Night Owl Cards

It's a new year and -- LQQK! -- I'm following through on a new series! Let's pause while I pat myself on the back. OK. This is the second edition of "The Card After," which is my attempt to shed light on a player's card that came after one that made him a card icon. For example, the first card I featured was the 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken "fuck face" card (I don't understand why people call it "rick face"). And then I showed the 1990 Fleer Billy Ripken card -- "the card after" -- because even 1990 Fleer deserves love sometimes. That's basically the whole exercise. A little love for the overlooked. And to make you forget nuclear war (you'll have to read the Ripken post if you're confused). Tonight we have an iconic card that you all know and love. Let's begin. THE ICONIC CARD: Please meet: 1976 Topps Traded Oscar Gamble Why it's iconic: It's one of the most comical cards of all-time. The ...

The most consistently difficult task to perform in my line of work is writing a headline. Newspaper readers bag on headlines all the time. They mock them. They deride them. They call up enraged, like any idiot can write a headline. They're wrong. You have to be a semi-idiot to write a headline. It is no easy task to write a few words that make sense together, that is accurate enough to sum up the copy below, that is interesting enough to get someone to read the story, AND that all can be crammed into the proper amount of space, using the properly sized letters in the proper font. I struggle with it daily. Some people have a talent for it. I don't. So usually I produce a workmanlike headline and move on. I count the clever headlines that I've written on one hand. When Miami and Virginia Tech announced they were leaving for the Atlantic Coast Conference, I wrote: "They ACC-ept." When a referee called a basketball player for a controversial traveling c...