This is what a Holiday Inn looked like in the early 1990s.
For businesspeople on the go, it represented a clean room, a parking spot for your rental car, and plenty of space for conferences and meetings on the lower level.
For an adolescent Mr. Nine Pockets, it represented absolute peak hockey card collecting years.
I'll explain.
On the first Friday of every month, my hockey-loving friend and I would meet up after dinner and walk over to the card show at the local Holiday Inn. We'd go around the rows of tables a few times, take note of which products were available, gawk at the prices of the vintage cards under glass, and privately poke fun at some of the dealers.
But the prime target of our modest stack of paper money was packs of hockey cards. A couple of times we even split an entire box! After the show, we'd walk back to my house, open some packs, turn on the TV and the Sega Genesis, and hunker down for a few games of NHL hockey. (E . . . A . . . Sports . . . It's in the game!)
The memories are strong. And it was a strong time for the NHL. They'd been celebrating their 75th anniversary, and players were lighting it up. Ten of them would end up scoring more than 100 points by season's end (including defenseman Brian Leetch!) Brett Hull led the league with 70 goals, Wayne Gretzky led with 90 assists, and Mario Lemieux beat everyone with 131 points. A whopping 17 players hit the 40-goal milestone.
As for me and my friend, we weren't only playing video game hockey. We were young high-schoolers playing on the same ice hockey team. We meshed well out there, so much so that our coach was reluctant to ever split us up.
So those packs meant a lot to us. The players we found inside were the guys we looked up to. The guys we marveled at. The guys we tried to emulate after we saw their highlights on ESPN.
It goes without saying, then, that we opened all sorts of hockey packs that year. But none more than Upper Deck.
And we needed to.
The low series consisted of 500 cards, while the high series added another 200. For the era, it was an absolutely enormous amount of hockey cards.
Here's a table showing the major sets that season, and their card totals.
It's a remarkable thing, because just a few years prior, the largest set of hockey cards would have been O-Pee-Chee's flagship offering, which totaled 396. If you were in the States, the Topps equivalents had half that much—198.
So you'd be right to think about those 700 cards and wonder if it was too much. After all, that's a lot of content to create—especially for a company that had just entered the hockey card market one year earlier.
If the set was designed poorly, or contained sub-par photography, those negative aspects would be evident 700 times over. But if the set was designed well, the sheer number of cards could be a good thing.
The question is, Did Upper Deck make it a good thing?
Yes.
Yes they did.
And those five cards were far from the only fantastic ones.
I don't know if any set captured the brilliant intensity of hockey battles more than 1991-92 Upper Deck. Look here.
Flip through the set and you'll also see some shots being fired.
Which can lead to some exuberant goal celebrations.
And that wasn't all. 1991-92 Upper Deck provided some captivating camera angles that hockey fans had never seen on cardboard—or maybe anywhere else!
They also showed players in practice, wearing practice jerseys. That was different.
The overall design was pretty good, too. That "NHL 75" logo was present on all the cards, swooping across the bottom. Team names got the same font treatment, set in team colors. Simple, effective, and cohesive.
And don't forget the card backs. Consistent with the other early Upper Deck sets, these cards contained just a few rows of stats in order to make room for the full-color image. Sometimes you'd have room for a one- or two-line blurb.
But what about the goalies? You ask.
Don't worry. Upper Deck didn't forget about them.
The photographers seemed to understand how important these guys were to their teams, and how dynamic and acrobatic the position could be. They even understood that such great action shouldn't be restricted to vertical layouts.
Images like the ones you've seen so far played a big part in launching Upper Deck to the top of the hockey card mountain.
The whole thing made me so nostalgic that I decided to do something I'd never done with a non-vintage set:
Put it in a binder.
That's right. Over the years, I've always reserved binder space for completed sets that were printed on vintage-style cardboard (i.e., 1980s and older). But recently I've found myself becoming more nostalgic about some card sets from the early '90s. So the "newer" Upper Deck cardstock gets a pass on the rules.
Here's the thing, though. Putting this set in a binder actually revealed a few disappointments.
First, the set led off with a few "Soviet Stars" cards, which felt odd. There was no accompanying checklist, and each card front featured Cyrillic writing with no real explanation. Although it's important to note how huge it was to have the wave of super-talented Russian players joining the NHL at that time, I think Upper Deck would have still been better off starting the set with some Star Rookies, like they did for their inaugural baseball release.
