May 28, 2010

Life imitates baseball cards. Or in this case, basketball cards.

Antoine Walker files for bankruptcy

Back in my younger days, when I spent all my money on sports cards and comics, I spent a lot of hours and dollars collecting Antoine Walker cards. I liked how he played at Kentucky and he was pretty decent on the Boston Celtics. But once he got his big money contract, he got lazy and didn't play nearly as well as he could have. (You would think getting $13,000,000 in guaranteed money per season would make a guy want to grab a rebound once in a while.)

My Antoine Walker card collection (which includes many autographs and shiny cards) at one time probably had a book value of $2000 (real world ebay value, maybe 500 bucks) is now worth about $22 (real world ebay value 35 cents).

Am I ready to retire from collecting sports cards? Not quite. I've slowed down a lot and recently went to a card show where I bought zero cards. Well, I could have bought a few autographed Tim Lincecum jersey cards, but I decided to pay my rent instead. There is one card auction on ebay at the moment where a single card is going for over $16k. My max bid was at $12000.

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