Ever been inspired by a card?
Futureman
Posts: 135 ✭✭
Ok, so maybe "inspired" is a bit of an overstatement (even for me). If not inspired, at least positively influenced, I guess. I was paraylzed just below the chest several years ago. I've always been a card collector, and went searching through my collection for cards of athletes that had also been paralyzed. I don't know if that's morbid or not. If I really think about it, it could be as a way to try to motivate myself. There have been some talented athletes (far more talented than I was, even before I was hurt), and I finally have something in common with them. No doubt it isn't something anyone wants to have in common, but there they are, highly conditioned athletes who got hurt, just like me. They keep going, which means I can too. One of the first ones I found was the 1992 Topps card of Mike Utley., the Detroit lineman that was paralyzed.
There's even some history in how I got the card in the first place. The coach of my YMCA basketball team, a college kid, who also acted as kind of a big brother to me, bought me the box set of 1992 Topps for Christmas. I remember being happy to get all the cards, but also thinking I would have liked packs, to have something to open. So more than a decade later, I was looking through the set, and found the Utley card. Being a lineman, there weren't any stats to put on the back of the card, so Topps profiled the player, asking questions about the player's favorite things. There on the back of Utley's card, it listed his favorite quote. Considering what happened to him (and me) it's kind of fitting. It's become a personal motto for me. It's from the former coach, George Allen. It says, "Health, happiness, and success depend upon the fighting spirit of each person. The big thing is not what happens to us in life -- but what we do about what happens to us."
Who would have thought that gift, overlooked at the time, would come back and mean so much to me today.
There's even some history in how I got the card in the first place. The coach of my YMCA basketball team, a college kid, who also acted as kind of a big brother to me, bought me the box set of 1992 Topps for Christmas. I remember being happy to get all the cards, but also thinking I would have liked packs, to have something to open. So more than a decade later, I was looking through the set, and found the Utley card. Being a lineman, there weren't any stats to put on the back of the card, so Topps profiled the player, asking questions about the player's favorite things. There on the back of Utley's card, it listed his favorite quote. Considering what happened to him (and me) it's kind of fitting. It's become a personal motto for me. It's from the former coach, George Allen. It says, "Health, happiness, and success depend upon the fighting spirit of each person. The big thing is not what happens to us in life -- but what we do about what happens to us."
Who would have thought that gift, overlooked at the time, would come back and mean so much to me today.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
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Comments
Collecting is great because you do it in the present, while celebating the past (or the future with rookies). Kind of neat in that regards.
Happy collecting.
Mike
ps. I've still got a couple of Darryl Stingley's - out of only 50 or so cards I managed to keep from the thousands of my youth.
Bosox1976
Looking for alot of crap.
Plenty of athletes have had to overcome something that presented itself as a challenge. Not all as serious as yours, but in dealing with, and getting past, something like a debilitating speech impediment (like Bill Walton, Lester Hays and Bob Love have), or just abject early poverty, professional athletes can serve as terrific inspirations.