalty in the conference final. Toronto nose tackle Adriano Belli (who looks exactly like John L. Sullivan) was ejected for putting an arm-bar on Calgary center (centre) John Gott.[6] A Don Nottingham clone named Chad Kackert had almost 200 yards in total offense[7]. Ahmad Carroll was whistled for defensive holding at a crucial point in the game. The halftime show consisted of a nearly dead Gordon Lightfoot, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Justin Bieber, and they booed Bieber with a sincere lustiness that American football fans would never have turned on Madonna. And the home team won.

I mention this because today’s Handful O’Landfill takes us to the exotic country of Belize, where we pay a visit to the reclusive zillionaire John MacAfee, his weapons and blue pacifier. No, we’re in Canada, looking at trains.

I love trains and I love Canada, so naturally I love Canadian trains. I spent a week on Canadian trains in my younger years, watching the Canadian Rockies pass by my bedroom window, dining on the prairie semi-al-fresco, subsisting on dried fruit and sausage, running sprints on the depot platform in Medicine Hat, steering clear of the native drunks in Prince George, B.C., hanging out of the vestibule watching the salmon run orange on the Fraser River alongside the Pacific Great Eastern tracks south of Quesnel, and coming face-to-face with an elk on a mountain trail outside of Banff.

So you can imagine how I felt in 1992 when I received a set of 76 Railfan Canada ’92 cards. Trading cards of trains? In a box? Yeah, that’s woodpulp heaven to me.

Well, no. The cards came up short of heaven – Peyton Manning short instead of Snoop Lion short, but short. They’re not a bad product taken at their face, though they do a number on the whole power-beauty-and-majesty-of-trains thing. These are the non-action photos – the head shots, if you will, only with no airbrushing. 1967 Topps Garry Roggenburk, anyone?[8]

The backs bristle with statistics: model number, horsepower, number built, number remaining, special features. That’s not a bad thing; if you’re moved enough by Canadian trains to buy 76 Railfan Canada cards, this is just the information you’re looking for. Railfan Canada resisted the urge to go all holofoil and die-cut, and the result is a better, more honest product.

A more honest product without any real market, unfortunately. Looking at the demographic requisites, the ideal buyer of Railfan Canada ’92 cards would have to love A) Canada, B) trains, and C) head shots, in that order. He would have to get off on the squiggly-lined logo of the Ontario Northland, the diamond of the Northern Alberta, and the whatzit of the Greater Winnipeg Water District.[9] He would also have to afford the $28 ($CDN) for the set.

He would have to be me, in other words. And while Railfan Canada hit the target from a marketing standpoint – I wound up with the set – selling to an audience of one isn’t exactly the pathway to the Hamptons.

As often happens, Railfan Canada ’92 cards promised the moon and delivered a Moon Pie. That’s not bad; it’s just less. But as the CFL proves, less can be quite wonderful indeed.

I mentioned this earlier, but as part of the Grey Cup's 100th anniversary the CFL put the trophy on a special train and sent it barnstorming across the country, so fans in remote locales like Kelowna and Kenora and Moose Jaw could get up-close with one of their national treasures.

I love Canada.


[1] And will consequently get beaten up by the tough old nun who bounces at the door and happens to be a Winnipeg Blue Bombers fan.
[2] And I’m constantly amazed at how little Canadian news Google has on a daily basis. Canada is the third-largest country in the world, and less news comes out of there weekly than comes out of North Korea on the half-hour -- and they're working on a 60-year news embargo. Canada's national obsession goes on strike, and the only thing Google talks about is the price of mining stocks. Maybe the entire country is under a gag order, or maybe they really are that phlegmatic.
[3] For instance, I would a thousand times rather watch the CFL than the short-lived World League of American Football. You’ve read about my experiences in getting to Wembley Stadium to see the inaugural World Bowl, but you’ve never heard my impressions of the game. Here you go: It was like a peewee hockey game after the Stanley Cup playoffs. Stan Gelbaugh moved like he was encased in gelatin and being eaten by a wasp.
[4] Which is why the league’s two most temperate cities, Vancouver and Toronto, play in domes.
[5] Among the others: Extra points are “converts,” touchdowns are “major scores,” defense is “defence,” and Ahmad Carroll is still allowed to play despite grabbing heaping handfuls of CFL jersey on every freaking pass.
[6] Hey, John L. would have arm-barred the dude, too.
[7] Or “offence,” as they put it up there.
[8] I can totally relate to the whole head-shot train-shot thing. My brother takes pictures of trains obsessively, and has for 40 years, and because he’s an engineer and not an artist, the less motion the better. He has dragged me through countless shabby quasi-industrial neighborhoods, past the unmarked warehouses of the Russian Mafia, down innumerable oily roads paved with the ground-up bones of Teamsters, and past scores of “We Shoot Trespassers” signs so he could take pictures of grimy, stationary diesel-powered boxes, knowing full well he could have hung out in some better (or at least more scenic) environ and seen it roll past 15 minutes hence. His (pre-digital) slide library exceeds 20,000, so that’s a whole lot of talking to railroad detectives that smell like creosote. I always thought shooting trains when they weren’t moving was cheating, like tackling the quarterback while he’s standing on the sidelines.
[9] Did I mention I wrote to all these railroads when I was about 14, asking for whatever free stuff they wanted to send me – and they all ponied up? In case I haven’t said this before, thank you, Greater Winnipeg Water District. May all your pipes forever run free.

Unremarkably Remarkable Moments

You may have suspected this, but I have the entire history of the trading-card business from about 1985-2005 in filing cabinets and storage boxes in my basement.

