That Crow Just Stole My Pack of Cards!

Have I got a story for you.

A few weeks ago, my brother booked our first round of golf of the season. His best friend from childhood was going to join us, and when the three of us get together, it's always a great time.

 

Unbeknownst to either of them, I'd picked up some loose packs of golf cards over the winter, so I thought I'd add to our good time by bringing some of them to the course—one for each of us to open. After all, I'd done a couple of pack rips on the golf course with my brother in the past, and I knew his friend would be into it as well.

 

So, before we teed off, I brought out the packs. This time, they were 1991 Pro Set PGA Tour golf cards. The guys got a kick out of them, and we agreed that we'd open the packs at some point during the round—maybe as a little break after the first 9 holes.

 

Excited about the day, we got started. It was cold, windy, and rainy, but it didn't matter. We were just happy to be back on the course together. Some less-than-stellar scores on the first couple of holes didn't even faze us. Neither did the chilly and damp air.

 

After a little while, however, the good vibes began to diminish. Scoring proved to be really tough. By the time we reached the 6th green, those golf packs were the last thing on our minds.

 

Then, as we were finishing up on the green, my brother noticed a crow standing at the edge of one of the nearby bunkers.

 

"What does that crow have in its mouth?" He asked.

 

We all looked over. It was something shiny.

 

At that moment, the crow dropped the shiny object and started pecking at it. And that's when my brother realized what it was.

 

"That's my pack of cards!"

 

It turns out that while we were reading our putts, that sneaky bird had swooped down toward my brother's golf cart, noticed the shiny foil wrapper, picked it right up, and flew over to the green—almost as if to mock us. Immediately, my brother's friend jogged over, hoping that little jerk of a bird would drop the pack and fly away.

 

Well, it did fly away. But it did so with the pack firmly secured in its beak.

We didn't have time to snap a picture of the culprit, but it's quite likely that right now, in a crow's nest on that golf course, there's a shiny green and gold pack of 35-year-old golf cards.

Miffed at the events that had just transpired (including some missed putts for par), we walked back to our golf carts. That's when I noticed a plastic container turned upside down on the ground near my golf cart. It was the container that housed my peanut butter sandwich.

 

That pesky crow had tried to get into that, too! 

 

Thankfully, it couldn't open the top, so my sandwich was safe.

What an experience. 

 

But if you think that's all, just wait. Because a bit later in the round, another crow swiped an unopened hand warmer packet from my brother's cart and flew up into a tree with it. These little pickpockets were everywhere!

I guess we've got to give credit where credit is due. I mean, on both occasions we were completely oblivious to the thievery that Heckle and Jeckle were getting away with. It's a pretty good racket, when you think about it. They wait for golfers to leave their carts, and then they sneak down to root through the items inside, taking whatever they can fit in their beaks before the golfers return.

 

Ultimately, what it meant was that our hands would be a little colder, and we were down to two packs of cards. And that wasn't going to work. Thankfully, I had a few more packs of golf cards at home, and we were all planning to go there after the round for lunch anyway. I told the guys about the extra packs, and they were happy to hear it. From there, it was back to golf—keeping an eye out for any crows the rest of the way.

 

And that's how it happened.

 

Now let's talk a little bit about 1991 Pro Set PGA Tour golf.

 

The set is made up of a whopping 285 cards, which means that even back in 1991, avid golf fans wouldn't have recognized some of the professional golfers they found inside of packs. But there are still some good players in the set, for sure. 

 

Rookie cards include Fred Funk, Jeff Maggert, Brad Faxon, and US Open Winner Lee Janzen. You can also find plenty of notable stars of the era, like Payne Stewart, Davis Love III, Mark O'Meara, Fred Couples, Greg Norman, Fuzzy Zoeller, and Ray Floyd. And don't forget about some of the legends who were playing on the Senior Tour (now called the Champions Tour), like Tom Watson, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Gary Player, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, and Jack Nicklaus.

