Kenny Make Davy Go Boom-Boom

The trading-card business was like preschool. You had people who played by the rules and people who did everything they could to get around the rules.

Here’s what I mean about preschool. My daughter and son went to the same preschool at different times. My daughter was a model citizen. She colored when she was supposed to color with the colors she was supposed to color with, ate her breakfast when she was supposed to eat her breakfast, took her nap when she was supposed to nap, sang when she was supposed to sing, and wore her reindeer antlers and Rudolph nose during the Christmas program, just the way she was asked. In return, she got two cookies and a glass of punch at the end of the program.

My son, on the other hand, would only color what he wanted to color with his two favorite colors – black and dark blue. He didn’t eat what he was supposed to eat when he was supposed to eat it. He hated napping, hated singing more, and refused to wear reindeer antlers or a Rudolph nose at the Christmas program. In return, he got dragged out of Stevens Point Pacelli High School without a glass of punch or even one cookie. (I ate his cookie. It was mighty fine.)

In the trading-card business there were companies that acted a lot like my daughter. They showed the logos the right size in the right position except for the occasional airbrush, they included all the players they were supposed to include and did not try to slip a Kevin Maas card into every set they made, they made reasonable(ish) quantities of their products, they didn’t cut backdoor deals with certain distributors, they paid their bills on time, and in return got a glass of punch and two cookies – one from the league and one from the players’ association.

Then there were the companies that took their behavioral cues from a four-year-old snot. They didn’t give a hoot about logo and licensing restrictions, they had no compunction about shoehorning a hockey player into a basketball set and a football draft pick into an all-time-great-bowlers set, they made limited editions of 4 million and slipped cases out a back door the size of the Colossus of Rhodes, they paid on whims (and were pretty much whim-proof), and in return they got punched. Or they ought to have been punched.

And – oh, look: Here are some Classic World Class Athletes cards.

 

Let me get the good things about Classic out of the way. Classic had a vertically integrated business model that John D. Rockefeller would have loved. Classic took trading cards into shopping networks, formerly the bastion of floral polyester dirndls, clad aluminum cookware, and back-acne preparations. Classic added a sense of urgency and value to draft-pick cards.[1]

On the other hand, Classic circumvented every rule and regulation, and made David Stern go boom-boom all over his booster seat, to make cards of professional athletes without securing the approval of the appropriate licensing bodies. It made limited editions with limits in the millions, it cut deals that made the Shark Tank look like the Guppy Bowl, it specialized in nearly authentic autographs, and it had a lucrative make-your-own-promo-card operation that basically ruined the promo-card market.[2]

Given all this, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Classic was headed by perhaps the most annoying person in the hobby.[3] Ken Goldin looked like the love child of Mark Zuckerberg and Beaker from The Muppet Show, and talked like Gilbert Gottfried with a mastoid. He had the habit of calling into the Home Shopping Network when his products were being schlepped, posing as “Ken from New Jersey” and uttering rapturous notes on his cards’ quality and value. He was the biggest shyster in the land of shysters; people dealt with him with one hand holding their nose and the other clutching their pocketbook, but deal with him they did, because he had what they wanted.

What they wanted did not include the 1992 World Class Athletes set, by the way. This is somewhat ironic, because World Class Athletes were about as close as Classic came to making a semi-legitimate set. This was Classic’s attempt to gather the best athletes who weren’t parts of leagues or covered under blanket licensing agreements and put them into a set. Sure, there were some of the usual Classic suspects (Patrick Ewing, Larry Bird, Scottie Pippen, Charles Barkley, and John Stockton, and Desmond Howard and Rocket Ismail), but there was also Pete Sampras, bless his curly-topped head, and Bela Karolyi holding (in an appropriate fashion) two tiny gymnasts on his shoulders, and the twin decathletes Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson, and Muhammad Ali and Oscar de la Hoya, and Carl Lewis and Michael Johnson, and even professional volleyballer Bob Ctvrtlik , because what’s a set of world-class athletes without at least one vowel-challenged tall guy?

Classic is long gone but Goldin is not, much as you may have rather wished for the opposite outcome. Goldin Auctions recently sold a T206 Honus Wagner card, and is currently caught in the middle of the dispute between Kobe Bryant and his mom over Kobe’s high-school uniforms and other memorabilia from his early days that he said he didn’t want but now doesn’t want sold.

After dealing with Barry Bonds’ mom, I have this advice for Ken from New Jersey: Wear a helmet. And if it comes down to the mom or the mamba, take the mom. And the points.

 

The essential lie here, of course, is that there is no way this set represents Baseball’s Best anything. The player is acceptable – a Hall of Famer in name, thanks mainly to one great season spent scaling the Walls of Ivy. But the photo is pedestrian, the design is execrable, the backs are poo, and the distribution model renders these cards worthless from the getgo.

Baseball’s Best was made from 1987-88 and sold as a boxed set in McCrory’s stores. Been to a McCrory’s store lately? Know anyone who goes to McCrory’s, or ever went to McCrory’s?

McCrory’s was a rookie-league version of Woolworth’s. Still struggling? Okay, try this: It was a Dollar General with notions. We won’t get into what kind of notions.

