Well, to continue in the vein of real life becoming make-believe in which I have been writing for the past several posts... let's talk about the only thing I can really call a hobby I've had my whole life - collecting hockey cards. Just another thing that has been utterly destroyed by money, greed, and deceit so heavy it has parted ways with reality. This is a sad story close to my heart so please don't make fun of me. My name is Dave and I STILL collect hockey cards despite the rabbit hole of filth the hobby has cast itself into.
I remember being a young boy in Hamilton and having something to look forward to in the winter. I was not a huge fan of hockey but I remember the Buffalo Sabre's broadcasts on CHCH TV11. That stood for Canada Hamilton, Canada Hamilton I think. Hamilton was the city that REALLY should have been given the franchise in the 1970-71 season but probably since the other expansion team, the Canucks, were from Canada and the NHL was already interested in expanding into the US to get more of that sweet, sweet American franchise cash, Hamilton got screwed.
I remember watching Sabres broadcasts after a day of school and possibly street hockey in the cold, snowy winter. After supper I'd hope to hear the Sabre Dance which was (of course) the theme music of the Buffalo Sabres back then. They had a lot of legendary players but I wouldn't even know their names if it weren't for hockey cards. I actually liked collecting the cards better than watching the games. My first ever favourite player was Rick Martin. He was #7 and a goal scorer. I used magic marker to put a 7 on a white T-shirt and used it to play street hockey in the summer. What? Didn't YOU play street hockey in the summer?
Rick Martin with the best player on the team, Gil Pearreault and Rene Robert, all French Canadians, made up "The French Connection" line. I remember going to see a game and even though they played the Bruins with the greatest player of all time (Sorry Gretzky) Bobby Orr, and a goal scorer better than Rick Martin, I was cheering for the Sabres. Yup, I saw Bobby Orr play and didn't even care at the time.
I think my favourite thing about winter was going to the corner store with 15 cents and buying a wax pack of cards hoping to get Rick Martin or Gil Perreault or ANY Sabre. Sometimes (but not often) I'd have MORE than 15 cents and buy more than one pack. My friends and I would have mouths watering from the chalky gum and we'd gather in a cloud of steam from our breath in the cold Canadian winter saying, "Got him, got him, got him, need him, got him, need him..." as we flipped through our new cards with our numb, rosy hands.
I TOTALLY remember this wrapper! You know what this is goin' for nowadays? Twenty bucks! I'm not kidding! So many of these things were torn off and thrown away that they are a very rare source of fond, old memories that folks will pay to relive.
But that's what makes hockey cards, or any sports cards for that matter, worth money. We've all heard stories of people putting valuable cards in the spokes of their bikes to make them sound like motorbikes. I remember my cousin giving me a Wayne Gretzky rookie card. One of those that was graded a PSA 10 (I'll get to PSA in a minute) sold for 3.75 million dollars! What was the card I got worth? Nothing. It was thrashed. But that's what most kids did with their cards. I just liked them so much I took care of them. Very good care. I looked at them a lot but never damaged them. Well maybe early in my collecting career I played a little ledgy with them. That's when you lean cards against the wall and fling other cards at them. Whatever you knock down you keep. See? NOBODY took care of their cards. That made them more and more valuable over the years. Look at these:
These cards are from the 1974-75 season. I pulled every one of these out of a wax pack like the one pictured. That's 50 years ago when I was 7 years old! There's the French Connection. The Sabres made it to the finals that year. I remember that! One game was a foggy one. One thing I don't remember but it will give you an idea of the times and how they have a-changed, every player but one - Lee Fogolin, the Sabre pictured in the Finals card checking Bobby Clarke was Canadian. Yup only Lee Fogolin, an American, was not from Canada.
These cards mean too much to me to sell but they're not worth much anyway even being 50 years old. The Perreault and the Finals card both have gum residue on them. Just my luck to have the best cards in the pack stuck to the gum! The corners are rounded and there are some wrinkles. I doubt I could even get 10 bucks for any of them.