 

Oh, and perhaps the biggest card of all?

 

A John Daly rookie card. 

With that being said, let's finally get to the pack rip and see what we found.  

 

I'm not going to show every card. There are 12 in each pack, which makes 36 golf cards in total. That's too much to look at here, even for me. Instead, I'm going to show the best three cards that each of us pulled. Choices were based on the skill level of the player, the look of the photograph, or the awesome 1990s clothing and hairstyles on display. (Or, if we're lucky, all of those criteria.)

 

Let's get to it.

 

First, here are the top three from my brother's pack.

 

 

Gary McCord has the sweet CBS Sports baseball cap, the striped polo, and the mustache. Blaine McCallister is wearing a straw hat that could only be from the '90s, while Sir Bob Charles is sporting the classy sweater-vest and visor combination.

 

Next, here are the top three cards from my brother's friend's pack.

 

Wayne Levi shows us that visors and multi-stripe polos were a popular choice back then. Don Bies is grinding hard to read a putt. And there's the man, Arnold Palmer.

 

 

And here are the top three cards from my pack.

 

Brian Claar gets a nice action shot for his card, blasting the ball out of a bunker. Charles Coody and his caddie read the green in a classic pro golf image. And there's a Lee Trevino Player of the Year card. Woo-hoo!

 

I thought I might take home the "Best Mustache" title with that Brian Claar card. Check out the back for a different view.

 

 

But when my brother pulled out that Gary McCord card and we saw the handlebar, we knew it was over. Just look at this thing.

 

 

As for the other cards, I think I'll call it a draw between Lee Trevino and Arnold Palmer. But it's important to note that 1990 was Mr. Trevino's first year on the Senior Tour, and he absolutely steamrolled it to earn Player of the Year honors. Check out these stats from the back of the card:

 

• #1 in eagles made (14)
• #1 in scoring average (68.89)
• #1 in greens in regulation (76.7%)
  
• #1 in putts per GIR (1.736) 
• #3 in driving accuracy (74%)
• #4 in driving distance (267.9 yds)
• #5 in birdies (379)
• #5 in sand saves (53.1%)
  

 

As for how we did on the golf course?

The scores are not worth mentioning. Earlier in the post I alluded to the weather. Well, to elaborate, we teed off around 8:45 that morning. It was 39 degrees Fahrenheit. Windy. A little rain. And it actually got even colder during the middle of the round. Overall, it was just a rough day out there. We hardly saw another golfer anywhere on the course the entire time. In a way, that was amazing. In another way, it told us that maybe it just wasn't a day to be out playing golf for five hours.

 

Regardless, we had a great time, and we'll talk about the day for a long while. The pickpocket crow story just tops it off.

Now some questions for you readers:

 

Do you have a favorite golf card of the bunch?

 

What do you think about these pack rips on the golf course? Do we have a fun tradition in the works?

 

Let me know in the comment section, and thanks for reading. 

 

Embracing the Best and Worst of the Junk Wax Era: Hockey Card Edition

A couple of months ago, I was inspired by Nick (of the Dime Boxes) and Night Owl to post a list of what I considered the best and worst sets of the junk wax era for baseball. I was a young collector back in the junk wax days, and certainly opened my share of baseball packs during that time. But there was also another sport I collected: 

 

Hockey. 

 

So I thought I'd create a similar best and worst list for the coolest sport on ice.

Interestingly, the junk wax era for hockey cards didn't follow quite the same timeline. In the second half of the 1980s, when baseball junk wax was booming, you still only had two choices for hockey cards: Topps and O-Pee-Chee. But that all changed during the 1990-91 season, as FIVE new brands emerged on the scene (Pro Set, Score, Bowman, OPC Premier, and Upper Deck). It was a wild time to be a collector, that's for sure.

For the sake of this post, I think I'll set the junk wax hockey years as 1990-91 through 1994-95. After that, a whole bunch of premium brands came around, with all sorts of inserts and parallels and rare cards. I'd say that effectively ended the era.

