On a whim I decided to purchase a blaster of 2011 UD Goodwin Champions. Yeah, I probably should have stayed away.  But I’ll admit that the image of Michael Jordan Peering at me on the side of the box and his signature scrawled in the area below his face made things intriguing.  Plus, I like that I got 12 packs in the box.

I digress.  I’d done ZERO research before  buying the box, so everything I saw in my packs was brand new to me.  Which may be why I was so stunned … and really amused … by the images I saw on my cards.

I mean I know Upper Deck really does’t have permission to print many logos on their cards, but some of these are really mindboggling.

Take a look at this Carlton Fisk.

The back of this card discusses how one of the lasting images of Fisk’s career is of him coaxing the ball fair in1975.  There’s also some chatter of him having his jersey number retired.  So how does UD honor this guy?  By depicting him as a lumberjack.  Wtf?

And Troy Aikman … Hall of Fame quarterback … blah blah blah.  All-American athlete … blah blah blah.  No mention of him leaving the world of football to be the head coach of some country’s national soccer team, which is how he is depicted here.

But perhaps my favorite … Mike Schmidt.

What says “one of the third basemen of all time” like depicting him as the director of some 1970s pornography film?   This image looks like it is straight out of Boogie Nights.

So, is this what happens when a company cannot produce cards of a player in their uniform?  Are companies just going to give us card images of players doing things that we are not used to seeing them doing?

I thumbed through the 48 cards I received in my box and noticed that there is really only ONE logo that appears on any of these cards…

Interesting, no?

This entry was posted on July 7, 2011 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Newspaperman with tags Anthony Kim, baseball cards, Goodwin Champions, Michael Jordan, Michelle Wie, Nike, porn, pornography, sports, Upper Deck. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.