1976 Topps 'Too Tall' Jones rookie card...... Priceless!

Bobby Greer is shown in one of his favorite positions; in the floor looking at some of his overwhelming sports memorabilia collection. Greer started collecting football cards at the age of nine and never looked back. He has more than one-hundred-thousand cards in his collection today along with hundreds of autographs and other sports collectibles covering football, baseball, basketball, hockey and NASCAR.

"Wow! These are cool!" apparently were the words out of my mouth while opening the fresh packs at a nearby Taco Bell just minutes later. That's what grandma told me years later when reminiscing. Anyway, I was hooked. They were great. All of the players you would hear named on TV during a game and great statistics and even a 'who am I?' trivia teaser. The more cards you had of a specific team, the more clues you got. Ed 'Too Tall' Jones (Dallas Cowboys defensive end) was one of my favorite players at that time. I thought he was cool because he was so much taller than everyone else and he was all over the field. I thought he must be one of the greatest players ever after seeing a couple of Cowboy games that he excelled in. Now I had a picture card of my favorite player! There was even a piece of the sweetest bubble gum that you could ever chew on in each and every pack.

I would take the rubber band off of my stack and proudly show my new shiny football player picture cards to anyone that would pay attention to me.

After a couple of weeks of dinging the corners and breaking rubber bands, I had a brilliant idea. I shall take my pictures of professional football players and I shall put them in a small two-ring binder. It worked great! All I had to do was poke two holes in each card two inches apart and they slid right onto the binders, just as planned. No more rubber bands breaking, sending my new found love sailing through the air like a game of 52 card pick-up! I was a genius!

Soon after my new hobby had begun, the family packed up and moved east to Missouri. At the same time I learned that glass soda bottles could be returned to a grocery store or gas station for cold hard cash. Could I find more football cards in a new state? Six packs of 15 cards at 25 cents per pack: "I can find soda bottles and buy more cards!" That was my attitude toward my new hobby. And I did. In the seventies there was still an abundance of soda bottles lying around near the roads and a lot of older people would give you their pop bottle collections just because they did not want to mess with the hassle of taking the bottles back to the grocery store to fetch their hefty reward of a dime each. Unfortunately, my folks were not soda drinkers so soda bottles never accumulated at my house. I had my work cut out for me but I was an ambitious kid.

Every store my parents went into with me tagging along became a quest to find those elusive packs. Score! I found them in a local drugstore and again in a small Mom and Pop's grocery store not two miles from our house. Not only did I find them, but they were only 20 cents per pack! Two soda bottles equals one pack of cards! I could ride my bike to this store. It was a very small town and surely no one else would buy all those packs before I could accumulate enough soda bottles to buy all of the remaining packs of cards.

The amount of packs remaining were less each time I took my pop bottles to the store. This concerned me. Who else could want these cards as bad as I did and what would happen when the box ran dry? My deepest fear (at the time) was calmed on one of my trips when I got the courage to speak to the store owner one day as he was coincidentally putting a brand new box of football cards out on the shelf. He had come to realize that I was very serious about getting all of these cards that I could get my hands on and told me about the 'good old days' when he and his buddies used to collect baseball cards as children and how he and all of his buddies would put their favorite players card on their bicycle wheels to make a really neat clicking sound as the spokes passed over the card. Baseball cards? He also reassured me that if he sold out of packs, he could always get more. Mr. Hicks was my new best friend!

My next trip to the store was historical in my small mind. Sitting quietly and untouched right next to the football cards were a box of packs containing 1977 Topps baseball cards. Mr. Hicks had come through. Our previous conversation had meaning to it. He understood the importance of my collection.

Baseball cards, huh? This could be neat too! Instantly, I had two separate sport collections growing at a rapid pace as I found pop bottle after pop bottle and accumulated allowance for doing a good job on my chores. It was a given that the binder would do for storage no longer, therefore my father suggested a shoe box. Did he know something about collecting sports cards? He definitely knew I was in bad need of a shoe box!

When the school year started I made lots of new friends who, much to my surprise, were also new collectors of baseball and football cards. It didn't take long of talking about and showing off our treasures for someone to come up with the brilliant idea of 'trading' certain cards for someone else's certain cards. Holy Moly! That put a new spin on things. We could all trade each other to make sure we each got our favorite players. As a group, we also decided that maybe we should take better care of our cards. No more poking holes through them. So cards were separated by team and each team was rubber banded and placed into the sacred shoe box.

