I Emptied My Retirement Account to Buy Basketball Cards. It Was Thrilling. It Nearly Ruined My Life

Photographs: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

Card collectors refer to an unopened sealed box or pack of cards as “wax.” For many collectors, myself included, much of the thrill of the hobby is in opening wax, in the statistically improbable opportunity of finding a card worth more than the pack it’s in. I dwell in possibility, wrote Emily Dickinson. When I buy wax I’m not paying for the cards, I’m paying for the fantasy of what might be inside the pack. In this way the obsession (even now I’m consciously avoiding using the word “addiction”) is very much like scratch-off tickets, or gambling at a casino.

I am writing this in 2020, amidst the throes of a global quarantine, not having physically gone in to work for nearly a year. I’m also writing this so I can sell it for money that I will use to buy basketball cards. I share this because it feels like the truest—and most pathetic—thing I can say about my relationship to card collecting. I feel like I’m charging you, reader, a nickel to stare at a strangely-shaped hole in my skull. Eventually, I’ll come to understand this as a byproduct of the frothy mindwarp of quarantine, delirious from vitamin D deficiency and months of stewing in my own juices.

But at this lockdown moment, what is clear is that in the past months I’ve spent an obscene amount on basketball cards. I don’t want to get into numbers for several reasons, chief among them the possibility that my mother-in-law might some day Google this article. But suffice it to say I’ve long since burned through whatever amount of my income might have been deemed “disposable,” and quickly crossed over into emergency funds, mortgages and student loan payments. My spouse separated our finances. I racked up a reckless driving charge hurrying home from a card shop to open my new packs, had a lawyer and court dates. Some part of me recognizes how grotesque it all is. But that part of me is still suppressible.

I’m an alcoholic and an addict. Through a conspiracy of minor miracles, I haven’t drank or used in six years. In that time I’ve constantly groped toward other foils off which to bounce my obsessiveness. I threw myself into recovery, working with newcomers and going into correctional institutions and treatment centers to work and commiserate with fellow addicts. I gave myself to poetry—writing it, teaching it, touring it. I became a champion tournament backgammon player. I’ve been a podcaster, a stencil artist, a runner, a painter. I’ve been an advantage player (card counter) at smalltime blackjack tables. I’ve read two novels a week and watched a movie a day for years, ostensibly trying to learn enough narrative to write my own novel (which will ultimately be released in early 2024 as Martyr!, about a man who—predictably, probably—is addicted to everything).

When I was still going to bars despite being months behind on my rent, I would tell people: “I’m not paying for the alcohol, I’m paying to rent this stool. I’m paying for the experience of being here.” I dwell in possibility. I was that full of shit.

Most of my sober obsessions felt okay to me because they were generative. Yes, they’ve all been sublimations of the same addictive impulsivities that nearly killed me, but generally these new manifestations have been positive. I’ve written poems and made paintings that never would have existed without my being there. I’ve learned with and from my students. I’ve laughed and wept and celebrated with newcomers in sobriety. In each case, something new was being made.

Card collecting is the opposite of all this—the whole hobby is predicated on consumption, on taking the cards you want out of the world’s limited supply. There are a finite number of 1997 Skybox Michael Jordan Metal Universe Precious Metal Gem cards in existence, so if I have one it means someone else who wants one doesn’t.

Just before the quarantine I took one of my oldest friends in recovery with me card shopping. This is a guy I got sober with, a former rugby star who now works as a registered nurse in a psychiatric hospital. As we drove around from card store to card store I narrated my new obsession, talking about how the expensive LeBron James autographed rookie card I bought wasn’t an extravagant luxury, it was an investment. “Like Apple stock,” I kept saying, though I have never bought or sold or owned or wanted stock and honestly only have the most rudimentary understanding of what “stocks” even are. My friend kept smiling with his cheeks and eyes in the coy quiet way of his that means something along the lines of, “if you say so…”

It’s said that real alcoholics will always fill their companion’s cup before filling their own. This was largely my experience—if I was drinking with you then we were having fun, we were having a good time. Nothing was amiss, there was no cause for concern. If I had three pulls left in my bottle I’d pass it to you to take the second.

When my friend and I arrived at the final card store, the best one, the one I’d been saving, we were beside ourselves. He pored through the football cards, pulling out this one or that one—saying, “Holy shit, a Brett Favre rookie!” and, “Ronnie Lott, I loved that dude!” His excitement at his finds was more thrilling to me than my own. He put together $100 worth of cards, which he negotiated to buy for even less. Later that night, when we had both gotten back to our separate houses, he texted me: “I lied and told my girlfriend I only spent $40 when I spent $60. Also she might be super mad at you because she’s assuming I’m going to get super into this : )”

Three pulls left in my bottle. Here, try a bit. Look how much fun we’re having.

