A couple of weeks ago, I and three of my friends took a road trip to Cleveland, Ohio, for the National Sports Collector’s Convention. We all have the card-collecting bug and have had it since the late 1900s (or 1990s to be more precise). When we arrived, we found ourselves surrounded.
On the first day, maybe a thousand people tried to pick up their VIP credentials and goodie bags. Then on the show floor, a few thousand more people were walking around in a giant space for a preview session for VIPs. That was Wednesday.
On Thursday and Friday, the crowd eclipsed 100,000 both days. It went from a busy show floor to some spots where there was barely enough room to move along the aisles. People stood one, two or three deep at different corporate vendors or card dealer booths.
It was madness. Beautiful madness. Not everyone was there to look for the exact same card or set.
Some people were looking for vintage cards. Some were looking for ultra-modern cards. While the prize at the end of the quest might have looked different for all of us, we all spoke the same language.
We all understand the hunt. Looking for that one card you’re willing to spend $10, $100, sometimes thousands of dollars on because you know you might not see it again until the next national. Then there’s the plight when that grail card you’d overspend on was snatched up hours before you showed up at the table.
My budget was very modest — $100, which wasn’t all going to be spent. One potential target was a 1976 Marvel Spider-Man sticker. This card only recently appeared on the radar.
It was created in my birth year. It seemed like something that would be a cool item to add to the collection. Most importantly, with a price range of $15-$30 — and maybe $10 depending on condition and if the dealer was willing to negotiate — it fit perfectly into my budget.
Every dealer had cases and cases of cards, but those stickers proved elusive. On one of the searches Friday, a dealer had three graded stickers in his case, none of them was Spider-Man. Still, since they had been so rare, inquiry was made.
“Do you have the Spider-Man from that set?” They had sold one graded a near mint-mint 8 by PSA the day before for $120. While it would have been cool to see it and take a photo, it wasn’t terrible because that was out of my price range. “Do you know any other dealers who have those stickers?” The dealer asked me to wait and said he had to go to a dealer to pick up some other cards for clients.
He said to give him a couple of minutes. A glimmer of hope. We then walked almost the entire length of the convention hall floor to a table that had one solitary binder with nonsports cards in it hidden among more than a dozen binders of sports cards.
He leafed through to find what he was looking for and gave me an idea of where I could find the stickers in the binder. Alas, no Spider-Man. At this point, slightly dejected, I wandered and browsed for a bit.
After my wild goose chase, I and the crew were completely separated. Cellphone signals were as shoddy as you’d expect in a giant building full of 100,000 people trying to look up card prices and post to social media. Every once in a while you’d pick up a signal, inevitably finding a couple of missed calls and some missed texts.
This time, the fellows asked for directions to me and for me to wait there. While on my goose chase, they, too, had stumbled across a table with the stickers. They reviewed my video to make sure they were getting the right one, then negotiated a deal and purchased the sticker for me.
I gladly paid $20 to add that card to my collection forever. Not only is it a cool card, it has one of the coolest stories of all the cards in my collection. Eric Pehowic is the News Editor at The Daily Item.
You can listen to his award-winning podcast Collecting Cardboard at dailyitem.com ..
