The 1989-90 OPC Hockey Sticker Album Project

My first experience in this hobby came at a very young age—I was probably about 6 years old—and involved not cards, but stickers. 

 

 

At some point in 1983, Dad brought home a baseball sticker album and some packs of stickers for me. Throughout the season, he'd occasionally bring home a few more packs of those stickers, and I'd very happily open them up, find where each sticker was meant to go in the album, and stick 'em in there as carefully as a 6-year-old could.

 

Over the next few years, I became a baseball-loving, Little League–playing, card-collecting kid. But something new came along by the end of the decade.

 

Ice hockey.

 

An elementary school friend introduced me to the sport, and I loved it. I soaked up as much knowledge as I could, and started playing the sport as well—first in sneakers, then on roller skates, and eventually on the ice.

 

Hockey stickers were available in my area, and I do remember buying a few packs during that time. But by and large, I was buying packs of hockey cards. They were from the 1988-89 Topps set. (Sticker albums were a young kid's game, and I was almost in middle school, gosh darn it.) So I never really got the experience of filling up a hockey sticker album like I did for baseball.

 

Very recently, however, I came across an online listing for some hockey sticker packs from that same time period. 

 

 

A complete box of 48, to be precise. 

 

 

 

The price was so reasonable that I considered buying it right then and there, just for some fun and nostalgia.

 

But then I thought of something else:

 

What if I find a blank sticker album from that same season, buy that as well, and then open the packs and actually fill the album? 

 

Because really, what else would I do with a box of 48 hockey sticker packs? Put it in my closet and let it sit there?

Didn't seem right.

 

So, off I went to search for a blank 1989-90 O-Pee-Chee hockey sticker album. And I found one at a reasonable price. 

 

 

  

I mean, look at that image. How can you not want to look inside that album and fill it up with stickers? 

 

Check it out:

 

 

 

Studying all those stats on the inside front cover would have had 1989-90 Gregory busy for a couple of weeks, that's for sure.

 

Now here are a few team pages.

 

 

 

Some teams, like the Canadiens, received a two-page spread. Patrick Roy was a very big deal back then. 

 

 

Other teams received just one page. I chose this spread to show you the all-star page. (I wonder if those stickers have gold foil like the baseball all-star stickers often had.)

 

 

 

And here's one more team page, plus the super-nostalgic sticker order form instructions. It's so cool that back then you could hand-write a list of stickers you needed, mail it away with your payment (10¢ per sticker), and then in a few weeks Topps or O-Pee-Chee would send you what you needed.

 

So let's get down to business here.

 

Now that I have the stickers and the album in hand, I've decided that I will indeed go for it. But will one box of sticker packs allow me to compete the album? Here's some number crunching:

 

48 packs x 6 stickers per pack = 288 total stickers

 

There are 270 stickers in the complete set, which at first doesn't make set completion seem promising. But remember, quite a few of them come two stickers to a panel, like this:

 

 

 

So really, there are only 182 different sticker panels I'd have to pull from the total of 288. 

 

There aren't any variations on the fronts, which means that as long as I pull fewer than 106 duplicate panels, I should be able to complete the set. In other words, even if almost 1 out of every 3 panels is a duplicate, I'll still complete it.

 

What I'm thinking of doing is opening a few packs at a time, maybe once a month or so. For each round, I'll post an entry here on the blog to show you which stickers I pulled, where they go in the album, and a bit of information about some of the players and teams featured on the stickers.

 

I hope you'll follow along in this series, because I just talked with 1989-90 Gregory, and he is psyched. He thinks this project will be totally rad, and that you'll have an awesome time, too. 

Don't worry if you can't pronounce names like Luc Robitaille, Pat Elynuik, or Vincent Damphousse. 1989-90 Gregory didn't know, either.

I'll get this started in a few weeks. Stay tuned!