So let's start with my selections for the five worst junk wax sets, in no particular order.

 

 

 

1991-92 Pro Set

The 1991-92 Pro Set design was never going to be as rambunctious as the inaugural version the year before (we'll get to that one later). However, I think the company might have gone too far in the opposite direction this time, and fallen flat. The loud colors and stripes of the 1990-91 set were replaced with. . . almost nothing. Just a full-bleed image and a little black tab across the bottom for the player name (not even a position!). Even some of the subsets in this set were boring. You could only tell one from another by a little half-circle banner over the team logo that indicated what subset card you were looking at. In addition, the photography was not great at times, with images that were a bit blurry, or that were strangely cropped. The black tab can kind of get in the way of the action on the card, too, as evidenced by Dale Hunter on the face-off and Chris Winnes taking a slap shot up there. Maybe the design team at Pro Set was still exhausted from the previous year.

 

 

 

 

1991-92 Score

 

Yeesh. Score was really trying to cash in on excitable collectors during the 1991-92 season. They produced three variations of the same set, each with a different color for the borders. Card backs were written in English, in French, or both. The adolescent version of me sure did get swept up in it, buying plenty of packs of the American (purple border) and Canadian English (red or light blue border with purple interior) versions. I might have bought packs of the Canadian Bilingual version too (red or light blue border with green interior), but I don't remember seeing packs in card shops or at card shows very often in my region of the US. It's true that there were a few exciting insert cards available in each set that featured Bobby Orr—including an autographed version. And occasionally a player's photo did differ from one version of the set to the next. But that certainly doesn't rescue 1991-92 Score from my bottom 5.

 

1993-94 Topps Premier

 

Back in 1990-91, O-Pee-Chee released their first premium set, called "Premier". It went over pretty well with collectors, and for the next two seasons, O-Pee-Chee continued with the brand. Then in 1993-94, Topps decided to jump in with "Topps Premier". It was the same exact set as the O-Pee-Chee version, other than the lack of French text on the card backs. I think I'd learned my lesson from Score a couple of years prior, and didn't fall for the Topps Premier hoopla—even with the allure of the special Black Gold inserts, which were admittedly pretty cool. 1993-94 Topps Premier was also one of the early hockey sets that suffered from "bricking" due to the ultra-varnish coating, which was another strike against it. Adding to the negatives, it was a time in the hobby when close-cropped player photos were in style, across many sets. Too close. I mean, look at how cramped those three guys are.

 

1993-94 Fleer Power Play

 

The irregular size and shape of these cards was eye catching, that's for sure. But I also think that a lot of folks bought one or two packs for the novelty of it, and then just never bought more. If that wasn't enough of a deterrent for collectors, the large set size (520 cards) probably did the trick. Even though it turned out that the cards measured the same as the vintage "tall boy", I didn't know many collectors who were willing to buy all the unique storage supplies necessary to complete and display the set, or even finish a team set. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Power Play did not return the next season. The thing is, Fleer didn't do such a bad job with the photography, oftentimes setting part of the player outside of the frame for that 3D effect. This works well on the taller template—especially in the digital image. As for how they looked on the actual cards in hand? I'm not so sure. Maybe the images would have worked better in some other form. Just imagine those three cards above as banners hanging throughout the concourse of an NHL arena, for example.

 

 

1994-95 Upper Deck Be a Player

 

I think 1994-95 Upper Deck Be a Player can be argued as a best set AND a worst set. It's a potential worst set because of the photography. It's a potential best set because it was the first one outrageous enough to put an autographed card into every pack. The list of autographs was an astounding 178 cards deep, and it contained many of the big names of the time: Brodeur, Selanne, Bourque, Leetch, LaFontaine, Shanahan, Gretzky, Yzerman, Kariya, Yashin, Lidstrom. 