There is also no redemption in the knowledge that the set's full name is “Baseball’s Best Sluggers vs. Pitchers,” because the sluggers don’t really face off against the pitchers, and if they did pity the pitchers, especially Joe Dawley.

It’s ridiculously easy to buy a sealed Baseball’s Best set. It’s the baseball-card equivalent of buying a bottle of Thunderbird.[4] In fact, it’s easier to buy a sealed set than an open one. Speculators bought thousands of the sets when they came out and hung onto them, waiting for the inevitable price rise that became all-too-evitable. And it’s hard to move even a thousand sets when demand is sitting at the half-set level.

These speculators are easy to spot. When you visit their homes, look inside their walls. The insulation has a common motif.

Of all the lame attempts to create a collectible during the Handful O’Landfill era, this is the one least able to walk without assistance. I’m ashamed to have even a single card in my pseudo-collection, but the only redemption in this mess is that I once had a full set. And my house is warmer than it used to be.

 

Last time I mentioned how holograms work better with three-dimensional objects than with objects that are not currently 3-D, like Babe Ruth. Here’s proof.

This 1994 Upper Deck Motorsports Salutes Jeff Gordon card features a really neat Gordon hologram, and you know why it’s so cool? It’s because Upper Deck put Jeff Gordon in a special studio and shot him from all angles, like they were taking an X-ray. And then when they created the hologram they kept the image small, to keep it from getting too diffused and indiscernible.

The result may be the best hologram card ever, but you know what? I still don’t care. It’s an Upper Deck NASCAR card, and when you’ve seen one NASCAR card you’ve pretty much seen them all. No other sport has as much of its sportness taken away in the card-creating process. Noise? Smell? Skill? Spinouts? Slap fights? Nope, nope, nope, nope, and nope. They’ve been replaced by rednecks on headsets and long, loving shots of sponsor logos.

I never thought I’d say these words, but here goes: If only this were a bowling card.

 

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[1] It’s 50-50 as to whether this is an asset or just a fact. Sticking lighted matchheads into your skin hurts. That’s a fact, but it doesn’t make me want to buy matches. Classic had a Huey Richardson card available within a couple weeks of the 1991 NFL draft. That’s a fact, but it didn’t make me want a Huey Richardson card. It made me want to curl up in a corner with a blanket over my head.

[2] Not that it shouldn’t have been ruined, but still.

[3] It would have been a contest, though. A real contest. It would make The Voice look like a bulldog beauty pageant.

[4] As Townes Van Zandt talked/sung in “Talking Thunderbird Blues,” “Among the strangest things I ever heard/ Was when a friend of mine said, ‘Man, let’s get some Thunderbird’/ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He just started to grin/Slobbered on his shirt, his eyes got dim/He said, ‘You got fifty-nine cents?’”

The Babe, The Dupe, And The Nine-Pocket Sheet At The End Of The World

I was cleaning out a filing cabinet – stranger things happen, but not many – and came upon a nine-pocket sheet of cards filled with the cards described below. The combination of randomness and mediocrity swept over me like a tsunami, and a column – a series of columns, more likely -- was born. Don’t blame me, blame them.

 

We might as well dispatch with the legitimate card first. The combination of restrained design (in team colors, yet), compelling photography and star power makes this the best Pacific Trading Card ever. Honestly: What Pittsburgh Penguins fan's humble abode would not be graced by this card’s presence? You wouldn’t want it staring back at you from the sheets when you pull the covers back at night, or greeting you as you lift the lid, but otherwise this is the shizzle. The problem, of course, is that Pacific made roughly 100,000 other cards, almost none of which were as good as this, and many of which were far, far worse. So is it worth sifting through a Brooks Range of Pacific-made landfill material in hopes there might be something even better than this bad boy?

I don’t know, but it sounds like a History Channel series to me.

 

One of my buddies sent me a link to a blog written by my old boss, Bob Lemke (a link I’m proud to share with you – boblemke.blogspot.com, and be sure to wear your cynicism-proof gloves), and then I stumbled upon this card, so I guess it’s a sign that I should tell some Bob Lemke stories.

If Oscar Levant was reincarnated as John Belushi he would have been Bob Lemke. The combination of hypochondria (completely warranted, in Bob’s case), acerbic wit, encyclopedic intelligence, shrewdness, self-destructive tendencies, creative wardrobing, and curly hair could only have been created by a mashup of the bilious-yet-charming antihero of movies like The Band Wagon and the out-of-control-yet-charming antihero of movies like The Blues Brothers.[1]

There are a few people who know more about trading cards than Bob Lemke, but most of them are dead –and one of them is definitely not me. He’s discovered heretofore unknown sets, which is really wild when you think about it, since we’re only going back 90 years and we’re talking about things that were designed to be collected, if not exactly kept. If the object matter was hot-dog wrappers it might be a different story, but these are baseball cards. Unknown baseball cards would seem to be something that only exists in the abstract, like leftover bacon.

Bob couldn’t move very well due to a number of ailments, but that didn’t stop him from pitching on the company team. I’m pretty sure we had the only lefthanded hemophiliac pitcher with rheumatoid arthritis in the entire Iola Summer Recreational Softball League.

