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.

---

[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.

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.