When Childhood Obsessions Turn Into Letdowns

We are planning for a project that would involve finishing a portion of our currently unfinished side of the basement. To prepare, I’ve been going through some of the crap stored down there to free up space. Part of that is digging through the massive box of sports cards I’ve been lugging around for decades.

I knew these were largely worthless at this point. My generation grew up hearing about the cards bought for pennies in the Fifties and Sixties turning into items that could finance a family vacation, home addition, or even college tuition fund. So we hoarded and hoarded, slipping our best cards into plastic sleeves and acrylic cases to preserve their condition for the magical day when we turned them into big payoffs.

Of course, we didn’t understand supply and demand at the time, forgetting those old cards were valuable because not many were produced in the first place and few of those survived their teenage owners’ childhoods unscathed. In the Eighties, however, each collection was produced in massive numbers, making them all common and worth nothing. If we were smart, we really should have sold our cards before we went to college instead of tucking them into basements, closets, and attics thinking they would be multiplying in value as they sat.

So, yeah, I knew my page of Rickey Henderson cards was worth less than when I first bought them. But a part of me figured, if I have 10,000 or whatever cards stored, maybe I could bundle them into lots and make a few bucks on eBay. Surely someone would pay $50 for 1000 random cards, right?

Turns out no one wants to do that. In fact, I saw some guy selling a box of roughly 5,000 cards for something like $20. The shipping was more than his actual auction value, which seemed wild.

Maybe there were some individual cards in there that could be worth something. I didn’t want to go to the effort of sorting them out and then having them professionally assessed and graded so I could sell them with their condition certified.

Thus I came to the conclusion that nearly everything in this huge tote was worthless and, with a heavy heart, decided to just trash them all.

I’m sure some of my fellow Gen Xers just involuntarily shuddered as they read that line. I still can’t believe I did it.

Now there was one card in my collection that would have been worth a fair amount of money even today had I not done what most people did when they got it in 1981.

I owned the Larry Bird – Julius Erving – Magic Johnson tri-card from the Topps 1980–81 basketball set. For some crazy reason, that year Topps divided the area of a traditional card into three sections, each for a different player, with perforations to detach them from each other. Yes, the dumbass writing this tore the three sections from each other. I recall having mixed feelings when I did it, but as I was already storing the set in a tiny jewelry box I found that was perfect for the individual pieces, I tore away.

Idiot.

That card has sold for as much as $9600 recently. There are a couple on sale for over $10,000!!!! Now, even if I had kept mine intact, I doubt I would have remained in mint condition over the years. But maybe I’d still get a few hundred for it? Alas. I’m holding on to these three mini cards both as a connection to my youth and a reminder that collecting things should always be more about the experience it produces than the possibility of a future financial windfall.