Night Owl Cards

  (The 1989 Score offers are arriving fast-and-furious after my most recent post. I should be down to just a few wants in a week or two! The blog's still got it. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 361st in a series):   I plucked this Cluck from my COMC order, which arrived early last week. You'll soon see the rest of what's probably my final order from that place, but I wanted to feature this card separate since it's kind of the black sheep of my order, not fitting neatly with any of the other cards.   I didn't pick it up only for the wonderful Toros uniforms of the era (and there are even gaudier examples ) or just because of the marvelous name on the front. Nor did I add it because coach cards are a relative rarity.   I grabbed this card for all of those reasons and one other -- I interviewed Bob Cluck once. He is a "Brush With Greatness" subject who I have never mentioned.   I wonder how many other coaches who I have interviewed have cards tha...

    I just soldiered through another Jim Nantz broadcast to watch the Buffalo Bills wrap up a victory and the second seed in the playoffs.   It's the completion of an emotionally exhausting week for the Bills after the on-field collapse and hospitalization of  safety Damar Hamlin, and I am, once again, very proud of my favorite team. Weeks before this happened, I was watching head coach Sean McDermott during a press conference after the Bills' win over the Dolphins and it struck me how impressed I was with McDermott as a coach. He answered reporters' questions, he smiled, he joked a little, he wasn't defensive, it was not at all what I am used to with a lot of NFL coaches. Many of them can be jerks, oafs, condescending generals, I've seen it in person. McDermott doesn't seem to be like that. He's a true leader. I think a lot more people came to that conclusion this past week. This prompted me to look around and see what I could find as far as a football card...

  I was looking for a story in our online newspaper archives the other day when I randomly came across a feature I wrote on Marvin Harrison 26 years ago. I took that as a sign as I had just received this 2000 Pacific Royal Crowne Harrison card from Matt in one of his Time Travel trades a day or two earlier. I talked to Harrison during that period in the mid-1990s when I was covering the Syracuse football team. I couldn't have picked a better time for my brief era of coverage as both Harrison and Donovan McNabb were key figures on the team and each would go on to have notable careers in the NFL. Harrison in particular set records during his career with the Colts and is now in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Back in 1995 he was a senior at Syracuse, their leading receiver, one of the best in the Big East, probably among the best in the country. I interviewed him with a group of other reporters during the lead-up to the '95 season. No, that's not me. That's the article. I ...

    Two weeks ago yesterday, I had the great luck to do something that not many get to do.   I interviewed the man whose baseball card was the first one I ever pulled out of a pack.   Kind of unusual, right? First, how many people remember their first card way back when they were a kid? Then, how many get to talk to that person decades later for a story?   That's what happened to me and Tommy John.   I've mentioned John many times on this blog. Not only was his card the first I pulled back when my mom gave me that cello pack in 1974, but he is responsible for my Dodgers fandom. He became a key figure during my formative years of following baseball and also was my first encounter with a baseball player turning to "the dark side" as John left the Dodgers to become a Yankee before the 1980 season.   All of that was a long time ago, of course. I am now more than 30 years into my journalism career and John is 78 years old. But he has continued to be a figur...

When I first started this blog, I was searching for content. I didn't want the blog to be "look what I got" all the time, and besides, I didn't have all that many cards to boast about twice a day (I still can't believe I was posting twice a day). I decided one interesting series might be to relay the various encounters I had with major league baseball players. As a newspaper journalist, I had run into one or two, although I had never been an MLB beat writer or anything. I started the "Brush With Greatness" series and started posting those rapid fire, at least one a month for a couple of years. Then I ran out of those MLB subjects and started writing about interviews with athletes from other sports. Then I ran out of those and the series basically died. Or so I thought. Life is weird. You probably know that. Two days after my John Wockenfuss story appeared in the paper, I received a call at the office from a former high school and college bas...

My story on John Wockenfuss appeared in the newspaper Sunday. I believe you can read it here . I don't think the paywall kicks in until after the first few articles. ... ... So, read it? Not all ballgames and butterflies, huh? We collectors like to romanticize our baseball players, but life doesn't care whether "John Wockenfuss" is fun to pronounce or that his batting stance was goofy. I knew that Wockenfuss had dementia before I even called to set up an interview. I was told it was in the early stages, but I didn't know exactly what I'd find. How successful would I be communicating with him? I've dealt with difficult interviews in the past. I once was assigned to interview a deaf person while in college. I tried to interview an elderly man living in Arkansas over the phone who had a hearing problem. That didn't work. Also, when trying to talk to a high school athlete, you never know what you'll get. Sometimes I'd listen to my re...