I also liked reading stuff on the backs of the cards. Some had funny cartoons on them. Boy those days are LONG gone! Now it's out of the pack and straight into a protective sleeve, a toploader, and maybe even into a magnetic protector.
I STILL love reading the stats! The Hart Trophy in the pic is for the league MVP. He never won that but look at my boy Gil's rookie season! 38 goals! That was unbelievable back then! He was a shoe-in for the Calder which is the trophy for the rookie of the year. And, just read the card, he DID win the rookie of the year. That year Bobby or got 37 goals and 102 assists. Astounding for a defenseman! So he got the Hart. It was close though! His teammate Espo got 76 goals and 76 assists that year by letting Orr do all the work and standing in front of the net popping in Orr's passes or missed shots. The 76 goals was a record until Gretzky broke it 12 years later. Orr also won the Norris for best defenseman. The voting wasn't even close for THAT one.
My friends and I would bounce stats like this off each other during recess at school, or during lunch at school, or during school at school. There was a time when I knew a lot more about hockey than I do even now. Mostly due to hockey cards and the love of the game.
So I've been collecting hockey cards for about 50 years. I still buy some once in a while when I want to waste a few bucks. At one point in my life when values were calculated by Beckett magazine I looked through and priced out a bunch of my best cards. Not all of my cards, just the cards with the highest prices. I had well over 20,000 dollars worth of cards. I figured they'd get more valuable as they got older. I kept them in climate controlled storage and paid over 100 bucks a month for it. They were my rainy day savings. I have never trusted banks and why would anyone? Also, I knew that it would be very unlikely to sell all of them and get their value. I would have to spend a lot of money traveling from card show to card show. Maybe go to card shops or meet some folks online who might be interested in buying them. The hope was that I would never have to sell them because I love them too much, but just in case, I felt I had a little nest egg. At one point their value was probably in the 50,000 dollar range.
Not any more. The hobby has been destroyed by greed, corruption, and price fixing. Now you can't get anything for a card that is not sent to the lawyers of the hobby - PSA. I don't know who the hell PSA are but they have an almost total monopoly on hockey card value setting. They can look at a card in perfect condition and say it is "off center" or has "surface wear," "discoloration" or "micro flaws." Maybe the autograph has "ink bleeding" or "inconsistent pressure" or all kinds of fake shit like that. I have actually seen several videos of people opening packs of cards. I reckon I save money vicariously "opening" cards instead of buying real packs. See how it's becoming fake? Anyway, a lot of the regular pack openers I watch have started wearing latex gloves while doing it so as not to cause any microscopic surface damage or leave a fingerprint that the CSI unit of PSA can detect thus decreasing the card rating from a 10 to a 9.5. It's complete hogwash and if I were a billionaire collector I would never buy a card that was "slabbed." That's what you call a card that has been sent to PSA because they put it into a slab of plastic so you can never get it out without breaking it. Here's what a slabbed card looks like:
That card has been sent away to PSA and graded highly. The price (hmmm... this sounds a bit shady doesn't it?) is more expensive for a higher grade. A Coffey rookie card rated a PSA 10 is worth almost $5000. I remember not long ago when the value of a Paul Coffey rookie card in what Beckett called "mint" condition was worth more than that. Thing is, we depended on our own judgment as to what was and what was not "mint."
Any Joe Blow who didn't want to get ripped off was going to check on things like centering, sharp corners, wrinkles and imperfections, etc. There are some imperfections that I WANT in my cards because counterfeiters, and when hockey cards reached their height in value the counterfeiters brought their greasy asses out from under their rocks you can be sure, can't fake little hairs or threads in the cardboard. They can't make fake cards with gum residue on them either. Or the furry edges that are the result of a dull cutting blade or being at the bottom of a stack of cards being cut. They are imperfections that allow you to know you have the real thing.