 

The big negative, though, is for that photography. There are players standing outside in the cold, wearing ski jackets. There are players on the golf course, wearing polo shirts and khaki shorts. There are players wearing NHLPA jerseys instead of their team's jersey. (There was a lockout during part of the '94-95 NHL season.) Ultimately, even though this inaugural edition of Be A Player really changed the game with the one-autograph-per-pack thing, I still have to put it in the bottom 5.

 

 

Now let's get to the top 5, also in no particular order.

 

 

 

 

1991-92 Upper Deck

 

If the inaugural Upper Deck hockey release came out with a bang, their follow-up set in 1991-92 was even louder—and in a good way. The designers really upped their game. You've got some fantastic subsets like the Canada Cup and All-Rookie Team, plus much better quality on the hologram inserts. In addition, there are lots of great rookie cards to be found (Teemu Selanne, Nicklas Lidstrom, Peter Forsberg, John Leclair, Alexei Yashin, Alexei Kovalev, and Keith Tkachuk to name a few). This is probably the Upper Deck set I collected the most back then, and I had a lot of fun doing it. I still remember walking to the local card show with my friend on the first Friday of each month, going back to my house with packs and packs of 1991-92 Upper Deck, and playing NHL Hockey on Sega Genesis while we flipped through the cards.

 

 

 

 

1990-91 Pro Set

Despite the many errors in this set (and many stripes of many colors), I've got to put this set in my top 5. It's large and colorful—perfect for young collectors—and both Series I and Series II have some great rookies. On top of the standard subsets like All-Stars, Draft Picks, and Award Winners, you've also got some fun subsets like Head Coaches, Career Leaders, and even Referees! Oh, and collectors had the rare chance to pull a Stanley Cup hologram card. The photos in this set weren't always the best, but they also showed some decent action and weren't cropped so tightly or oddly as some other sets of the hockey junk wax era. That's nice.

 

 

 

 

1990-91 OPC Premier

 

I remember packs of 1990-91 OPC Premier being tough to find back then. But if you did find them, you had a good chance at putting the complete set together—it's only 132 cards deep. There are certainly some big-name rookies (Jagr, Modano, Fedorov, Roenick, Bondra, Mogilny, Nolan, Sundin), and a decent design that helps to make it memorable. The photography can sometimes be plain, and I'm not sure this set would have been in my top-5 back in the early 90s, but history has shown that it holds up, and the big rookie cards are still prized among collectors.

 

1990-91 Score

Score made a splash with their inaugural hockey set. Part of the buzz was generated from their exclusive rights to Eric Lindros. He appeared on the final card in the set, and if you purchased a factory set, you received 5 "bonus" Lindros cards that featured him in various photoshoot-style hockey poses. Here in 2024 it might be hard to understand how big of a deal this was, but Lindros was the hottest name in the sport back then, and hockey card companies all wanted a piece of the big power forward. Lindros aside, Score did very well with their first design. There were hardly any errors, especially when compared with some of the other brands. The "hockey rink" design—featuring a blue line, red line, and blue line across the borders—was pretty cool. In addition, there were some fun subsets like "Blaster", "Sniper", "Magician", "Stopper", and "Speedster". Baby-faced Jaromir Jagr and Martin Brodeur rookie cards add to the good grade here.

 

1990-91 Upper Deck

Upper Deck took their baseball card success from 1989 and rolled it right into hockey for the next season. Their photography was unmatched, and gave hockey card collectors the best look they'd ever had into what the sport was all about. (Flip through the set and you'll see that Theo Fleury and John Tonelli up there represent just two of many fantastic, descriptive images.) The tamper-proof foil packs and anti-counterfeiting holograms on the card backs were cutting edge. The rookie cards were highly sought after. And on top of all that, the Young Guns series was created that very first year. It's still going strong to this day, which is truly impressive.

 

So that's my bottom-5 and top-5 hockey sets from the junk wax era. If any of you readers collected hockey cards back then, share some of your rankings in the comment section—or create your own blog post!

Thanks for reading, as always.

