Classic card of the week

Some dude, 1980-81 Topps

Hey, here is an awesome hockey card featuring a guy. This guy plays for the Canucks. This guy also plays left wing, and wears a dashiki on the ice. This guy also got his ass kicked at some point in the past few days. Can you guess who this guy is? No? Me neither! Isn’t that friggin' sweet! This card is the manifestation of, quite possibly, the most ingenious idea in sports card history (not including, of course, this): the scratch n’ sniff hockey card! Yes, if you scratch the black hockey puck on the lower right-hand side of the card with a nearby penny, or even a dulled machete, it will reveal the name of the player on the front. Then, if you so choose, you can sniff that area, which will release the very same aroma that this guy’s hockey equipment does after an overtime game. So, why haven’t I scratched off this area yet to reveal this guy’s name? Well, don’t be such an idiot! This guy could be Wayne Gretzky for all I know! I’m not going to ruin my new Wayne Gretzky card by ripping it up with a dulled machete – I have a retirement to plan for! Of course, this was the main problem with the scratch n’ sniff idea – nobody scratched. You see, recent surveys have suggested that mostly hockey fans collect hockey cards, and hockey fans are freakin’ nuts. They know everything about hockey. And there is no grey area when it comes to hockey; either you know your shizz, or you think this guy might be Wayne Gretzky. For example, if I showed my brother-in-law this card, he’d look at it for like, two seconds, and then say something like, “Yeah, that’s Olf Lemieux. He helped Chezeslovakia win a bronze medal in 1976.” I could probably get a whole bunch of these cards, and show them to him like flash cards, and he’d guess each and every one. Blindfolded. So, why would someone like him bother scratching a card to reveal a name he already knew, thus ruining the card? Exactly. And the greatest part is, the name isn’t revealed on the back of the card either. There are only clues. Here’s the clue for this card: “His strong points are his tough checking and good positional play.” Well, I mean, geez – could you make it more obvious? I may not know a lot about hockey, but I darn well know that no one checked tougher and consistently stayed in the alignment required by their respective position than Patrick Roy. I wonder what he smells like…

Did you know?
“Canucks” is Canadian for “schnozzberries.”