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Thursday, December 18, 2014

Surfing In To My Collection

After
selling off the four 2013-14 Panini Immaculate Basketball that I didn’t need in
my collection I turned towards picking up some wanted Griffey cards and one specific
“other” card that has been on my personal want list for a couple of years. The “other”
card finally arrived today.

As
a teen and young adult I surfed, as difficult as that was living in
Arizona. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend time with friends in
California regularly hitting Redondo, Hermosa and Manhattan Beaches with the occasional
outing to Zuma Beach. Being out on the water is just something Zen, completely at
peace.

I
grew up reading about guys like Bob McTavish and Duke Kahanamoku and idolizing
surfers like Derek & Michael Ho, Gerry Lopez, Tom Curran and Laird Hamilton
but the guy who I really liked is Kelly Slater. He is the same age as I am and
he began ripping it up in the late 1980s and hasn’t slowed down since. He is an
11 time ASP World Championship Tour champion and currently has 54 total WCT victories, the
most all-time.

From
the 2012 Upper Deck All-Time Greats release I am happy to finally add a Kelly
Slater autograph to my collection. I love the gold signature, it looks great on the card. I still want to add his Shining Moments auto
(#SM-KS3) to my collection but that one will have to wait because prices are
still well above my price range.

1 comment:

I grew up reading Surfer magazine and following guys like Derek Ho and Tom Curren too. The only difference was that I was a total poser. Every year my family would go to Hawaii... and every year I chose a boogie board over a surfboard. Anyways... I idolized all of my cousins who surfed and when Upper Deck started issue surfer cards it was like a dream come true.

Congratulations on the newest addition to your collection! It's beautiful.

About Me

I started collecting as a kid but by the time I hit my teens my interests were elsewhere. I returned to the hobby in 1992, just in time to see the junk wax era go in to full swing. My collecting interests have changed over the past 25 years and I prefer to focus on just a couple of players.

My collection is very specific now because I want to keep it controlled and organized, I now focus mainly on my Ken Griffey Jr. & Jay Buhner collections.