Completed Set: 1990-91 Pro Set Hockey (Series I and Series II)

 

 

Pro Set. 

 

If you were a youngster who collected hockey cards in the early 1990s, seeing that brand name has likely brought back a tangled web of emotions. 

 

There was excitement back then, that's for sure. As a young hockey card collector, I clearly remember the brand's tagline: The Hottest Cards on Ice!

But were they? Yeesh. I don't know. That was kind of a bold claim for a company that was creating hockey cards for the first time—especially with Score, OPC Premier, Bowman, and Upper Deck all jumping into the mix that very same hockey season of 1990-91. And although Pro Set's inaugural release did generate some buzz at first, here's what I remember:

 

As collectors began opening packs from all those new hockey card brands, the buzz for Pro Set fell off. And with good reason.

 

First of all, it was riddled with errors (player name misspellings, wrong uniform numbers on the card fronts, incorrect stats on the card backs, wrong player photos altogether), and the photography sometimes left a lot to be desired. On top of that, the set didn't have foil wrappers and holograms like Upper Deck. It didn't have the exclusive rights to Eric Lindros like Score. It didn't have the history and strength of Topps and O-Pee-Chee. So who were they to claim they were the hottest cards on ice? Nobody, that's who.

But looking back, I'll say this: 

 

I appreciate Pro Set.

To use a baseball analogy, they were like the rookie who steps into the batter's box for his first Major League at-bat and swings as hard as he can on the very first pitch he sees, regardless of where it's located in the zone and what type of pitch it is. And I think there's something fun about that type of reckless abandon.

So for the rest of this blog post, I'm going to try to describe just how hard Pro Set swung at their first try with hockey cards. Whether you consider these points positives or negatives is up to you.

 

The set is huge 

Pro Set was released in two parts. Series I consisted of cards 1-405, while Series II went from card 406 to 705. That was an absurd number of hockey cards at the time. We'll get to how Pro Set filled all that space a little later. For now, here's the total number of cards in each of the major hockey releases of 1990-91:

 

 

 

 

I don't know which company finalized their numbers first, or if all the companies were privy to each other's information, but you'd have to think the folks at Pro Set were rubbing their palms together with a good feeling that they were going to churn out the most hockey cards that year.

 

 

The colors are huge

With all the new hockey sets that burst onto the scene in 1990-91, Pro Set had to do something to stand out. And they sure did. With color. Just have a look at these six action cards, for example. 

 

 

 

Those bold horizontal stripes, matched to each team's colors, really stand out. It's a good thing that the cards were numbered sequentially by team. Otherwise, there would have been way too many stripes of way too many colors on any given 9-pocket page.

 

 

 

The subsets are huge

So how did Pro Set increase their bulk? Subsets! In fact, there are more than 130 subset cards in all. Here are some examples.

 

 

 

There were all-stars, award winners, and team logos that sported a 3D metallic look—so cool in the early '90s.

 

 

There were career point leaders, Hall of Famers, and head coaches.

 

 

There were even 22 cards that featured referees!

 

For those of you who didn't watch hockey back then, I'll say that refs were pretty big stars in their own right. Kerry Fraser, Dan Marouelli, Pat Dapuzzo, Bill McCreary, Don Koharski, Paul Stewart, Andy van Hellemond. I remember names like that clearly. I don't think referees today get the same name placement and notoriety.

 

 

The amount of cards with errors and variations is huge

 

 

 

In fact, there's an error on the very first card of the set (pictured on the left). The name "Bourque" is misspelled "Borque" on the front.

 

Oof.

 

As for those other two, the photo on the middle card is not Peter Stastny. It's his teammate, Patrik Sundstrom. (Sundstrom's card features the image of Stastny.) The card on the right is not an error, but a variation. Look closely at Paul Gillis's face. He's got a bloody nose there. Pro Set spotted it early in production and airbrushed the blood out for the rest of the print run.

