Uh Oh. I Knew The Hockey Card Thing Was Going To Happen.

As a kid, I was baseball-first, no question about it. When I started buying sports cards in 1976 and 1977, it was Topps Baseball only - and honestly, in Sacramento, CA, where I grew up, I only remember baseball cards being available at the local 7-11. I lived and breathed the sport; read everything I could about it; watched every game on TV; and bought cards with every quarter that fell into my pocket.

We moved to San Jose in 1978, and two things morphed me into an NHL hockey fan: one, my local Quik Stop store sold every kind of sports card, and two, ESPN debuted in 1979, and not only did we have cable TV, but I had a lot of time to watch it.

ESPN showed NHL games early on. The NHL and WHA had just merged. I remember watching the Hartford Whalers, Quebec Nordiques, Edmonton Oilers etc. and being fascinated with the teams who were not the Bruins, Canadians, Blackhawks etc. whom I'd read so much about. So where hockey cards started showing up at Quik Stop, I bought pack after pack. This kid Wayne Gretzky was blazing through defenses and becoming so well-known that even some Americans talked about him (I even owned this card, but I'm pretty sure it was purged from my room by my mom when I left for college). Still, hockey really seemed like someone else's game, and it had zero presence in my elementary school nor in the Bay Area's sports pages.

That was sort of what I liked about it, and it presaged my own snobbish positioning of my tastes around alternatives - especially music. You like mainstream pop music? OK, I like punk. You like pro football and baseball only? OK, check out my Winnipeg Jets cards. Both the punk thing and the alterna-sports thing has carried on well into this day, forty years later. I still put together a music fanzine and podcast called Dynamite Hemorrhage, and yeah, I still follow hockey relatively closely. We even have a team here now, maybe you've heard of 'em.

So when I returned to collecting baseball cards recently, I knew that the lure of hockey cards would follow. Baseball's still, and will always be, #1. But I got to thinking about how cool it would be to put together sets of all of the 70s California Golden Seals teams; maybe collect a bunch of the defunct WHA teams from that same decade; maybe pull together some Kansas City Scouts and Cleveland Barons; maybe get a collection going of my all-time favorite player, Patrick Marleau....

And here we are. I'm deep in the "California Golden Seals" phase of the program. It's not difficult at all - they're quite inexpensive, and there aren't that many of them. I suspect I'll have at least all of the Topps cards by this summer, and maybe will move onto some other specialty sets from there. I would not be surprised if I'm gripped by a bit of hockey card mania from time to time, the way I have been with baseball over the past year. I'm not expecting this blog to turn into a joint baseball/hockey card blog, but just thought I'd highlight this weird and totally unsurprising new chapter in my collecting odyssey.