Growing up, sports were a language in my household. I was living in Wisconsin during Super Bowls 31 and 32, both featuring the Green Bay Packers, and my lifelong devotion to Wisconsin sports—the Packers and the Milwaukee Bucks—was sealed. In the past few years, feeling increasingly unable to support the NFL between its overt racisms and suppression of CTE evidence and myriad domestic violence cases and and and, I’ve found my attention turning more wholly to the NBA.

But my NBA fandom isn’t a recent development. My father, who spent his whole adult life working on duck farms, has watched all 82 Bucks games every season for at least the past two decades, often recording them on his VCR and going dark to watch them unspoiled later. The Bucks are the bedrock upon which we’ve built much of our relationship over the years, a conversational channel we return to again and again when the others get fuzzy. When I think of the Bucks I feel affection for my father. It’s easy to dismiss sports as meaningless, but they’ve been profoundly important for us, two Iranian men in the Midwest trying to figure out how to speak to each other. And to the dizzy empire around us.

We moved to America when I was a small child. Our household was one of intense frugality. My mother clipped coupons all week; we tore napkins in half and reused them. Asking for a pack of basketball cards would have felt like asking for a Rolex. I settled for marveling at the binders full of shiny Jordan and Kobe cards the other kids sometimes brought into school.

In college, after prattling to a film-major friend about a movie I’d just seen in a theater and loved, he threw his hands up. “You’ve ruined it for me!” he cried. I defended myself—I’d not mentioned the plot, hadn’t offered anything even the most spoiler-averse person would find annoying. “Sure,” he said, “but now I’ll never be able to like it the way you did. The bar’s too high. You over-like things.”

It took me a while to understand what he meant: I really really love the things I like. One of the load bearing struggles of my life has been how to accept the untranslatability of my effusions. One of the basic conditions of my recovery is a fundamental mistrust of my own joy.

I bought my first basketball cards only a couple years before this, and a couple years was all it took to turn from a harmless lark into A Threat. I was traveling to teach at a summer writing workshop in Portland, Oregon, and the plane lost my luggage. The only attire I had was what I’d worn on the flight, so the airline sent me a voucher to buy new clothes. An organizer took me to the mall to cobble together a wardrobe for the week, but naturally, I quickly wandered into a sports memorabilia store. I was totally enamored—they had a giant signed poster of Magic Johnson boxing out Larry Bird, signed by both. Like the boy in the fairy tale trading his family cow for a handful of magic beans, it just felt fated—the free money burning a hole in my pocket, these two titans of my psychic life battling it on a giant poster they’d actually touched. Nevermind the clothes for which I was supposed to use the voucher, nevermind how I’d get the massive poster frame back on a plane.

I carried Larry and Magic around with me through the mall, floating an inch off the ground. I bought a single pair of pants, some socks and underwear and a couple shirts, then went back to the sports store. I eyeballed a box of Panini Prizm basketball cards behind the counter—I knew nothing about them but I’d never gotten to buy basketball cards as a kid; now I had this free airline money. It was fate! It was the beginning.

Recovery maxim: “One drink is too many, and one thousand is never enough.” That first pack of Prizm was all it took—I began stalking basketball card forums to figure out what to buy next, looking on merchant sites for cool-looking cards of my childhood heroes: Glenn Robinson, Ray Allen, Kareem-Abdul Jabbar. The ceremony was so intoxicating—the search for a gorgeous rare piece of basketball history, the tango of negotiating a fair price with the often-reticent seller, and then refreshing tracking numbers online, sitting by the mailbox, waiting to finally hold the piece in my hands.

Basketball cards are graded on four categories: surface, edges, corners, and centering. One soft corner might bump a card from a 9.5 to an 8. A tiny scratch on the back could take it even lower. The hobby is built around this obsessive attention to detail—cards are handled like the brittle bones of dead saints. They’re stored, displayed, like reliquaries. There’s something sacramental about a beloved rare card, a kind of sacred secular reverence. Men who would never step foot in an exhibit of Byzantine coins or Mesopotamian stoneware crowd around fluorescent card-shop display cases wondering at cards they’ve only ever seen in pictures, touching each other on the arms in baffled awe.

During a trip to teach at Bread Loaf the winter before lockdown, I brought a favorite card—my signed 1971 Topps Oscar Robertson rookie. I didn’t have anybody to show it to when I arrived; I wasn’t planning to do anything with it. I just loved the card and knowing it was with me, that I could reach into my bag and touch it, pull it out in the light, read the statistics on the back. A small precious thing, bidden and cherished.

Much of the past year of my life has felt governed by a kind of amorphous mélange of political, ecological, social, and psychological doom. Keeping a 53-year-old basketball card in my backpack to relieve some non-zero amount of dread seems like an unassailable good thing, right? Maybe it is. But does it matter how much I spent on the card? Does it matter how much time I spent looking for it? Deliberating whether or not I was going to buy it? Obsessing? Does the opportunity cost, financial and temporal, of that card matter? How might I have spent that money instead? How might I have spent that time? How many campaign posters could I have bought? How many delinquent correspondences might I have attended to?