Like a friend, mate, or good pair of shoes, these imperfections ADD to the value and love in a person who is not a soulless money-grubber and who has genuine love for the real article. Where do I find people like this in my hobby? They seem to have all drunk the Kool Aid and/or disappeared.
Here is what PSA has done to the hobby and to the dumb schmucks who have bought into it: 1. They have set themselves up as the one and only authority on card condition... and they are a BUSINESS! You PAY them and they are not cheap. Not long ago we trusted each other to exchange genuine cards and we trusted ourselves to judge their condition. PSA has convinced us that none of us are honest and none of us have enough talent to judge our own cards. 2. They have reinforced their indispensability online by employing trolls to comment on cards for sale on websites or ebay or any place cards are sold. You can guess the comments. First of all they call any card that has not been incarcerated in PSA plastic "raw." A raw card is almost never looked at closely by commentors no matter where you try to sell it. They pan it shamelessly if you are asking for what it's worth. 3. They even occasionally DO look at the condition and THEN slag your card with their fabricated vocabulary of ersatz flaws that are not really there. They do this so nobody gets good value (or what a card is really worth) unless they first give PSA their pound of flesh and get it graded. It's very simple! You will get people making jokes about your pie-in-the-sky price (even if it's low) and even flamers saying you should be banned from the room. "You really need to do some research before you post." But 4. PSA has removed an awful lot of pictures of cards rated a 10 by their agency. Why? They don't want you to be able to do what they do. Even if there WERE PSA 10's to look at online, they're encased in plastic so any criticism of THEIR criticism can be written off as image distortion due to the plastic casing. You know what? The above is NOT a Coffey rookie card.
THIS is a Coffey rookie card.
If you look REALLY closely you might notice that the right margin is marginally (ar ar) thinner than the left. It is very slightly off center. There is zero corner wear, it is in remarkably good condition for a 44-year-old card. And I have taken good care of it since I pulled it from a pack 44 years ago. Coffey is one of the best defensemen ever and there are precious few of his rookie cards in the world in such good condition. When you consider that this is O-Pee-Chee, not Topps, it's even MORE valuable.
I put this card on a few websites and almost instantly people started with the comments. And they can because they have internet impunity and they have the support of other trolls who are trying to buy cards as cheaply as possible. Why else would they do that? Well for one reason, maybe they are trying to increase the reputation of PSA thereby making THEIR slabbed cards more valuable. For another thing they want me to lower the price so they can buy this card for nothing, get it slabbed and sell it for hundreds more than they paid.
The last comment I read on the site where I posted this card and a few others was, "Ban this guy, please!" They won't have to. I unsubscribed from the group. I'll never even try to sell my cards online again. That ship has sailed. The market has been poisoned and bullshit reigns. This card is worth hundreds, maybe thousands but I will never be able to sell it online for even tens.
But I love my cards too much to sell them anyway. So it's not all bad news. I know what I've got in my hockey card collection and most of my cards are too valuable to me to get even half of what I know they are worth. Values don't just go through the basement in such a short time. The fact is, there is really no reason for the value of hockey cards to have dropped. The sport saw a double digit increase in ESPN viewership in 2024. Probably due to Bedard. Hockey's popularity spiked with Gretzky and the value of hockey cards did too. The NHL's popularity spiked with McDavid and the value of hockey cards did too. The popularity of the NHL is spiking again and the value of cards has artificially plummeted due to the PSA snobbery. It's another in a long list of fake things that just keep replacing the real pleasures life used to have.
The only person I'd be willing to sell to or trade with is a fellow collector who is not in it for the money. Ironically that person stands to make a lot of money buying cards from me because I will not sell them for outrageous prices. Only PSA can allow people to do that. Unfortunately I suspect that anybody I sell my "raw" cards to will just permanently confine them to their Superman Phantom Zone slabs so they can get more money for them. Hey, maybe PSA stands for Phantom Superman Area. Remember this?
Anyway, you only get top value if PSA gives the cards a high enough grade and THAT might depend on how much you pay them.
Does everything have to be a scam?
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