Every month I tried to deliver Bob a perfect issue of Baseball Cards magazine, and every month I’d get a marked-up copy that showed the ways I had fallen short. He was awfully nice about it, though. He always let me try again the next month, and he defended me to his higher-ups when I called Ken Goldin (one of our biggest advertisers) a slimewad.[2]

The absolute best thing about Bob Lemke, other than the fact that he was allowed to put his encyclopedic knowledge into an actual encyclopedia, was that he totally did not care what people thought of him. If he decided he was going to wear a Razor Shines Indianapolis Indians jersey to work that’s what he did, and if it wasn’t exactly tailored-made to fit him or him if some high-zoot potential money type was flying in from New York to meet him, it didn’t matter. The Razor Shines jersey was stayin’.

Most of the important things in life are accomplished by people who could care less what others think of them, and it makes sense. It’s hard to change the world when one hand is holding a mirror and the other hand is cupped over your mouth so you can check your breath.

This card shows Bob as I will always remember him, smiling in a polyester doubleknit of uncertain origin, and the back is priceless. “A 10-year veteran at KP, Bob was traded from the Old Cars division for a ’55 Cadillac hubcap,” it reads. “Collects 1950s baseball cards and memorabilia and gets paid for playing with them at the office.” It goes on to list his hobbies as “Cold Beer” and “Hot Women.”

 How could you not want to follow someone like that into the fiery furnace – or to the Willow Grove show, even?

 

This card didn’t start out bent to pieces, though in retrospect it’s a darn good idea. Evidently the nine-pocket sheet was faulty and this card slipped out and was crushed by a laptop.

Oh, well. It’s just a Babe Ruth card.

Now before you start talking in all caps, take a deep Buddhist breath and remind yourself that not all cards are created equal, even Babe Ruth cards. There are really valuable Babe Ruth cards, valuable Babe Ruth cards, modestly valuable Babe Ruth cards, and holograms. And you can pretty much guess which card type this is.

The reason why we have holograms, in case you were wondering, is so something astonishingly three-dimensional can emerge from a flat, two-dimensional surface, like a grain elevator or Jennifer Aniston’s bustline. Given that, the best way to create a hologram is to start with a three-dimensional object. (It’s a little like the classic line from The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble-Gum Book that states the best way to create a large cantaloupe is to start with a small cantaloupe and not a collection of cantaloupe parts.) As we’ll see sometime in the next couple of weeks, the more three-dimensional the object and the better the job of capturing that three-dimensionality, the better the hologram.

In case you haven’t noticed, Babe Ruth is currently not three-dimensional. He’s barely two-dimensional. Hence, your chances of getting a hologramesque hologram of Babe Ruth are less than your chances of taking Kate Upton to prom, even if you say please and buy her a wrist orchid.

Questionable compositional choices aside, there is also the issue of expectations. The back of this Whitehall Collection card reads, “Limited edition of 150,000.” Under what circumstances is an edition of 150,000 limited? When you expect to sell 150,001, obviously. But even at the height of the fury in 1992, when this card was issued, it seems beyond unlikely that there were 150,000 Babe Ruth, New York Yankees, or trading-card fanatics fanatic enough to plunk down $5 or more for a chunk of aluminum foil theoretically overlaid with a chunk of Babe Ruth’s ectoplasm.

And that, dear readers, is precisely what the Whitehall Collection found out for itsownself.

 

Ah, and gone are the days when you could create a parody of a baseball card and have a significant percentage of the populace get the joke. I saw a picture of the Score Eric Fisher card created on draft night a couple of days ago and immediately got the in-reference. It was meant to resemble a Score Rated Rookie card from 1989, a time when there was someone actually rating rookies and not merely slapping anonymized photos of first-round picks on cardboard and saying, “Yep, we got everyone.”[3] Certainly the College of Card Cardinals got the reference; I can hear them banging their walkers on the floor in assent. But did the new generation, the standard-bearers for the future generation of collectors, all three of them? Did the media? (nysportsjournalism.com didn’t, that’s for darn sure.)

When SkyBox created a Willy “The Dupe” Dipkin card in 1994, everyone got it. It was SkyBox using Matt “Simpsons” Groening to promote the second series of SkyBox Simpsons cards and slam the 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken card, the Card of a Million Variations (with obscenity, with modified obscenity, with partially whited-out obscenity, with completely whited-out obscenity, and please don’t make me remember the rest).

Groening nailed everything about the Ripken card that made it a fad as well as an artist with Groening’s skills can nail anything that doesn’t have a natural overbite. The pinstriped, rhombus-cut Dipkin card nails the over-engineered-by-half ’89 Fleer look. The bat knob reads “Fish Face.” The traumatized expression on Dipkin’s face mirrors that of the real junior Ripken, the brother forever destined to live in the shadow of a legend.

As good as the front is, the back is even better. In contrast to the so-called humorous trading cards foisted on a suffering humanity through trading-card history (see a very early post in this blog for the sordid details), the Dipkin card is spot-on satire.

The standard throws-and-bats line reads, “Bats Right, Throws Up.” His stat line for home runs reads “.75 (reached third and pulled a hamstring”). The back text summarizes his career highlights like so: “Willy holds the league record for most errors committed in a single inning (17). His only other claim to fame is this world-renowned ‘error’ card, in which Dipkin poses unwittingly with the word ‘FISH FACE’ scrawled on the knob of his bat. The spiky-haired culprit responsible for this foul misdeed has yet to be apprehended. And the coup de grace is the “Do you really wanna know?” section, which says:  “Willy never really liked playing baseball. His true ambition was to play the flute for the New Shelbyville Philharmonic. Unfortunately, a spiky-haired culprit scrawled the word ‘FLUTE FACE’ on the end of his instrument and Dipkin left the orchestra in a frustrated rage in 1992.”