I love these Press Pass Xs and Os cards from 1999. When I was looking for a Donovan McNabb card to fill out my collection of Brush With Greatness topics (i.e.: athletes I've interviewed), I wanted just the right card. I don't really collect football so I wanted only one card of him. Any card of McNabb with the Eagles wouldn't do. I didn't interview him then and that Eagles' color scheme makes for boring cards. I like the helmet with the wings, but all that dark green really dulls down a card. And forget about the Redskins or Vikings when McNabb was on his way out. No, I wanted something from his Syracuse University days and something snazzy. I covered McNabb at Syracuse during his first year on the football field (he red-shirted the 1994 season). It may be difficult to believe now, but at the time of McNabb's first spring practice on the roster, he was not a sure thing as the starting quarterback for SU. The starting job was considered a toss up bet...

I am not in the mood to look at my Dodgers cards. And I think you can understand why I'm not showing any Cubs cards either. I'm one of the few not caught up in Cubs hysteria. In fact, baseball doesn't mean a lot to me right now. Oh, I'll get over it in a day or two. But right now it seems like baseball's dead and hockey season is here. So, why not bore you all with a hockey card? To extend my Brush With Greatness series a little longer, I finally picked up a card of Craig Conroy, the former U.S. Olympian who played in the Stanley Cup finals with the Calgary Flames and also played in the NHL for the Canadiens, Blues and Kings. Conroy grew up in an extreme northern New York outpost called Potsdam. It's a college town and since it is so far removed from civilization and civilized weather -- I've often wondered why college-bound kids would pick such a remote location for four of the finest years of their lives -- one of the most popular leisurely pursui...

The most famous person I have ever interviewed is John Elway. I'm in sports after all, so there have been no conversations with kings, presidents or hollywood actors ... thank goodness. But you won't find my interview with Elway under my byline. And that means I can't prove to anyone that I talked to John Elway. But I did. It was on Monday, Sept. 18, 1989 . I was at the Bills' stadium to help cover their Monday Night Football game against the Broncos. It was my first time covering a Monday night game and it was as hectic as an emergency evacuation in the middle of downtown. First, Monday night games don't start at east coast-friendly times. Second, I worked for a newspaper that was an hour away from the Bills' stadium. Third, this was before cell phones and smart phones. Filing remotely was like trying to start a fire under water. So, as the newbie, my designated job was to be the gopher. While the main writer gathered quotes from the home team, the Bil...

Happy Thanksgiving all. I hope you're treating your stomach well. Since this holiday is an ode to carbohydrates, I am watching my intake while still trying not to take all the fun out of the day. Mostly I am redirecting my interests from food toward football, something that I have only watched out of duty over the last few Thanksgivings. But today I am really trying to pretend to care about the Lions and the Redskins and ... well, hell, nothing on earth will get me to care about the two teams in the last game. As I've said before, I used to be a very big football fan. It was very easy to be a football fan in Buffalo in the late '80s/early '90s, what with all the playoffs and Super Bowls. And then things got easier when I started covering Bills games. In fact, I just dug out the first article I ever wrote about the Bills. I wrote it on Oct. 30, 1988 at the first NFL game I ever covered. I was six months out of college and the Bills were playing the Packers. Gree...

It's been a long time since I've done one of these "Brush With Greatness" things. I'm all out of baseball players that I've talked to, which means I have to go outside my collecting interests and attempt to track down football and hockey and basketball cards of players I've interviewed in the past. And I don't want to track down football and hockey and basketball cards. And I especially don't want to track down golf cards. But when the card falls in my lap, like this card here, then you'll get a Brush With Greatness segment. Matt Kuchar's had a pretty good 2012. He finished third at the Masters. He won the Players Championship. He was rated as high as fifth in the world rankings. In fact, his last three years have been pretty good. Ryder Cup, and a few PGA tourney wins, and the leading money-winner one year. I talked to Kuchar when he was still in college. It was a month after his greatest victory to that point. Kuchar had just...