Sports Cards Ate My Brain

After they made the 1970-71 Basketball "tall" set Topps decided to go with standard sized cards for the next few years; until 1976 that is. The 1976-77 Topps cards are way too big.  They are hard to store except in a shoe box. Having said that, I somehow ended up with some cards from the set. John Drew was the Hawks leading scorer for several years in the late 1970's.  He was eventually part of the trade that got Dominique Wilkins for the Hawks. Not sure about this picture.  What was Topps thinking putting this on a card? My best card from the set is this David Thompson rookie card.  I don't think I ever saw Thompson play in a game.  I hear he was pretty amazing. Tell me what you think of oversized cards.

Working at home I've been using my lack of commute time to go through old boxes and see what I want to keep an what I will give to someone. I found my old basketball stash and found some nice cards. Here are the top ones: This is a 1997-98 Metal Championship cards.  The regular Metal series card has skyrocketed.  This one h as gone up also since The Last Dance documentary has been airing on ESPN (I have NOT been watching it.)  I pulled a couple of other Jordan's out also but did not scan them. A 2007-2008 Topps Gold Parallel Lebron.  It does have some wear issues but this is a keeper for me so no worries. 2014 Upper Deck Goodwin Champions Giannis (I am not typing the last name!) I remembered I had this card someone and thougt it was my only Giannis but I stumbled upon this: 2014-15 Panini Prizm Prizm Parallel.  It's shiny!  This is by far my most valuable basketball card. That is it for my Giannis collection. I also found 2 2009 ...

When I found those Topps Super football cards there was this lovely Calvin Murphy rookie card from 1970-71 Topps with them. Like the Topps set from the year before tese cards were about 40% taller than a standard card.  The colors on the back are pretty much identical to the Topps Super football cards from the same year.  Either these were hot colors in 1970 or Topps had way too much of this orange color ink combo, I already had several cards from this set.  Here are the best ones. ============================================= Comment on the photography.  I suck at taking pictures with my phone.  I apologize.

So Georgia lost to Belmont in the first round of the NIT this year.  While this is considered an upset, it is not a surprise to me.  UGA basketball history is full of probations and disappointing teams.  Winning 20 games in a season is almost unheard of so this year's team settled on 19. Georgia basketball was terrible until Hugh Durham came along in the early 80's.  He somehow lured Dominique Wilkins to Athens and then recruited some fine player around him.  In 1983 Georgia made it's one and only Final Four appearance, losing to the famous Jim Valvano NC State team that year. Georgia's star player on that team was Vern Fleming. Vern came down to Athens from New York City and ended up being a first round draft pick by the Pacers. This is card 83 from the 1986 Star set.  For those of you who may be unaware, there was no major card set available for the NBA during the mid-eighties.  I had no way to get these cards near my house and ended up g...

To recap:  These are the cards I would take with me if I could take ten 9-card pages with me to Mars. I decided that each part of my collection cannot have more than one page.  The cards must fit into a regulation page as far as height and width but I am taking liberties with how thick some of the cards are. Next up is basketball.  I rarely watch basketball anymore and I recently realized that the NBA lost me as a big fan when they started allowing zone defense. 1952-53 Wheaties I don't know why I love this card so much but I just think it is seriously cool. 1985-86 Star #83 Star distributed cards in team sets at hobby stores.  I got this card out of a box of Crunch & Munch.  It was a great pull for me since Vern was a star at UGA and played on their 1983 Final Four team. 1986-87 Fleer #91 This was the first widely distributed NBA set in a few years so there are many rookie cards in the set.  This is a great card of my second f...