Hi, I’m Ché, and I’m wordy. Very Wordy. I love sports cards. I love to write. I love to write about sports cards.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get to why I’m here. You may already know me by my Twitter alias, ENSportsCards. And if you have followed me on Twitter, you may already know most of this, but there are some new nuggets below that I’ve never shared there. Anyway, I’ve decided that my rambling mind can no longer stand to be constrained to 280 characters at a time, so I’ve created this little outlet for me to have a place where I can just free form ramble on The Hobby, life, and whatever else tickles my fancy.

If we haven’t interacted, or you don’t know much about me, or why #WhyICollect is my mantra, here’s the part where I change that… my backstory.

There’s not a lot interesting about me, and I’m actually surprised you are still reading this. I’m a 40 something child of the 80’s who is very possibly entering a mid life crisis. I’m the extremely proud and doting father of two amazing sons, from whose initials I derived the “E and N” in ENSportsCards. They are my inspiration, my everything.

I began collecting baseball cards in 1981, and spent practically every penny a 7 year old could come up with on Topps wax packs. This pretty much continued for the next 15 years or so, as I continued to rabidly collect baseball (and later basketball) cards into the mid 90’s.

In 1996, I left the University of Kentucky and my old Kentucky home behind, and moved to Florida. One day I just woke up and thought to myself, I want to go live on the beach. So I spent the day deciding what was essential to me, what I needed to leave behind for safe keeping with my mom, and what was either too big (furniture) or too meaningless to worry about saving. By midnight that night, I had told my roommate he could have my furniture tossed him my apt key, packed up what I could fit in my 1989 maroon Ford Probe, and hit I75 South with no plan whatsoever. Unfortunately, there is only so much cabin space inside a 1989 Probe, and my card collection didn’t make the list of essential items that I crammed in that thing, they went to Mom’s. The decision to leave my cards behind was the beginning of what would become roughly a 23 year hiatus from being active in the hobby. After spending a little over a year of honing expert level knowledge of how to successfully work a construction job from 7:00-4:00 everyday, while somehow partying until 3:00 am nightly, and just being an overall beach bum, I’d had my fill of that and decided to give adulting a try.

I came home to the Bluegrass state and got a job. I met a girl. I liked the girl, and much to my surprise, she liked me back. Ultimately we got married, then “E & N” came along, and I cruised along for a few years. During this time, I never thought about my cards or my old beloved hobby. I was adulting at this point, remember?

Then one day life threw me a good old fashioned Satchel Paige “trouble ball”, that girl and I came to the inevitable mutual realization that our journey together as a married couple had come to an end. So our family went through some major changes. Here’s the part where I circle back and tie in to the mid-life crisis reference in the intro. I found myself newly single, living alone (the 60% of the time I don’t have my boys,) and extremely bored. My mom had passed away a few months prior and in going through her stuff I had found what had survived of my old card collection. Unfortunately a couple of my best boxes had been misplaced or lost, including all of my old Rod Carew cards (this is me pointing out foreshadowing to future topics of discussion,) but for the most part I had boxes upon boxes of memories to sift through.

The first day that I decided to get those boxes out and go through them, the gratification was immediate. The nostalgia I experienced was just intoxicating, and I was 100%, no questions asked, transformed right back into a full blown card junkie right there on the spot! The industry is not the same one I left behind 20+ years ago, that much is certain. But I won’t address any of that here, they’ll be future blog entries for that. But the major change that I will address today, is how much social media is now interwoven into the fabric of the wold of card collecting. One year ago this week, I discovered that Twitter, an app I’d been using for years, had a full blown sports card culture that was active, vibrant and just full of so many folks like me. Sure, they may not have stopped collecting to go be a beach bum, or because of marriage, or kids. Or, they may not have ever stopped. But the common thread that unites that community is we all love the hobby now, and love talking, chatting and just interacting with anyone willing to show interest in what we have to say about it.

Over the course of this past year, I’ve cultivated true friendships, learned the joys of sharing my love of the hobby with others, and I’ve found my niche in this hobby. I’ve discovered the things about it that give me joy, and I’ve discovered things about it that don’t make me happy. I choose to focus on the parts that leave me with a sense of fulfillment. If nothing else, this past year has taught me “why I collect” and that’s how my tagline was born, #WhyICollect.

I have been humbled & awed that so many folks find what I have to say interesting enough to follow me and interact with me daily about this simple childhood passion we simply refer to as “The Hobby”. If you’re still with me at this point, bless your heart! I plan to post new stories, content and such on here often, I don’t know where this little blog will go. I’m sure my vision for what I think I want it to be will organically grow and change as both the hobby and I evolve. Thanks for being here, I hope you come back to visit often. Peace and Love!

Ché – ENSportsCards