You Are Looking Live at Cards from Angus

Today, living sportsbook legend Brent Musburger decided to call it a career in broadcasting today. Musburger, 77, basically announced, "yes, next Tuesday, I'm done." His last game will be to call the Georgia Bulldogs basketball game at Kentucky. Musburger supposedly is going to help family members with their new venture in sports handicapping.

For me, it's not soon enough. Musburger's last season was spent paired with Jesse Palmer calling games on the SEC Network. Between Palmer's inability to stop talking whenever any possibility of dead air approached and with Musburger usually -- and tellingly, it seems -- more focused on whether the teams would cover the spread and whether the teams would get over the over/under number, it got to the point where I literally could not listen to them.

Still, Musburger had some memorable calls in his life, what with being around sports for as long as he has. And what better way to thank Angus from Dawg Day Cards for his Christmas card and the gifts that came with it than to start "looking live."

1. Brent Musburger Introduces America to Jenn Sterger

Without Brent Musburger, Jenn Sterger would have never become known to America. Without Brent Musburger, that means, perhaps Brett Favre's little Brett never gets to the Internet. Maybe, just maybe, without Brent Musburger, new Brewer minor leaguer Cody Decker would never have met Jennifer Sterger and gotten engaged to her.

It's always about Wisconsin sports, right?



Starting off the envelope from Angus, we have a Ryan Braun Chrome 1989 Topps refractor from the 2014 Chrome set and a 1997 Dave Nilsson card from the Donruss Limited set -- a "counterparts" card with Jim Thome on the back. I definitely needed the Nilsson, and the Braun scanned so beautifully that I had to share it even though it may be my second or third or fourth copy of that card.

2. Brent Musburger perving on an orange Iowa State fan

This apparently was a couple of years ago at the Big 12 basketball tournament. I guess it was because it was so par for the course for Brent Musburger to get all excited when women were on screen that no one mentioned anything. That, or no one cares enough about the Big 12 basketball tournament to notice...or maybe that's just me.

I'm much more likely to exclaim "Oh, Yeah" when I see 1973 O-Pee-Chee cards than I am about that Oompa-Loompa girl who looks like a bad cross between Donald Trump and Katy Perry, but only if Trump just put on extra spray tan in an effort to try to look orange. Okay, so maybe that's harsh on the girl, and the problem is the color on the video, but man, that is not attracive.

Not like these cards are. Well, except the electric blue Don Money hat in the pinstriped Phillies jersey (n.b. The Brewers did not wear pinstripes until they changed logos in 1978).

3.  Brent Musburger Gets Katherine Webb Airtime

Are you seeing a trend? Over at least the final 10 to 15 years of his career, Brent Musburger started paying less attention to the game and more attention to the girls in the crowd. To be fair, when you see someone as stunning as Katherine Webb, it might be difficult to look away if you are a heterosexual male.

As was the case for Sterger, Katherine Webb parlayed her 15 seconds of fame into about 15 minutes of fame by doing the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue in 2013 and then going on this weird show on ABC called "Splash", which featured D list celebrities jumping off diving boards. I mean, hell, Louie Anderson was on the show, I think.  

Hey, anything to get her on TV in a swimsuit, I suppose. Here's a link to a video from that show. In fairness to her, she already was Miss Alabama, and she had her man A.J. McCarron already (who is now her husband). But still -- no one would recall her today without Brent Musburger.

On the other hand, everyone would know who these two players are whether Brent Musburger called one of their games or not. As best I can tell, Brent did, indeed call baseball games on CBS radio. He was slated to call games in 1990 on TV, but CBS fired him effective the day after he called the NCAA Men's Basketball Final on April 2, 1990 and replaced him with Jack Buck. 

But I can't find any video of him doing it.

4.  Brent Musburger Loses It over "Busty Heart"

Watch the video to about the 1:20 mark to hear about Tree Rollins and Danny Ainge hating each other and about Rollins taking a bite out of Ainge's hand during a scuffle. Stay to see John Salley in the crown seated next to a blond woman who decides to shake her breasts for the camera. That was Susan Sykes a/k/a Busty Heart.

