Really fun reading all these stories! Here's mine...
I got my start in the hobby as a youngster in elementary school not with cards, but with the annual OPC sticker books in the early 80's. I'm not exactly sure what got me started, probably friends who collected or their older brothers... each weekend I'd get a couple of 25 cent packs if I was well behaved while helping mom with the weekly grocery shopping at Safeway - adding the ones I needed to the album, and trading others the following week with my classmates. By the end of the season I was usually down to just a handful remaining, and my dear grandpa would shell out the dollar or two and help me write a letter to OPC request the last few stickers to finish my album.
After 3 years and 3 complete albums, I moved to Vancouver and my new elementary school classmates collected hockey cards, the year was 86-87 OPC ... I don't think I ever bought a pack - one of my friends gave me a handful of cards to get started, and I gradually won myself the entire set playing all the great school yard games of the time... "flipsies" (each kid tosses a card such that it flutters end-over-end, if one landed face-up and the other face-down, the face-up owner wins both cards, ties would be do-overs)... "closies" (each participant flicks a card towards the wall, closest one takes all)... knock downs (each person contributes a card propped up against a wall, take turns flicking cards at them from a distance, whoever knocks down the last card wins the heap)... "farsies" (flick a card, whoever's goes the furthest takes em all). Needless to say, few of my cards ended up in mint condition - though ironically the one card that most of us had mint was Patrick Roy's rookie card. At my school no one liked Roy for no reason other than we thought his neck protector looked stupid - so most kids would give them away rather than ruin their collection by having multiple copies of Roy, and no one would play tossing games if you included Roy, so I ended up with several pack-fresh copies in a drawer. Sadly, I sold them a couple years later along with my complete set for all of $5 at a garage sale. The next couple of years my classmates moved on to other stuff like Garbage Pail Kids, so hockey card collecting fell by the wayside.
Fast forward to 1990-91, the great hockey card explosion ignited the collecting fever amongst some of my high school buddies - I built a complete set of ProSet (protecting my "investment" including the highly desirable Owen Nolan and Peter Nedved rookie cards in 9-pocket pages)... still remember the big snowfall we got in Vancouver that year, and trudging to the local Mac's convenience store with soggy socks just to spend all my Christmas money on ProSet packs (I was way too cheap to splash on the extravagant Upper Deck which was double the price for fewer cards per pack!). I built the ProSet and Upper Deck sets the following year, but quickly switched gears when in the fall a much-heralded prospect arrived in North America - the Russian Rocket!
The city was electric with our first true superstar in our midst, I remember staying up well past my bedtime secretly listening to Bure's entire first game against the Winnipeg Jets on my Sony Walkman under the covers - I still get chills hearing the excitement in Jim Robson's voice as Bure broke through with numerous glorious chances... he didn't score that game, but that didn't matter, the sheer excitement he brought had me hooked. I traded / sold the handful of sets I'd built, and probably became the Pavel Bure Supercollector of the early 90's - I had everything from Russian cards, promo cards and sheets, broke open Parkhurst Final update boxed sets just for the Bure and gave away the rest, every Beckett featuring Bure, autographed posters, and even had my dad line up for hours to get my jersey autographed (sadly I had to perform in a school orchestra concert and missed my only chance to actually meet Pavel). I wore that jersey probably at least once a week all through high school till the autograph eventually faded out from all the washing machine cycles. I met up with a local dealer at a card show who took want lists, and he'd call me every couple of months with all the new cards he found - I'd arrange to meet him blocks away from my house so my parents would never know that I was spending my hard earned money on cards (in retrospect it probably looked like a drug deal going down as I'd hand over wads of cash the mall parking lot and get a paper bag in return full of cardboard). Just before Bure's terrible knee injury, I was away in Toronto on a co-op job, and my parents house got broken into - the entire Bure supercollection was gone, by far the most valuable item taken (the crappy VCR which didn't even rewind anymore and my parents 486 PC were pretty much the only other things taken). Apparently my little sister was really cute, she knew exactly how much the collection meant to me, and gasped to the police officers "Oh my God, the Bure's... they took all his Bure's!". While it definitely stung to lose the entire PC, by the time I'd returned home Bure was on the shelf for the year with his knee injury and didn't stay with Vancouver much after that, so in hindsight I'm pretty happy to have received the insurance settlement when I did.
The late 90's were a dark time for Vancouver hockey fans - Messier and Keenan came to Vancouver and we all know how well that panned out. But just before the new millenium, Brian Burke wheeled and dealed on draft day to scoop up the Sedin twins. Being a collector at heart, I wondered if they still made cards of prospects like they used to back when UD made the Bure and other rookie cards of WJC stars... and being the late 90's there was this relatively new Internet site called ebay, so I did a search, and sure enough, there were Black Diamond Sedin rookie cards available. On a lark I signed up for an account and picked up first one copy of each, then multiple copies, then the parallels including the really tough quad diamonds, and the rest as they say is history. For the next few years it was all ebay, and then I discovered a couple great sites in SCF and HI where I've met all sorts of wonderful people, made some great trades, and received some generous gifts from fellow 'nucks fans who just felt their neet Sedin oddball items would look good in my PC.
I feel so lucky that the guys I chose to follow have (so far, knock on wood) spent their entire time playing for the local team, blossomed into star players (an Art Ross apiece, Hart for Hank and a Lindsay for Danny), and are great guys in the community (big supporters of the Children's Hospital amongst others). Anyways, that's my story, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading, and hope to see more stories from others!
Originally Posted by sedinfan 