You may have suspected this because I look the part – i.e., old. Also because I’m not always lying. And also because there is no other reason why I would have the press kit for America’s Most Wanted trading cards somewhere other than under the refrigerator, soaking up a leak.

 

We cleaned out the basement the other day and I threw nothing away. I have almost the entire run of Sports Collectors Digest’s Trade Fax printed on slinky paper, and I keep hanging onto it even though I have never referred to it for anything, not even the correct spelling of Tony Loiacono’s name.[1]

 

I have the packout and insertion ratios for hundreds of Pinnacle products, including winners like 1998 Pinnacle Performers Football. You want to know how often Pursuit of Paydirt Point Cards show up in a box of Performers Football? I can tell you, though if you’re the sort of person who asks for information like this I’m not sure I want to talk to you.

 

We got sent everything from everyone in those days, and our erstwhile secretary Sue dutifully filed it all away, in neatly labeled folders. When the business went blooey I got the filing cabinets. I hung onto them at first because I was clinging to the hope that the band would get back together. Then I hung onto them because I thought I might write the definitive book on the trading-card business from about 1985-2005 for the seven people who might be interested. And now I’m holding onto them because I’m waiting for reality-TV producers to work their way down to me. I’m thinking of a mashup of Hoarders and American Pickers, with a dash of Say Yes to the Dress: Bridesmaids.

 

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to reach into one of the file boxes, pull out a file folder and write about its contents. And I struck gold.

 

The first line of the first document in the folder, a press release, reads, “Don Nomura, Hideo Nomo’s agent, calls the Japanese pitcher, ‘the Michael Jordan of our country.’ That pretty much says it all.”

 

It does. Yes indeed, that pretty much says it all. Hideo Nomo throws fastballs with his tongue hanging out, lays 50 on the Nippon Ham Fighters while running a 105-degree fever, jab-steps Yutaka Enatsu out of his Mizunos, smokes cigars the size of smoked hams, has his commercials produced by the Japanese Spike Lee[2], and bets on anything that moves, including freight trains and scarab beetles.

 

Okay, maybe he didn’t mean that. Maybe he meant that Nomo was really, really popular in Japan at the time of the press release – Sept. 21, 1995. That I can buy.

 

But do you know the name of the product responsible for this epochal statement? I’m guessing your answer is not “Remarkable Moments.” Yet that’s what it is.

 

There is definitely something oriental going on here. The press release does not suggest a product name, and the product name does not suggest a product. In the collectibles field alone, Remarkable Moments could be a series of commemorative coins, greeting cards, lithographs, stuffed animals, paintings on velvet, or sculptures. Or condoms.

 

Of course, I know the answer, because I have the entire history of the trading-card business from about 1985-2005 in my basement. Remarkable Moments is a series of talking picture frames.

 

If you’re thinking of talking picture frames in the context of Billy the Big-Mouth Bass, you’re about 20 years ahead of the curve. This talking frame does not sense your presence, does not flop back and forth, and doesn’t play cleverly repurposed quasi-popular songs. Instead, you press a button and listen to a sound chip play squawky, scratchy, nearly inaudible audio over the 30-second life of the battery.

 

This talking picture frame also requires a dedicated picture. You couldn’t slip a photo of Aunt Edna into Hideo Nomo’s space without having an answer prepared for Aunt Edna when she asks, “Why is that man with the funny voice calling me ‘The Japanese Tornado?’”

 

So if you’re keeping score, the entire Remarkable Moments package consists of:

1) A semi-removable picture of Hideo Nomo;
2) A high-quality stone-like base with a sound chip and a one-nanowatt (RMS) speaker; and
3) A battery with a 30-second lifespan that requires a fist-sized piece of gelignite to change.

And what would you charge for this bundle of goodness? Not $29.95. Not $19.95. Not even $9.95. But $79.95.

 

It is serially numbered and strictly limited to 1,995 pieces[3], so that makes it better. So too does the knowledge that other Remarkable Moments pieces can be yours for the incredibly low price of $129.95.

 

If that doesn’t sell you on the spot, remember that, “In the past, this type of time-capsule memento has only been available in museums and halls of fame.” Never you mind that in another 10 years the list would expand to include hunting shacks and doublewides.

 

Lest you think he was trading in hyperbole, Remarkable Moments chief Jeff Schwartz hastened to remind us that, “This new multi-media memorabilia certainly qualifies as a collectible, but Remarkable Moments are not just for collectors … They’re also for anyone who simply treasures a remarkable historical moment. They’re time machines which can transport us back to experience those inspirational moments, again and again.”

 

Okay. Make that, “trading in succinct hyperbole.”

 

After paragraphs and paragraphs of such unexpected delight comes the all-too-predictable denouement: “In addition to Schwartz, the Remarkable Moments team also includes former Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres great Steve Garvey and U.S. Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner.”

 

Well, of course it does. Joe Montana was a northern-California rhymes-with-bore.

In the end, Remarkable Moments were true to their description. They were pictures of moments that to someone were in some way remarkable.

 

I’m not sure that’s enough to hang a business on, though. After all, I have a picture of me where I’m wearing a Cub Scout uniform and I'm made up like Mae West. That’s a moment for sure, and pretty remarkable, but I’m not sure it merits a sound chip.

 

And I definitely want it kept the hell away from Steve Garvey.


[1] Not that Trade Fax would have that.
[2] I don’t know – Spike Ree, maybe?
[3] All of which most assuredly found nice, new homes.