Sykes took her two seconds of infamy and Musburger's inability to stop laughing and has turned it into a life's work. At the age of 55, now, Busty Heart has her own website -- at, of course, www.bustyheart.com -- and you can see videos of her using her 44H breasts to smash bricks, crush cans, and bust watermelons. 

No kidding.

That's disturbing. Go to the website, though, to see video from Today where Kathie Lee Gifford can't stop laughing either.

Something less disturbing...please:

It's Scooter Gennett as a child, looking like someone you'd call Scooter. The Brewers almost certainly tried to find a trade partner willing to take Scooter on as a bench part this offseason since they have said already that Jonathan Villar will be their starting second baseman this year. 

Having found no takers as of this writing, Gennett is still on the Brewers. I'm not quite sure why the team did not decide simply to non-tender him, but I guess they have hope that he either will bring something in trade during the season or that he could develop further. My guess is that he will no longer be a Brewer in the very near future, one way or the other.

5. Brent Musburger Forlorn over UGA TD

So, I can't get a video of just this play to embed, so here's a 12-minute highlight package. You honestly had to hear more than just one play, though, to get the feel. Last fall, Georgia and South Carolina pushed their game in Columbia to Sunday from Saturday due to Hurricane Matthew. It was an entirely out of sync game. Watching college football on a Sunday afternoon felt weird.

Listening to Brent Musburger and Jesse Palmer making mistakes all day -- things like Musburger calling UGA quarterback Jacob Eason by the name "Jason", or pronouncing Quincy Mauger's name wrong after Mauger made a huge deal about it being Haitian and pronounced "Mo-zhay" even after Jesse Palmer corrected him.

More annoyingly, though, Musburger spent more of the game worried about the spread -- South Carolina was a 7-1/2 to 8-1/2 point underdog -- than anything else. This was especially shown to be true near the end of the game. Go to the 11-minute mark of the video. South Carolina scored a TD to pull within 7 with a minute-and-a-half to go -- and Brent was excited for that. He must have had money on Carolina to cover. At any rate, South Carolina kicked an onside kick, and Terry Godwin ran it back for a TD.

Brent sounded like someone had run over his puppy. I wasn't the only one to notice.

Something that is the opposite of dejected was me when I got this package and found an awesome poster book from 1985 looking up at me.

$3.75 was big money in 1985! I remember those "Scholastic Book Club" order forms from that time, and getting something that was $3.75 was a major investment. I'd usually bottom feed or try to find something for a dollar or less -- mainly because I couldn't afford such frivolities as books at that point. If I wanted to read, I needed to go to the library and find something to read. I did that often, to be fair.

Anyway, getting back to this poster book, inside was a great Cecil Cooper "poster"

Coooooooop!

Coop's swing was smooth and as silky as they came. He was not a patient hitter, to be fair, but damn he could hit.

Many thanks go to Angus for the great cards and, legitimately, to Brent Musburger for his lifetime of commentating. When he was on top of his game back in the 1980s and 1990s, he was one of the best.

Gunslinger by Jeff Pearlman

I love to read. I have literally hundreds of books in my house -- some of which I've read, others I have not yet read. I've been slogging through a dense biography about Karl Marx over the past several months, for instance, and it reminded me why I put it down the first time I started reading it -- while interesting, it is not a fast-paced book.

Often, though, I will have two or three books going at once. Over the summer, for example, I had a weekend where I had to be in Florida for a trade association meeting and had most of Saturday free. So, I read Jonah Keri's book Up, Up & Away about the Montreal Expos and that team's time in Montreal -- and how it fell apart. It's a great book that I can highly recommend, and it's a fast read -- I read it basically in one sitting over about 4 hours (I read very fast, usually).

Another very easy book for me to get through is one that just came out last week: Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre by Jeff Pearlman. 

This is actually a scan of a 4" x 6" card that replicates the book's front cover and, on the back, has a couple of the book-jacket quotes that publishers like to use to validate how great a writer or book is.

Pearlman has written several sports books, including the book about the cocaine-using Dallas Cowboys called Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty (which I have also read). He also is the writer who wrote the Sports Illustrated story about John Rocker that led to Rocker's suspension and ultimate downfall.