 

 

 

The number of rookie cards is huge

According to Trading Card Database, there are 213 rookie cards in the 705-card set. A whopping 147 of those rookie cards can be found in Series II. That means about half of Series II consists of rookie cards! Can't blame Pro Set there, as the rookie craze was well underway. And their approach paid dividends. There were some great rookies all around.

 

Series I has Alexander Mogilny, Jeremy Roenick, And Mike Modano.  

 

 

 

 

 

Series II has Sergei Fedorov, Mike Richter, and Jaromir Jagr, along with Ed Belfour, Curtis Joseph, Owen Nolan, Mats Sundin, and Peter Bondra, to name a few more. 

Now here's a card back

Pro Set did pretty well with the space here. The color bars and overall design continue from the card fronts. There's a player photo, some well-organized stats, and at least one paragraph of descriptive text. Unfortunately, a bunch of card backs contain statistical errors and other typos. And I think the team name at the top right could have been a little bigger or bolder. But overall, it's not bad.

Back to the card fronts, now.

 

 

Some of the stars of the era got good-looking cardboard.

 

Goalies got some nice treatment, as well. 

 

Overall, however, there were more misses than hits. Many cards feature players standing around during warmups or play stoppages. And there are quite a few blurry photos throughout the set, too—more than the other 1990-91 sets.

 

Getting back to some interesting aspects, on the left we've got a coupon card that was issued in every pack (10 cents off!). In the middle there's a peculiar "puck" card, which is the final card of the set. And on the right, the ultra-rare Stanley Cup hologram card that was randomly inserted into packs. As far as I know, the print run was limited to 5,000. That doesn't seem at all scarce these days, but when you consider how many packs of Pro Set were churned out that year (millions?), the odds of pulling one of these holograms change dramatically. I sure don't own one. That photo is from the internet.

 

Interestingly, there are no checklists in this set. Just think that with some team checklists and general set checklists, the company could have bumped the totals up to 730!

 

 

In any case, that's 1990-91 Pro Set. With all its faults and foibles, it's still a landmark set of the era. I'm happy to have the whole, big, whopping thing completed. (I might even try to add a couple of the variations next, like the Stastny/Sundstrom cards featuring the correct player photos.)

If you opened packs of Pro Set back in the day, share some memories in the comment section. And if this is your first time seeing the cards in such detail, what do you think?

Now on the Tee, from Springfield, USA . . .

This spring I look forward to getting back into a couple of sports: softball and golf. Last year's softball seasons around here were largely canceled due to COVID. As for golf, I just didn't devote much time to it, even without the restrictions that most other sports and activities suffered.

But it sure is great to get out there on the golf course and walk around in the fresh air for a few hours, especially if you're playing with friends or family. I'll have to make a better effort this season.

The game and I go back quite a while. In fact, my first real job that paid real money was golf related: In the summer between eighth and ninth grade, I caddied for snooty people at a ritzy country club. 

I only lasted one summer.

I know, I know. A little harsh of me. Not everyone who belongs to a country club is snooty. I carried bags for some very down-to-earth people that year.

But the experience makes me think of a guy with a ritzy name who likely does belong to a country club, and who is known to play a good game of golf. I decided to make a custom card for him.

Ah, good show there, Burnsie ol' chum, holding that follow-through and tracking the flight of your drive with steely conviction. 

The card design is from 1991 Pro Set. I used the Senior PGA Tour variation (dark blue color bar on the bottom, and the Senior PGA Tour logo). An absence of card borders and the use of a cartoon image instead of a photograph made this custom a little easier than most of the others I've done so far.

BONUS CARD:

Now that the upper-cruster has been covered, I thought I'd also make a card for one of the best "Everyman" characters ever created.

I mean, who hasn't assumed that very posture of frustration and strength while playing this great game of golf?

This card's design is also from 1991 Pro Set, but uses the PGA version (green color bar on the bottom, and the PGA logo).

Now quit cogitating, Steinmetz, and use an open-faced club. A sand wedge.

And thank you for reading.