I loved my shoe box. It was originally an Adidas tennis shoe box that I had covered with baseball team logo stickers that came out of a gum ball vending machine and football team helmet stickers that were inserted into loaves of Wonder bread for a while. It was beautiful even though it did have four of the same Oakland A's stickers on it. I couldn't care less about the Oakland A's at the time, but they had a neat logo!

If it pertained to sports and it was on a thin piece of cardboard, I wanted it. The next year brought a new season and a new card design for each sport with newer statistics. For several years I was a walking sports encyclopedia. Just ask my folks! I could and would bore them for hours talking about certain players and their statistics and achievements. Neither of them were too much into sports but I think they appreciated (or just thought of it as amusing) my desire and dedication put forward towards my hobby.

After another year of buying and trading cards, one shoe box was simply not enough. Time to expand to a football box and a baseball box. Both were lavishly decorated to their sport. They had to be. Those cardboard receptacles were the 'home' of my prized possessions.

Over the next few years I became quite educated in the collecting of baseball and football cards. Rule number one: Take better care of your collection - no more poking holes in them to accommodate a binder. That idea seemed so 'childish' now! These things are worth money! Not that I could ever sell any card in my collection. I was always willing to do some serious 'trading with the boys' but I could never sell a card for money. It was against the rules. Rule number two: Always put your cards up or else your mother will throw them out! On one occasion as I took the trash out, I was absolutely shocked to find one of my many shoe boxes laying on top of the already discarded trash after she had warned me about "leaving those darn things laying around." Looking back I suspect my mom placed them their for me to prove a point, never meaning to do any damage. Trust me; it worked. I secretly retrieved my shoe box of cards, smuggled it back into the house and never left them lying around again!

The collection grew leaps and bounds until the teenage years when I established a new hobby; girls. The collection was forced to take a back seat for a few years but was never completely forgotten. Shoe box upon shoe box were stored in my closet like a pirate's treasure buried on some secret island for future use.

The treasure was dug up after graduating from high school. I was making that big move out of the parent's house and could not leave my childhood collection behind. Each box I opened was sweeter than Christmas morning. I couldn't believe that I had amassed such a prosperous collection as a child and hid it away in the closet. I had forgotten that I had so many great cards. I had also forgotten about the ones that my little sister Michelle had decided to draw on one day! I was officially over my 'girls are the most important thing on Earth' phase!

As the years have passed, my passion has grown and expanded to include all sorts of sports memorabilia. I enjoy meeting with (shaking hands with and getting autographs) past, present and future superstars of sports at different events or special card shows that are held just for me and everyone else who fell in love with sports cards.

I have accumulated numerous autographs over the years like Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal, Red Schoendist, Ozzie Smith, Gale Sayers, Brett Hull, Ken Griffey Jr., Terry Bradshaw and Isaac Bruce. Trust me, that's just a drop in the bucket but my favorite sports item is a baseball autographed by the legendary Jack Buck. Although Mr. Buck never hit a home run or struck anyone out for the St. Louis Cardinals, he was there every night when I was listening to the Cardinal games on KMOX 1120 AM radio and analyzing every card in my collection as a kid. My best friend Chuck and I took a baseball, ball-point pen, and a chance that we may have the opportunity before a game in Busch Stadium just outside of the KMOX broadcast booth to catch him. Our timing was perfect and he even chatted with me one-on-one for a couple of minutes before the crowd started to gather. What a thrill it was for a sports geek like me.

The hobby is much different now. Every individual card should properly be stored in a protective sleeve and mass production with high retail prices by the manufacturers drives the collectible appeal down. It is much more economical to seek out individual cards instead of buying packs. However, I do still buy an occasional box of unopened packs and the thrill of the childhood chase comes rushing back every time a good card is pulled from a pack.

How is a kid supposed to discover the joys of collecting cards these days without having at least 'middle-class' parents? The glass soda-pop bottle has been replaced by non-refundable plastic and a kid would almost have to earn minimum wage for doing chores to get enough allowance to start a decent collection.

I remember vividly pulling two Walter Payton rookie cards out of the six original packs that my grandma bought for me and I also remember punching holes in them. The Walter Payton rookie card in great shape today fetches about $250. If all of the cards that I got in my younger years were in mint condition today, I could be a whole lot better off financially, but I wouldn't trade the memories or the thrills of being that boy who loved his card collection for anything.

Bobby Greer may be contacted at bgreer@dailystatesman.com