Pearlman is active on Twitter, and it was on Twitter that he made an offer much like the one that Molly Knight made for her book, The Best Team Money Can Buy about the Dodgers -- if you emailed a screenshot of proof that you preordered the book, then he would send an autographed front plate to paste into the book.

And that's what I did:

Not sure where Jeff is getting the Southern Cal influence here (he went to Delaware, I went to Vanderbilt and Georgia...) but hey, thanks for the cool autograph for the book. I stuck that into the front of the book, and that's where it will stay.

Now, for the book. There have been a couple of excerpts published online already if you want a flavor for how the book reads. This one on Sports Illustrated talks about how much of a wastrel Favre was during his one-year tenure with the Falcons. A second one on Bleacher Report pretty much confirms what a complete dick Favre was to Aaron Rodgers when Rodgers was drafted -- though Rodgers certainly exacerbated the issues by being cocky and tone-deaf himself. 

For me, a lot of the book covered familiar ground. If you knew anything about the behind-the-scenes world in which Favre ran in Wisconsin, you knew that he was a big-time drinker. A number of stories later in his career mentioned his womanizing in past-tense terms until, of course, Favre started sending pictures of little Brett to Brent Musburger's FSU Cowgirl crush/internet sensation/New York Jets sideline eye-candy/Deanna Favre lookalike Jenn Sterger. 

Brett & Deanna Favre

Jenn Sterger

Favre and his Hamlet act on retirement over his past several years in Green Bay had worn on me. By the time he was traded to the Jets, I was relieved. It was time for him to go, and it was time for the team to move on. Simply put, Favre viewed himself as bigger than the team by that point, and he loved the attention that his continued on-again, off-again retirement drew to him.

Pearlman did not speak to Favre for this book, but he did speak to over 500 other people in and around Favre's life -- everyone from Brett's mother to drinking buddy and wingman Mark Chmura to Jets OC and destroyer of the Georgia Bulldog football program Brian Schottenheimer.

As with most public figures and professional athletes, there are any number of negatives about Favre. He was an arrogant prick to rookies, he believed he deserved (and he received) special treatment from the Packers in his later years -- to the point of getting to dress in the coaches' room rather than with the other 52 players on the roster -- and he was an alcoholic womanizer who treated his high school sweetheart Deanna like complete crap. 

On the other hand, you also get the good -- the arrogance often leads to an ability to overcome setbacks, and Favre needed that cockiness early on in his career. In Favre's second year in Green Bay, the Packers had drafted Mark Brunell out of Washington. Favre was so stubborn at times that Coach Mike Holmgren was perpetually one series away from benching Favre and giving Brunell a shot to play. While a less confident player might have been shaken by that, Favre was motivated by it. 

Similarly, any number of stories about the good stuff Brett Favre did -- like the stories that Pearlman put into his prologue about Favre befriending little kids with cancer -- don't sell as many books. Those likely fell by the wayside early on. This is not to say that cutting the feel-good stories was an intentional act meant to make Favre look bad. Rather, it's more an indication that the "juicy" stuff is more interesting; we sort of expect the nice stories more than some of the negative.

In the end, Favre comes across as a complicated human being, sort of as you would expect. He was petulant, caring, obnoxious, vindictive, insecure, annoying, cocky, warm, loving, hateful and hated all at once. In other words, he really is a human being and not some caricature drawn by John Madden on a Sunday afternoon talking about how Favre just plays like a kid with joy and all that. It is an interesting portrait, and it is a good read -- especially if you are a Green Bay Packers fan.

One last thing: I have two of those 4 x 6 cards of the cover. If you want one of them, let me know by commenting below. If more than two people let me know that they want them before Monday, November 7, at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time, I'll do a randomizer giveaway. Otherwise, I'll just give them away. Thanks for stopping by.

Headin' for a Heartbreak

A few weeks back, Matt F. from Heartbreaking Cards of Staggering Genius was the recipient of one of my attempts to reduce my staggering number of baseball cards that are not Milwaukee Brewers.  I sent him a bunch of those 1972 minis from the 2013 Topps effort which were essentially collecting dust in a box in a cabinet in my house.  