One of the cruelest things a human can do is attach shame to another’s harmless joy. I fear I am constantly practicing this cruelty against myself. But I’m also afraid that this is a way to rationalize my own self-will. If I’m emptying my attention, and my bank accounts, on these cards (“investments!”), is it really harmless?

The philosopher Peter Singer’s famous “drowning child” paradox goes like this: you’re leaving a fancy party and walking home along a river when suddenly you see a child drowning. Almost certainly, you’d leap in to save the child, expensive clothes be damned. Right? Even if you’re a couple blocks away and hear the child screaming, you’d sprint those couple blocks and dive in to help. If it’s understood that you value the child’s life more than the cost of those material possessions, your expensive clothes and the phone in your pocket and whatever, then it follows that you should also be giving all your expensive non-essential items to the drowning world, that we should be donating 100% of our disposable income to charity.

Short of giving away all my clothes and buying a donkey, anything about my life today could rightly be taken as an indictment of my own monstrous ease. But on the spectrum from monkish asceticism to utter frippery, I know where basketball cards fall. There is a prayer by St. Augustine in his youth that has become my own. “Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo,” he said—“Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

My favorite player in the NBA is Giannis Antetokounmpo, a Nigerian immigrant to Greece who grew up selling knockoff designer handbags to tourists in Athens, who as a teenager often slept on a mat of the gym where he trained. Antetokounmpo plays for my Milwaukee Bucks and just led them to their best two seasons of my lifetime—he’s still a year away from winning the Bucks their first championship in fifty years, but he’s already earned himself two league MVP’s. He is charming, humble, charitable, family-centered, talented, ambitious, funny, and unprecedented. On the court he looks like a sword cutting through silk, that smooth and powerful and effortless.

When it comes to Singer’s paradox, I tithe. I’m not rich, but at this moment I have an assistant professor job at a good public university and make more money than I need to survive. More than I’ve had at any point in my life. I give to GoFundMe’s, make regular donations to bail funds and recovery homes and organizations that build bridges and vaccinate children and fix cleft lips and provide legal resources to immigrants and clean plastic out of the ocean and generally support all the other legitimate causes we all champion to make our world more habitable. That is all verifiably true. But my recovery program is one that demands of me not just honesty but rigorous honesty. So I will also add that for every dollar I’ve spent on those things during quarantine, I’ve also spent at least one on basketball cards. I wince typing that. It’s impossible not to think of Singer’s Paradox.

When I told my spouse Paige I was writing an essay about card collecting, they said, “Are you writing about how you’re afraid anything you love will become dangerous?”

Two months ago, I emptied out my retirement account to pay for new basketball cards. Paige, the love of my life, separated our bank accounts.

I am afraid anything I love will become dangerous.

I am wired to press any available PLEASURE button until it breaks. In recovery I’ve lost my privileges regarding most of my favorite pleasure buttons. Of those still available to me—buying cards, having written, connection with some divine, and orgasm—buying cards is the most immediately summonable and the least complicated. I can do it from my phone, on demand, anywhere, around anyone.

This going to sound like I’m making it up for the purposes of this essay but I’m not: for weeks I’ve been having this recurring dream where Giannis Antetokounmpo comes to my house (sometimes it’s not my house but one of the many apartments of my childhood, or one of my classrooms) to look at my basketball cards. Giannis ducks through doorways and I pull out box after box, showing him the highlights of my real-life collection—a 1972 Topps Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a 1997 signed Glenn Robinson booklet, a 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie card. Giannis is deeply interested.

John Coltrane once described his unique saxophone playing style by saying, “I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” In my dreams my joy feels like this, like the way Coltrane played it, a straight line traveling infinitely in both directions. I think the main difference between real life and dreams is that dreams are deeply unironic. My joy is my joy and the gulf between joy and shame is vast.

Zbigniew Herbert: “Nothing is more ordinary than the dreams of Emperors.” Great power, great responsibility. I feel like cards are a way for me to hide from my dread, from the beautiful terrible difficult world that birthed it. What better place to hide than a little cardboard rectangle small enough to fit in a pant pocket? What better place to escape than a dream?

I’m not finished with basketball cards yet. I still see myself as being in the twilight of it still being a hobby, before it becomes A Real Problem Demanding a Substantive Intervention. My brain is a little tyrant, a Hannibal Lector. I can’t leave it alone for two seconds in a room with a paperclip (or a basketball card) without the whole city going up in flames. Right now on eBay, there is a gorgeous signed Giannis rookie card with a patch of game-worn jersey in it.

I’ve been watching the auction for days, refreshing it, contemplating bidding. I stare at the picture on my screen, imagine it sitting on my desk, glowing in my hands. I dwell in that possibility.

Originally Appeared on GQ