Perfect. Spot on. And the Simpsons cards it promotes are darn cool as well. (Come to think of it, there has never been a bad Simpsons set.)

All this, and we’re only halfway through the nine-pocket sheet. More good goodies next time.

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[1] These movies have more in common than you might realize. Music, for one thing. Couches, for another.

[2] Truth was not an excuse in this case. By the way, did you notice whose name was on the auction house that just sold a T206 Honus Wagner card for $2.1 million? That would be Ken Goldin, the slimewad. He’s come a long way from telling Major League Baseball to go forth and multiply itself.

[3] Full disclosure: We did our share of slapping and anonymizing way back when, and some of the current slappers are friends of mine, and highly capable card people. In fairness to them, if you want trading cards out on draft night or shortly after, there’s not a lot of time to do anything but slap and go. (And how embarrassing was it to get scooped by Tide? http://nysportsjournalism.squarespace.com/tide-awash-with-nfl-rookies-42/?SSScrollPosition=0) Still, I’d have to imagine from a star-power-moving-cases standpoint it was a particularly onerous task this year.

Birdies, Eagles, Bread Puddings, and HEADgehogs

Isn’t this the way it always works: I wax poetic about the demi-legendary Imperial Sporting Collection Ryder Cup set, and then two weeks later I’m rummaging through my desk looking for Taiwanese basketball cards and I come across the even more demi-legendary Imperial Sporting Collection Panasonic European Open set.

Fetch me a bucket, Sylvie. I feel the drool comin’ on.

Really. This set jiggles the Jell-O in my brain on so many levels you’d think you were looking at my mom’s old vegetable-and-gelatin mold (shredded cabbage and carrots, sliced green olives, and lime Jell-O, and it tastes just about the way you’d think it would).

First, this set was sealed. That’s right: for nearly one-quarter of a century I’ve been able to resist the siren call of the Panasonic European Open set, the one with the gorgeous brown eyes and blue polyester pants of Seve Ballesteros on the box lid.

I want you to know I opened this set only in the interest of science, just for this column. It’s one of the great sacrifices researchers must make. Plus, I was really, really bored.

Second, the set claims to be part of a series that includes the aforementioned Ryder Cup set, American Golfers, and All Time Great Quarter Backs (their spelling).

Begging your pardon, but what the hell kind of series is that – three golf sets and a football set? That’s like saying the Beatles’ string of smash singles included “Ferry Cross the Mersey” by Gerry and the Pacemakers, or that Mumford & Sons sound fresh and original. It’s plainly a hash.

Listen, just because your company made four trading-card sets does not mean they are a four-set series. “Series” implies continuity, and unless you plan on showing Bubby Brister in a pair of plus-fours (Zubaz don’t count), you are running on empty in the continuity department.

Even the fact that the likeness of Bernhard Langer looks exactly like Joe Montana does not lift these sets up into seriesdom. It just makes them a plagiaristic hash.

Now, let’s consider what exactly is being commemorated here: The Panasonic European Open. There’s bravado in the decision to devote a set of trading cards to the golfers with good hair who played in a pedestrian European golf tournament, but it’s largely misplaced. It would be like devoting an entire baseball set to anyone who happened to be in the starting lineup on April 6, 1987.

(Oh, wait. Donruss did that. It’s called the Opening Day set, and except for a major error involving Barry Bonds and Johnny Ray, it’s a hash, too.)

Okay, fine. But if we’re going down that road, where is the Big I Houston Open set, or the sets for the USF&G Classic, the Hardee’s Golf Classic, the Shearson Lehman Brothers Andy Williams Open, the Beatrice Western Open, the Canon Sammy Davis Jr. Greater Hartford Open, or, irony of ironies, the Panasonic Las Vegas Open? I don’t know where Europe gets off saying the U.S. has it all; they got the Imperial Sporting Collection Panasonic European Open set, while the Panasonic Las Vegas Open got bupkis.

Continuity and logic having been disposed of, let’s talk hair. The Panasonic European Open ascends to its demi-legendary status on mountains of hair.

 Golfers have been known for hair ever since they stopped wearing those twee checked caps, but the hair on the Panasonic European Open golfers is positively Alpen. Greg LeMond may have been cycling clean in those days, but there is definitely some funny stuff going on above Jose-Maria Olazabal’s forehead. I’m thinking he’s juicing and volumizing.

And it’s not just Olazabal. I’m sure he was doing it just to stay competitive, because the Imperial Sporting Collection Panasonic European Open set, overrun as it is with soft-collar shirts and saddle shoes, is even more heavily infested with hirsute heads. (They probably smell nice, too, but 24 years in cellophane has sort of eliminated olfactories from the equation.)

