The Captain

After a couple of successful TTM's a few years back, I got the ill-fated notion that it would be fun to try and get as many signed cards from the 1978-79 Topps basketball set as I could.

Now I use the term "ill-fated" for two different reasons, the first being that there are number of deceased players within this set, which isn't terribly surprising given that the set is now 40 years old. Obviously guys that have passed can no longer sign cards, therefor if one were to want a signature from one of said guys, one is going to have to pay a little bit to acquire it -- one of which, Pete Maravich, would likely require some lottery winnings to obtain.

And the second reason that this project might not have been the best idea, is that there are a number of guys in this set who just don't sign, unless of course they're being paid to do so by one of the big card companies. Thankfully though, there is a way to get around this second problem, at least when it comes to a pair of very popular non-signing players:

Sometime back in the mid to late 90's, Scoreboard partnered up with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Julius Erving. As part of this partnership, both players signed 1978 copies of their original 1978-79 Topps cards, which were then sold via QVC (a home shopping channel).

I can remember watching QVC quite a bit during the 90's (thanks mom), primarily because of all the collectibles that used to be featured on the channel, this was the 90's after all -- everything was collectible, and everything was an investment, that is if you were just able to hold on to it for long enough. Some folks look back on those times and laugh, but god do I miss them!

Anyway, I don't recall seeing these particular offerings from Scoreboard at the time, in fact I only became aware of them once I decided to start collecting autographs from the 78-79 set. It took a couple of years for a decent priced Kareem to pop up on eBay (there are always high priced copies in stores), and about six months ago I was finally able to get one, the final price... $20.50!

Most of the time you'll find the cards loose, like mine above, but they originally came in a stupid looking holder like this:

Image pilfered from Google

You can see why so many of them have been taken out of those holders, right? That thing is just flat out ugly!

Even though I finally got one of the big names out of the way, this project has still sort of fallen by the wayside, primarily because of my slacking off when it comes to sending out TTM requests, maybe that can be my first ever New Year's resolution.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.