You absolutely have to know that my sister can throw a punch.
As a teenager she was walking to school, carrying a backpack and a lunchbox. A neighborhood boy snuck up behind her and grabbed her behind. She whirled around and, letting the centrifugal force add weight to her already bulky metal lunch box, clocked him in the face with it. She left him unconscious on the sidewalk.
When she was younger, she played in a youth hockey entirely populated by boys. She played left wing and was no stranger to throwing elbows and mixing it up chasing pucks into the corners. Her teammates knew her as “Clark,” a name borrowed for her hockey career from one of our male cousins.
The deception worked almost too well. Another boy once made fun of her and started a fight, an encounter she ended by bloodying his nose. The kid’s dad came looking for “Clark,” only to discover when he encountered our parents that this was only her criminal alias. The target of his wrath switched immediately to his sniffling son, who was soon berated for “getting beat up by a girl.”
Despite the presence of selective evidence, my sister wasn’t entirely some fourth line goon. She knew her hockey and had more prosaic interests. There was middle school theater club and waiting in line for the latest David Bowie or Talking Heads record to be released. A 7-Eleven had been built a few blocks away just as she learned to ride a bike, providing the perfect nearby destination for two-wheeled travel.
She had made this journey many times before and could be counted on to pick up a pack of bubble gum whenever hockey cards were present on the shelf. The last time she pedaled to the store for a card run was 1979, right around the time she was packing away her hockey gear into the garage.
She cleaned out the store’s inventory of Topps cards, carrying home an entire wax box with one arm on her bike. There, she consumed all the gum while sifting through the latest Topps design. The cards had bright blue borders, and most importantly, featured Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, and the WHA teams she had been missing from prior year packs. She looked through the cards, putting each pack’s contents back in the wrapper, and tucked the box into a closet for closer inspection later. She had theater practice to attend to.
Theater practice turned into 20 years of life happening. Drama Club led to production work at a low-powered UHF television station, marriage to an art teacher, two young sons, and the purchase of a “fixer-upper” house that had been inhabited for an extended period by ill-tempered squatters. Every free moment was spent wrestling with repairs to punched out drywall and tearing out (hopefully) animal stained carpets. The well system needed replacing and there was the occasional bounty hunter, intent on finding a previous resident, to fend off.
Sometime around 2001, her husband left and she found herself an under-employed single mom. There was no child support, an arrangement that she quickly agreed to in exchange for no contest as to who would keep the kids and the house. While this would certainly generate headshaking from attorneys, it was a plan hatched by two broke people with hardly anything else left to fight over. Times were tight, and even when she managed to get enough to pay the mortgage there was always something waiting to go wrong with the car, the dog, or a medical bill.
One overcast day with no work to go to, she was going through her belongings in the attic. Amongst too many holiday decorations and old cans of paint was a white cardboard box with “HOCKEY” in red block letters. She opened it and discovered her old blue bordered hockey cards, just as pack fresh as when she opened them two decades earlier. She put them in order, finding nearly enough for a full set. The Hull and two Howe cards were present, but it was another name that now took precedence over the rest: Gretzky.
Her packs had yielded a Wayne Gretzky rookie card. She called my brother, who had some price guides and at the time was the only one of us still actively collecting any kind of sports cards. She wanted to know if this was actually a rookie card and it so, was it as valuable as a hockey fan thought it might be. After a brief discussion, my brother added her card to a stack of cards going off for grading at PSA. Shortly thereafter, a return package arrived bearing her newly slabbed card. Having basically been handled more by the grader than its original owner, the card came back assessed as a pack fresh Near Mint PSA 7.
The Gretzky card was listed on eBay within an hour of its arrival. Heavy bidding ensued, with the buyer asking to have the shipping upgraded to overnight FedEx in exchange for an even higher amount. She cleared more than $700 after all was said and done. A nice last second stick save for someone struggling. Today the kids are grown, she just became a grandmother, and has emerged from the long fog of the last 20 years. There is no need to keep throwing lunch box haymakers.
The Gretzky card is long gone, traded away to keep the heat on. The fighter who pulled it from a wax pack at 7-Eleven is still here. Undefeated.
Postscript for Modern Collectors
I can hear an audience of collectors groaning that such an iconic (and expensive) card was thrown overboard to save the ship. The last PSA 7 Gretzky rookie sold on eBay went well beyond $3,000, an increase of more than 300%.
Keep in mind what was going on. That $700 kept the heat on in the winter for a mom and her two elementary school age children. It allowed them stay current on the mortgage, something they never would have been able to dig out from under had they fallen behind. When you’re drowning, you don’t get to come up for air again when your head goes underwater.
There were credit cards involved in plugging other holes. An extra $700 balance compounded by 20% interest is well over $38k in saved interest if carried to the present day, far more than the few grand generated by 7% annual price appreciation on a piece of inert cardboard. She already maximized the financial return by selling it when it wasn’t the time in life to own hockey cards.