Ian Woosnam has amber waves of hair; Paul Way’s locks flow like the Thames. Peter Baker’s bushy overgrowth appears to be concealing a bread pudding, while the mane of Jose-Maria Canizares (the other Jose-Maria) seems to have a mind of its own, which may be the point. Howard Clark’s growth matches his turtleneck, Eamonn Darcy’s tangle is cut to match the rough at Royal Troon, Nick Faldo has obviously pared down a bowling ball to fit his pate, and Anders Forsbrand is only a Yamaha DX7 away from full membership in A Flock of Seagulls.

Even the curly-headed guys get in on the action: Manuel Pinero has more in common with Strawberry Shortcake than he’d like to admit, Bernhard Langer rocks Joe Montana’s ‘do, and for Sam Torrance and Peter Senior I offer some of the sweetest words ever to fall on a middle-aged man’s ears: Bosley hair replacement.


(I guess you really can play golf in it.)

I suppose this is as good a time as any to quit with the wisecracks and actually say something about the set. It consists of 25 really thin, poorly cut cards, with borders that are meant to be reminiscent of old tobacco cards but wind up reminding you of your great-grandmother’s bedroom set. The artwork carries over the head-shot-and-action-shot look of the earlier Ryder Cup set – and not by accident. The players who carry over from one set to the other – Langer, Faldo, Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle, Woosnam, Darcy, and Gordon Brand Jr.  – really carry over. The artwork for one is the artwork for the other.

Maybe the Imperial Sporting Collectors were thinking (probably correctly) that few people would own both sets, or that two years was plenty of time for collectors to forget (also probably correct), but I’m pretty sure I know the real reason: Imperial Sporting Collection had a bunch of lithos of golfers that weren’t exactly flying off the shelves, and in a fit of marketing call-it-inspiration screamed to the heavens, “We can make trading cards out of them!!!!”

Yes. Well. They did make trading cards out of them, and now we’re sitting around almost 25 years later commenting on how asinine they look. And my guess is the lithos are still on the shelves, so if you go into just the right London shop and ask the proprietor, “Say, by any chance you wouldn’t have a Des Smyth lithograph around -- you know, the one with the surgical collar masquerading as a turtleneck,” he will fall over dead of a heart attack.

Oh, and if you see Dinsdale Piranha, tell him we’ve found Spiny Norman. It’s on top of Barry Lane’s head.

Par for the Course -- Get It?

Historically it’s been hard to get people excited about golf cards, and I can prove it. Golf cards. There. I said it. You excited yet? I rest my case.

Beyond the overwhelming dullness of the concept – and it’s like South Dakota in its bleak vastness, with the Corn Palace on one end and Wall Drug on the other – the demographics don’t line up. Now, granted, in the heyday of trading cards no one talked about demographics. They were too busy talking about debentures and annuities, and reciting the Greek alphabet to one another. When they weren’t doing that, it was a Cherokee Strip land-grab for licenses, and when the dust settled only a few odd stragglers like Calvin and Hobbes and the Hanna-Barbera cartoons (note to self: why?) had retained their dignity.

No, the truth is that eight-year-old boys and golf have never exactly seen eye-to-eye. Granted, I played a variant of golf when I was eight years old. I have the scar on my jaw to prove it. (I stood too close to Bobby Miller on his backswing.) We hacked around in our backyard, seeing how far we could drive a green plum, which lacked the dimpled aerodynamics of a Top-Flite XL but made a much better sound (and stain) when it struck the garage wall. Even so, golf was a poor 10th, behind baseball, football, basketball, tennis, swimming, green-plum fights, rotten-tomato fights, and currant wars, and in a league with Jarts and roller-skating (with the skates that clamp to your feet, fall off at a frequency in direct proportion to the steepness of the hill you’re descending, and throw a bearing anytime you utter a preposition).

So would I have bought golf cards when I was eight? Sure – but you have to realize: I was not the target audience. I craved the unusual, the weird, the off-the-beaten-middle-of-the-road stuff. I made (okay, my mom made) the local candy distributor order hockey cards in a market where the nearest NHL team was a four-hour drive away but none of the locals knew that. I bought (okay, my mom bought) Fleer Cloth Patches and Topps Jumbos and World Series cards and any other sporting confection Lang’s or Northside Drug wanted to carry (but not Odd Rods or Gomer Pyle, USMC cards, because they weren’t sports cards, silly). I did not chew the gum but stuck it in a candy jar. I did not stick the cards in a back pocket or flip them but put them in the boxes model train cars came in, and the most physical thing I did with them was build card houses.

So, yeah, I probably would have bought (or had my mom buy) golf cards.

Not these golf cards, though. ’65 Topps AFL golf cards, definitely. ’69 Topps Cap Peterson golf cards, for sure. ’64 Philly golf cards, more than likely. But not Imperial Sporting Collection Ryder Cup golf cards.

Still, I get where these cards are coming from. England, if I read the box right.

I mean, I actually get these cards’ raison d’être. They’re meant to resemble old British cigarette cards without the cigarettes, which is about as fair a trade as I can imagine.

British cigarette cards used sketchy art, and often this same sort of portrait-hovering-above-action (sic)-shot art, to showcase many of the action sports that cram the isles. You know – cricket, golf, bowls, fox hunting, darts, snooker, pub-crawling.

