Are Sports A Hundo P Fixed?

 I've said right here on this blog before, not a hundo P tongue in cheek, that I've always been one to enjoy a good conspiracy theory. What? Hundo P? Oh that's a new thing in my hobby - hockey card collecting - that I find so annoying that I'm ironically trying to make it happen. I've been using it in comments on Facebook and I thought it was time for it to make an appearance in my blog. I'm sure they didn't invent it at Upper Deck, the phrase was probably firmly established in the urban dictionary before the subset in Series One Hockey cards came out a couple days ago, but it's the first place I saw it. I'd give you a screen shot or photo of a "Hundo P" card as an example, but they're so new, I can't find one on the old interweb just yet. 

This is not the first thing that has bugged me about card collecting, or, as you'll see when I finally trundle round to the point of this post, sport in general lately either. "Let's go!" When did this become synonymous with hooray, yay, yes, all right, etc.? I get that athletes say this at the same time as those other things when they're celebrating a goal or a good play. Hell, I've even said it. While playing sports. And it didn't mean the same thing, it meant let's go. Let's use this good play to inspire further good play. Let's go. Not yeehaw, yippee, excellent or fuckin' A. Okay I'm being pedantic, but I know what the word "pedantic" means, and I know what "let's go" means. It bothers me when people, maybe people who've never played sports, just hijack a phrase like this. I've always fancied myself a descriptivist linguistically speaking, but as I get older and I see more changes in my beloved language, I am starting to reluctantly identify with the prescriptivists more. 

I guess I'll put a vid in here because it shows a few of the things I will mention. At 3:31 AND 7:10 you will hear the "Let's go." This might have been the first guy I heard it from for all I know. He also gets Hundo P's at the 2:17 and 6:39 mark if you want to see what they look like. Of course THIS guy gets the MackDavid! He's a lucky little shit and I don't like him. Admittedly, envy IS one of the reasons. I have two boxes of Upper Deck Series One on the way to Korea as I type this and I am pretty sure I won't get half the value out of them that this guy gets out of his ONE box. He always seems to be lucky. Maybe he only posts his good box breaks, but it's not just his freakishly good luck that bugs me about him. 

He's a Habs fan too. LOL. Actually, that doesn't bug me, I am only kidding about that, but what DOES grate on the spine a little is the overly French pronunciations of players' names. I dunno, maybe, being a Montreal Canadiens fan, he speaks French, but come on, man! 1:16 Johnathan Marchessault. We KNOW he's French, dude. You don't need to say "Jeunne-a-TUN" Marchessault. He does that with Alexis Lafreniere too. I'm sure I'm not the first guy who has been bugged by this as Antonio Mendosa can tell you. (The old SNL skit?) 

TheHabsGuy clearly knows his stuff, and I have to say his OVER-pronunciation bugs me less than some of the American business collectors who can't pronounce names because they have never watched a game of hockey in their lives. However, the other thing that bugs me about this kid is that he IS what I like to call a business collector. When he gets his Trevor Zegras, at the 7 minute mark, his LAST Young Guns, almost as if this whole break was a set-up, after his initial "Let's go" reaction, the first thing he says is "This is gonna go straight up onto E-bay." Now, I checked and there are already Trevor Zegras Young Guns for sale on Ebay. 150 bucks seems to be the going rate. That's what the box cost. The whole box! And you'll notice, he was actually hoping for a Cole Caufield Young Guns. The Caufield is only 120 bucks on Ebay, so I guess, since Cole Caufield plays for his Habs, maybe TheHabsGuy isn't a hundo p business collector. See what I did there?

Okay, here's where I put on my tinfoil hat. I'm not saying any of this happened... BUT, what if TheHabsGuy opened several packs of UD Series 1 VERY carefully and arranged the cards so that he'd get MORE than anyone has the right to expect from a box? He got a clear cut YG of Kole Lind, which he says himself is a case hit. That means you only get one per case. There are 12 boxes in a case, so he's already bucked the odds by a long shot with this one card. Then he gets the chase card. Everybody wants the Zegras Young Guns cuz it pays for the box. His disappointment at not getting Caufield could just be acting. HEY! If you notice, we don't see him open every pack. The Lind pack, we saw most of it, but some of them, we don't see him open the pack at all. If you notice when he opens the Zegras pack, there's a pause. The cam stopped and started again. He could have easily put the card in there during the pause. The very next pack is a YG canvas. ANOTHER rare card! Oskar Steen is not a big name, but this box is just too good! 