Matt was kind enough to send me some cards and other items recently in return for those. Even in the midst of war with Hazel Green -- and trust me when I say that JBF has sunk to monstrous levels in the war -- these cards from Matt are far too good to wait.

In the spirit of another theme post, how about we use Matt's "Heartbreaking Originals" for the theme here?  Matt hasn't added to them in a while, though they are excellent and with the perfect sense of dry/gallows humor that Midwesterners are known for.  

Let's start with #12: an Allen & Ginter original 2008 "World's Greatest Victories" featuring Skrillex at the 54th Grammy Awards.  Skrillex is Sonny Moore, a 27-year-old from Highland Park, California, who has said he is influenced greatly by the Warp label, whose artist stable includes Squarepusher and Aphex Twin.  

Here's a little Skrillex for you:

That is music that may not be familiar to a lot of you. To be fair, I don't listen to much Skrillex myself, but there is a lot worse out there.  

Speaking of the unfamiliar, this card was in the envelope from Matt:

This Sports Kings Gum card from Series E is a card from a set that I have never even heard of before. It does not appear that Sports Kings Gum got very far, seeing that their website has not been updated for quite some time.  It's too bad -- who wouldn't want to have a dual memorabilia card featuring Joe Sakic and Sasha Baron Cohen on the same card? Or Terry Sawchuk and Paula Creamer? Or, more saliently, Maurice "The Rocket" Richard and Paul Molitor?

The next Heartbreaking Original is a 1975 Kellogg's 3-D Superstars card of Brett Favre's Lil Brett (NSFW, perhaps) that he texted to Jenn Sterger, the former Florida State "cowgirl" who, of course, was discovered and became famous in the time-honored tradition that made a name for Katherine Webb -- Brent Musburger perving over her in the stands while a national TV audience watched.

How about a real Kellogg's 3-D Superstars card instead, of Davey May (Derrick May's dad):

While Brett Favre will always have a place in my football fandom for bringing my Green Bay Packers back to the Super Bowl and winning it, Lil Brett should have stayed under covers.

What's next?

How about the 2009 Topps Heritage of Thom Yorke from Radiohead?  This one may be my favorite Heartbreaking Original.  It's an iconic set design from 1960 that works perfectly for Yorke.

Yes, we need Radiohead here:

In the mid-1990s, I really liked 'Fake Plastic Trees" a lot. Speaking of plastic...

Two plastic-protected Topps Coins from 1971 -- one of former Brewers announcer (and later Indians announcer), the late Mike Hegan and one of former bonus baby Lew Krausse, who made his debut in 1961 with the Kansas City Athletics and, in his first appearance fresh out of high school at the age of 18, threw a 3-hit (and 5-walk) shutout of the Los Angeles Angels (then not of Anaheim) and went 2-for-3 at bat to boot.

One of the sardonic cards in the Originals is the 2009 Allen & Ginter Hoaxes card called "Book Value."  Believing in book value and then bidding on eBay is a dangerous game.  You will outbid almost everyone on every auction.  I mean, think of how dangerous believing book value would be with these two cards?

I made the decision to subscribe for a little while to the Beckett price guide online when I first got back into collecting.  I wanted it as a reality check of sorts, and because the first thing people always ask when they hear that you collect cards is, "oh, yeah, I have a couple of cards.  What's this one worth?"  

One of my first experiences with that was trying to help a neighbor who has a bunch of cards from the early 1960s in really great shape to determine how much his cards might be worth.  I looked at Beckett, and then for a sanity check I looked at eBay.  Beckett was always high by at least 10% and sometimes 25% or more.  As I looked further, it got worse for the so-called high-end cards like Triple Threads -- even the non-relic base cards -- and the serial numbered cards.  These Molitors would be amazingly overvalued -- or at least they were then.  

After all, it is one of the world's greatest hoaxes.

I'm left now with two cards that do not have decent analogs on the Heartbreaking Originals. So, let's play one more Radiohead song in honor of the second Thom Yorke card -- this time, a 2008 Allen & Ginter.

This is what you get when you mess with Jean Segura or Dave May.

Matt, I thank you very much for the great cards. I assume that the Heartbreaking Originals may make a comeback when you have the time and the inspiration to undertake a few more cards. I hope that you do that.

Thanks again.