They didn’t often come in this size, though. The Imperial Sporting Collection cards are 2-3/8x3-1/8, smaller even than the old square Goudeys, and that makes them poor fits in just about any media you might use to display them. Not that you would, but you have to do something with them, because once you’ve bought the set that’s it. There’s nothing else to do but sit back and baste in the glory.

And there’s not a ton of that to be done, either. In contrast to many complete-in-the-box sets, there’s not much to this set – only 15 cards, including two recap cards. (I mean, it is a Ryder Cup set. If it didn’t just show the Ryder Cup team and get the heck out of there I’d be accusing it of set-padding, and who wants a padded Ryder Cup set? Not me.)

The combination of small cards, small set and wispy packaging makes this the skimpiest set of trading cards ever. This is an SI-swimsuit-edition-bikini of a trading-card set. Honestly, a single Ghirardelli chocolate square takes up more space, only the chocolate weighs more until you eat it, then it’s about even.

Ah, but the talent. There is more talent in the Ryder Cup set than in the aforementioned chocolate but not by much, since this is the Ryder Cup team from 1987, when European golfers, while not exactly inferior to the American models, largely kept to themselves on their tour. So while there’s Seve Ballesteros – the main reason for buying this set, now as then – there’s also lots of chumps with side partings that wouldn’t come apart at Royal Troon, guys like Ken Brown, Gordon Brand Jr. and Jose Riviero. They’re not duffers by any means, but they’re the Booth Lustegs of the golf world – which made their triumph in 1987 all the more surprising. It was like Florida Golf – excuse me, Gulf – Coast, in white belts.

Even with the included glassine wrap, the Imperial Sporting Collection Ryder Cup set is the lightest complete trading-card set I’ve ever encountered – not the optimum combination of attributes. It’s like having the best-smelling car. What does it get you?

In the case of the Imperial Sporting Collection, it didn’t get them sales. There was this set, a larger and somewhat more weighty set of American golfers (same size cards, though), the deathless Panasonic European Open set, and a set of “All Time Great Quarter Backs” (think Joe Montana with saddle shoes, or the Bernhard Langer art done up with shoulder pads), and then the Imperial Sporting Collectors were gone back across the pond, presumably to peddle their art to grownup eight-year-old boys with plaid slacks and Hush Puppies and vacant spaces in their offices just the right size.

And walls that can’t take a lot of weight.

London 0 Kingpins 4

Onward and upward with the arts, and the 1990 Collect-A-Card Kingpins pro-bowling set, too. Let's get right to the action -- which is more than the PBA ever did:

Ever wonder how bowling balls get juiced? Here you go. In another couple of hours it’s going to be stumbling around like Kristen Stewart at the Oscars.

A basic etiquette question crops up throughout the Kingpins set, namely: What’s an appropriate reaction for a bowler when he makes a nice shot?

The problem in bowling is there’s not a lot of athletic continuation going on to make a celebratory gesture look spontaneous yet not stupid.

Let me frame this question for you in the context of that other sport that dabbles in the pastel shades, golf. When a golfer makes a long putt, and s/he knows it’s going in the hole, s/he strides briskly towards the hole, simultaneously raising his or her hand to acknowledge the applause they know is coming as soon as the ball touches the bottom of the cup.[1] That’s a natural continuation of the putt, and not the starting-a-two-cycle-weed-whacker gesture most golfers (and bowlers) resort to when a putt they had given up for dead takes an abrupt left turn and jumps in the cup.

(There’s also the drop-the-putter-and-serpentine-wildly move, but that doesn’t even merit consideration. When a golfer feels the need to imitate Alan Arkin in The In-Laws, it’s like he’s surprised at his accomplishment, and I have no use for tour golfers who aren’t 100 percent dead-solid sure they can sink it from anywhere – the water, the sand, the tee box, the rainforest canopy, the crab nebula. It’s like the legendary Yankee scout Paul Krichell used to say: “A kid who thinks along the lines that it’s too hard to make it couldn’t make it anyway.” So why act surprised?)

The follow-the-ball-to-the-hole thing works in golf, but not for bowling, because it’s not only illegal but as ridiculous as hockey coaches in dress shoes walking on the ice after a game. Put Baryshnikov in a pair of Gucci loafers and send him out to the faceoff circle to shake hands with Sidney Crosby and he’s going to look like Wile E. Coyote, famishus famishus.

So what’s a bowler to do? The crowd expects something, even if that something is a severe questioning of their judgment for going to a bowling tournament and expecting it not to be a snoozefest with roller dogs. Cheerleaders are out, and so are jumbotrons, spotlights, pyrotechnics, sideline reporters, pep bands, Jerry Jones, that “Jump Around” song, and any other music that doesn’t come from a jukebox at 50 cents a track[2]. The crowd’s needs are simple: they expect a bowler to knock down the all the pins and then bust a move, so as to point up the crowd’s aggregated inadequacy in both departments. A spectator may never come away from the King Louie Open saying, “Man, that Earl Anthony sure can pump his fist,” but that’s what he’s thinking. In so many words.

Of course this expectation is unwarranted, but it’s real. The needs of the crowd must be served. The problem is that great bowlers are poor move-busters. Nothing is natural; everything is as conscious as a choice of matching belt and shoes (white). Ron Palombi Jr.’s fist-pump? Contrived. Joe Salvemini’s moonwalk? Pitiful. And these are the Italians. You don’t want to know the moves in Les Zikes’ arsenal.