Hear me out here. What if Upper Deck thought TheHabsGuy had enough Youtube followers that he could influence the purchase of their product? What if they SENT him a Zegras and told him to sneak it into one of his packs to make the viewers think it's possible that THEY could pull a Zegras too? Impossible you say? Well let me double down. What if Upper Deck took all the Zegras cards OUT because they're just too valuable and they don't want people getting them basically for free? UD Series 1 was late this year. I pre-ordered mine on December 17th last year after it had already been delayed once or twice. It was delayed something like 4 months. During that 4 months, Trevor Zegras did this:

Then, he did this:

Then at the All Star game, he did THIS:

... AND DIDN'T WIN!!! The hometown player won and didn't even score. It was a travesty, but it's the All Star Game. Nobody takes it too seriously. Except the refs doing off side instant replays. But I digress...

Now I could leave this part out, but I think you will understand why I am not gonna... Trevor Zegras is American. Not just American, from New fuckin' York. He's apple pie. He's baseball. Why, he could be the American Gretzky! Why would Upper Deck just GIVE him away? Do you reckon the delay in Series 1 was partially to remove thousands of his YG cards, then repack millions of packs? Before you answer, I have more...

I have been waiting. like all collectors, anxiously for this product and I don't mind telling you, watching Zegras' stock go up knowing I had two boxes of UD Series 1, each with 6-8 Young Guns inside, just made me MORE excited to bust them open. So when March second rolled around, I was watching every break of UD S1 on YouTube I possibly could. I probably watched 60-70 boxes opened before I got to TheHabsGuy. I don't like him. I usually don't even watch his breaks. But until I watched the video above, I saw ZERO Zegras YG cards pulled. None! And I watched two vids where two people opened two entire CASES without hitting him. That's 48 boxes just from them! That's minimum 288 Young Guns. Let's say 300 since they got some clear cut and canvas Young Guns. But they didn't get a Zegras. I've seen a dozen Caufields pulled already. Lots of the other good ones too that are supposed to have the same odds as Zegras. Is it me? Am I smelling something fishy here or being a conspiracy theorist?

Now in case you don't collect hockey cards. Bwaah haaa haaaa! I know none of you do. But does anybody watch football? We just finished easily the most dramatic NFL post season ever. You'd get no argument. EVER. It was so dramatic, I thought it mighta been TOO dramatic. Anybody else? In fact I posted after wildcard weekend that it was the best weekend of NFL football I can recall. The very next week blew that away! How is this possible? 

I'll tell you how it's possible: Professional sports are fixed. I've gone most of my life knowing most things in the real world are fixed. It's not an equitable job market; I am not gonna find my soul mate and if I do against all odds, we'd have too many obstacles to overcome; politics is almost a hundo P corrupt; banks should be more illegal than loan sharks; there are probably fewer than a thousand giant douchebags who run the whole world; but DAMMIT, I've tried really hard to maintain my faith in the purity and honesty of athletic competition. Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds juicing up? I can live through that. Strikes and lockouts have made me angry and even led to boycotts, but I've always come back. Watching hockey and knowing they're really only skating 75% or so for most regular season games. That's okay as long as they bring it in the playoffs. Even when the losing teams try to lose more at the end of the season in order to get a better pick in the draft. We know that's happened and it's okay. Bobby Clarke breaking Valeri Kharlamov's ankle. Cheating, but at least it was cheating within the sport by a guy playing it. It was cheating to win. But what I've tried to avoid looking into, what just might end up costing me one of, if not THE greatest pleasure of my lifetime, professional sports, is if I find out they're fixed for MONEY. Listen carefully to this next vid:

Scary isn't it? I'm not a hundo P convinced that hockey is totally fixed yet. I've almost given up on baseball and if there is a lockout, which I think there will be this season, I may just give up MLB and concentrate on Korean baseball. I did for a few seasons after the last one. NFL is looking more and more phony and I've already given up on basketball. 

If I find out for sure that money has destroyed hockey too, I'm going to Lhasa to dedicate the rest of my life to meditation and self-discipline. I'll find purity of spirit if I can't find purity in sport. It would be so nice if every CEO of every company, every politician, every banker, every sport team owner were a yogi or yogini who had dedicated his/her life to spiritual and mental pursuits and not the empty pursuits of money and power! But that would be Shangri La. That's never been a REAL place has it? 

So if I stop posting, I'm either dead or here:

Don't come looking for me.