Next, it seems like the cards weren't numbered with 9-pocket pages in mind. Here's one example.
The San Jose Sharks were the exciting new kid on the block, and Upper Deck gave them 8 low-numbered cards in a row. If they'd only added one more, it would have made a cool page for young Sharks fans. But instead you have a checklist for the 1991 Draft Choice subset in that last spot. A little weird.
A third let-down is the amount of times multiple players from the same team end up on the same binder page.
Four different Oilers, plus two Kings. This kind of thing seems avoidable.
They're all minor disappointments, I know. But putting this set together and looking through the cards brought back so much collecting energy for me that I guess I was expecting everything to make sense in 9-pocket pages.
Regardless, I'm keeping the set in the binder. It's absolutely one that I want to slide off the shelf every once in a while and flip through.
Nostalgia and good vibes. That's what this hobby is about, right?
And now we've got to get back to the set as a whole, outside of the binder issues. There was a lot more to 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey.
It's about the subsets.
Oh man, were there subsets. (I count 11 of them!)
More than 200 of the 700 cards in the set belong to a subset. In fact, if you were to start at card #1, you'd have to get all the way to #46 to find a regular ol' base card!
As mentioned earlier, the Soviet Stars led off the set. Directly after that was the Canada Cup subset, which featured big-time stars playing for their home countries.
In the high numbers, the World Junior Championship subset did the same thing for up-and-coming stars. These kinds of subsets were extra-cool for a young hockey collector who was learning just how international the sport was.
The high numbers also contained the All-Stars.
And a nice little tribute to some Hockey Heroes.
Bloodlines cards showed how the sport of hockey could sometimes be a family affair.
And of course we wondered which Star Rookies would pan out.
Even if they didn't, you had the All-Rookie Team.
Oh, and let's not forget about the Draft Choices . . .
. . . Or the Young Guns!
It's pretty clear to see that Upper Deck was all-in on the rookie craze. And guess what? The Young Guns series is still going strong to this day, which I find quite cool.
Overall, thanks to all the subsets, Upper Deck managed to hit some big names in the rookie department. I tried to show some of them above, but here's a more complete list of incredible talent:
Vladimir Malakhov, Alexei Zhamnov, Viacheslav Kozlov, Ziggy Palffy, Martin Rucinsky, Teemu Selanne. Nicklas Lidstrom, Peter Forsberg, Dominik Hasek, John Leclair, Doug Weight, Tony Amonte, Darius Kasparaitis, Alexei Yashin, Nikolai Khabibulin, Alexei Kovalev, Alexei Zhitnik, Sandis Ozolinsh, Sami Kapanen, Keith Tkachuk.
Back in 1991-92, I would have had quite a few of those studs in top loaders.
Speaking of studs, the artist behind the team checklists (Steven R. Cusano) did a terrific job.
There were also a couple of inserts we all hoped to pull from packs.
Award-Winner Holograms made up a 9-card insert set.
These were wayyy better than the previous year's holograms, which you could hardly make out.
The Brett Hull Hockey Heroes checklist was also 9 cards deep. Mr. Hull was big man on campus at the time. Here's card number 7.
You even a chance of pulling an autographed version of the 9th card in the set, serial numbered to 2,500!
Finally, here's an example of a base card checklist (it's probably the only plain thing about 1991-92 Upper Deck), plus the front and back of an all-star fan ballot that was included in every pack.
Fold open the ballot and you'll find a big list of players from the Wales and Cambpell Conferences. Just call that 1-900 number and key in your selections. ($0.95 for the first minute, $0.55 for each additional minute. Ouch!)
And look at the back of the ballot, toward the bottom: The fan voting was sponsored by CCM and Starter. Remember those 1990s Starter jackets? You just couldn't beat 'em.
So that's 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey. I'm very happy to have the entire set in a binder now. Maybe the next step is to buy a Sega Genesis system and a couple of the EA Sports hockey games, set it up at home, and see if I can get in touch with my old hockey buddy. Talk about a dose of nostalgia!
How about you readers and collectors?
Any good memories of 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey, or any of the other sports that Upper Deck released that year?
Did any of you have a Starter jacket back then?
When I was a teenager I had a satin bomber—Minnesota North Stars version. It was all black, with green, white, and yellow trim around the collar and cuffs. Wish I still had it.
Share in the comment section, and thanks for reading!
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