The unfortunately inevitable extension of this thinking is The Happy Dance of Skee Foremsky, which almost certainly was performed to the jukeboxed strains of “The Pennsylvania Polka,” by Frankie Yankovic and His Yanks.[3] It’s a shame that the bowling crowd’s unslakable thirst for entertainment drove this Lone Star kegler over the edge. There’s no need for The Happy Dance of Skee Foremsky. Skee should be allowed to be Skee, whatever that means, away from the crushing peer pressure of the bowling crowd. And he should act like he’s been there before, which he most assuredly has, and he can sink it from anywhere, which is undoubtedly the case.

Skee, my man, you deserve better. But I’m not sure you deserve that much better.

First there was a Horse Whisperer. Then, if I have my whisperers straight, there was a Dog Whisperer, then a Cat Whisperer, and if I’m not mistaken they were followed by an Orchid Whisperer, a Tequila Whisperer, and a Chicken Whisperer. And I just got done reading about a Nanny Whisperer.

So what do you whisper to tequila? “You taste like Sterno filtered through bread”? I think the whole thing has blown its head gasket.

Still, in the spirit of things, behold the Bowling-Ball Whisperer. I’m guessing what he’s whispering to his ball is, “If you don’t knock all those pins down right now when we get home I’m filling you with concrete and dropping you off the end of Navy Pier,” which is where all bad bowling balls go to sleep with the fishes, especially when their former owners are from Des Plaines.

I’m astonished. I never knew that bowling alleys had wallpaper. I always thought their walls were finished in cigarette smoke, fryer grease, and four-by-eight sheets of fake knotty-pine paneling. Sometimes when the owners were ambitious they’d actually nail the fake knotty pine to the walls.

And then I’m astonished that bowling alleys had this wallpaper. I thought this pattern was exclusive to the gimmicky ice-cream parlors that flourished in the ‘70s and featured a 60-year-old guy in sleeve garters and a straw hat strolling from table to table, playing the banjo and singing “In The Good Old Summertime” until someone crowned him with the remnants of their 33-Scoop Gut-Buster Delight, which they invariably did.

This wallpaper does bring up the possibility that Bill Allen was bowling in his basement and not in a bowling alley, adding fuel to the debate that the PBA in the ‘90s did not really exist but was fabricated in a sound studio with not 90 different bowlers but three – a tall one, a short one, and a fat one – and lots of prop hair and glasses. And striped polo shirts.

This would explain Chris Schenkel, who appears to be not Chris Schenkel at all but a cardboard cutout of Chris Schenkel in broadcasting Neverland, waiting on the CGI. How easy would it have been to round up a cardboard Chris Schenkel and a nine-foot patch of hardwood-laminate floor, grab some old footage of strikes and spares and crowd shots[4], rig a ball return out of the back end of a Kawasaki 440LTD, and fake the whole darn Pro Bowlers’ Tour? The PBA was at its nadir. It was pre-NCAA, pre-chip hat, and pre-cool; it wasn’t like anyone was paying attention. And hey, it worked for the moon landing.

I think I’m done with the Kingpins set. It was fun while it lasted. Just be thankful I can’t find my PWBA set, featuring the deathless Tish Johnson. Now, if any readers have a set they want to share …

[1] Rumor has it that when Arnold Palmer was seriously injured in a car wreck in the ‘80s he had his shattered elbow set to acknowledge the applause of the gallery after sinking a long putt, only to reconsider when he realized he would have to stand on his head to get the ball out of the hole.

[2] Preferably a jukebox with “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll,” the Chicken Dance, “Proud Mary,” and everything ever recorded by Bobby Vinton.

[3] And which was unquestionably inspired by the cover of London 0 Hull 4 by the Housemartins, one of the gayest bands to come out of the mid-‘80s British indie-pop scene. Draw your own conclusions there.

[4] Because the crowds at these events never changed. You think it’s a new thing to digitally create crowds in movies and TV shows? The PBA started doing it at the 1972 Waukegan Open. I have proof.

Just The Three Of Us: Me, My Ball, And My Pink Pants

Shades of the Gift That Keeps On Giving: I found even more fun stuff in the 1990 Collect-A-Card Kingpins set.

Let’s think about this. In some sports you really can’t tell the players without a scorecard. Water polo, for instance. Many swimcapped heads, scant space for team branding let alone player identification, and four-fifths of each person’s person is submerged. Team handball. Steeplechase. Tug of war. Field hockey. The Tour de France – this year’s Tour de France, anyway. These sports cry out for best practices in player ID.

Bowling is not one of these sports.

In bowling you are never not conscious of who’s bowling. There are only two pseudo-athletes to keep straight, to start with. This puts bowling on the same plane as boxing, wrestling, and MMA, sports that consciously play to audiences whose retention skills only go two names deep.


In a bowling match, the bowlers’ names are on the screen, on the scoreboard, announced beforehand, and prompted throughout. If you are watching in person, you did not just happen upon these bowlers on your way to the skeeball machines. You sought them out to baste in their glory – and hey, they’re 20 feet away from you. You can almost feel the heat from their hand dryers. Bowling fandom is highly informed, to the extent that they know the two bowlers kegling in front of them.

Given that, why does a bowler feel the need to splash his name across his back in the thickest embroidery floss money can buy?

I know why. It’s a throwback to the early days of TV, when bowler names were not always scattered with abandon around the screen and venue. You could chisel a player’s name in stone faster than you could superimpose it on a TV screen in the early cathode-ray days, when bowling was right up with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen as a time-eater. Throw in audio that wasn’t always audible and picture quality only foil-covered rabbit ears could provide, and there was a dire need for bowler identification of the most screaming sort. Hence plaid Sansabelt slacks and doublewide embroidered names on striped shirts that throbbed like a stubbed toe.

But Bob Benoit, he’s a hipster. He’s with it. His hair is Werewolves-of-London-quality. His mustache droops with Dennis Eckersleyesque aplomb. He was 10 when the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. He doesn’t need to live in the past … yet there he is.

That leads me to believe there’s some inferiority-complex stuff going on. His body language is screaming like Bon Scott: You don’t think I’m as much of an athlete as Tom Tupa? Oh, yeah? Well, let me tell you: My name is on the back of my shirt in even bigger letters than Tupa’s ever was – and it’s in script, too! If that doesn’t shut up the haters – or at least get them laughing to the point that they can’t utter consecutive coherent syllables – nothing will.

The only pseudo-athletes more driven to self-recognition are NASCAR drivers, and it’s understandable. They are identified by what they drive to a ridiculous extent. It’s not “Jeff Gordon is doing a masterful job”; it’s, “The number-24 car is doing a masterful job,” like if Randy Wimmer was doing the driving instead of Gordon – or better yet, if no one at all were driving it, save for Sergey Brin and a couple lines of code – the car would still be in the same position in the race.

That has to get old. Throw in the contractual obligation to dress like a Nomex M&M or tote around every shade of industrial Pantone on your bib and you can understand why NASCAR drivers tell the lady behind the sewing machine to put their names in freaking lights. [1]

I don’t know. I look at this picture and think “plumbing contractor,” or maybe “Winnebago dealer.” It’s almost like a Jackson Pollock painting in its ability to let the viewer build the story. The story I’m building includes a lewd escapade in a Mini Winnie at the hot-water-heater convention. And dental work.

Before the Susan G. Komen initiative pink was just pink, and it was not a common color among athletes. The ABA’s Floridians and the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers were the only teams to have pinkish colors as part of their palette, and they were vibrant, tropical fuschias. No limpid shell-pinks for them. No siree.
Pseudo-athletes were a different story, evidently. There are at least a half-dozen cards in the Kingpins set that show bowlers wearing some shade of mild-mannered pink, including the infamous Pink Pants of Don McCune.

I can’t look at these pants without being reminded of my senior prom. The senior prom was my one, solitary high-school date in high school. My mom commemorated the event by taking me shopping[2] and buying me an entire suit in roughly the shade of the Pink Pants of Don McCune. She called it “peach” but it weren’t no peach. It was pink.

The suit came in three pieces that attempted to make up in quantity what they lacked in quality. Every aspect of that suit was as vast and all-encompassing as a Tim McCarver digression. The jacket’s lapels nearly touched the shoulders. The pants’ top pleats could hold Kelly Ripa and the bottoms swelled like the Metrodome. There was a vest, too, a pernicious thing that served only to keep too much sensible white shirt from spoiling the oeuvre.

I’ve often wondered what possessed my mom in those years. She dove headlong into the Mod Years and when everyone else surfaced with tie-dye and paisley she came up with plaid – and not subtle plaids, either. She dressed us in green, white and black picnic-basket plaids; in pegleg pants festooned with interlocking squares of blue, orange and brown; and in red, white and blue quasi-tweeds with matching bow ties. The mildest plaid I remember was a sort of houndstooth affair of blue, red, and navy made from a cloth that was the love child of a shag bathmat and a burlap sack.

There are two ways to look at the plethora of pinks that dot the Kingpins set. The first is that these bowlers overcame their sartorial challenges and became successful professionals, able at long last to chase their dream. The other is that their moms dressed them in pink and they wound up becoming bowlers.

It’s like the Ron Bell card. You choose the outcome.

It’s one thing when you’re a struggling cardmaker and you want to make a card of Eric Swann, and the only photos you can find were taken by an amateur in the stands at the semipro football game, and he wasn’t even focused on Swann and it was nighttime and one of the light standards wasn’t working and he kind of fell over on the play. It’s another thing when you have a bowler at your absolute beck-and-call and all you can think to have him do is, “Uh, could you, like, sit on that ball-return thing over there? And could you spread your legs just a little more? And that’s right – hold the ball nice and high.”

Or, if you’re feeling particularly frisky, you might tell him, “Why not grab a couple of pins and stick your foot between them? That’s right – I said your foot. No, they don’t have to be the same make of pins. Just any old two pins.”

I would be amazed if I wasn’t amazed already.


[1] This isn’t a problem in horse racing. There the line between horse and rider is clearly drawn, and there’s acknowledgement that one is useless without the other. I think it’s because we attribute human elements to a horse that we would never attribute to a car. And the Brits are involved.
[2] Let me rephrase: My mom went shopping and took me along. My role in this was roughly the same as a mannikin’s.