Markus Delray’s spare bedroom has a wall that has two different stories written on it. On one side, he spent three years putting together a corkboard mosaic with hundreds of wine corks neatly pinned into place. It’s a quiet, tactile record of dinners, parties, and regular Tuesday evenings. On the other, he has neatly stacked plastic sleeves with NFL trading cards inside each one that date back to the spring of 2020. There isn’t a clear link between the two collections. Marcus, on the other hand, thinks they go well together.
He had no plans to start collecting cards. At first, no one really is. In March 2020, when the world went dark and the evenings felt like they were stretching out, Marcus, a logistics manager in his mid-40s from Columbus, Ohio, got restless, just like a lot of other people that year. There wasn’t much else to look at besides the corks, which were pinned and put in order. His nephew said, almost by accident, that the market for sports cards was having a weird time. People bought packs online, watched others open them on YouTube, and then sold singles on eBay. It seemed strange. Marcus still looked it up.
A blaster box of 2019 Panini Prizm Football was his first pack. He ordered it on a Wednesday night while a pasta dish cooled on the stove. It got there after four days. Like he always did when opening a good bottle, he remembers sitting at the kitchen table and slowly opening it. He paid attention to the ritual of it. There were some base cards and some parallels, but nothing really stands out. But there was something satisfying about holding them in your hands. How smooth the cardstock is. How light hits a chrome finish from a side. This might have reminded him, without him realizing it, of the tactile pleasure he got from collecting corks—the way a small object can hold a trace of something bigger.
The next week, he bought another box. Then a gift box. Then, at midnight, he started reading forums to learn the difference between a holo refractor and a prizm base and which rookie classes were important. From the outside, it doesn’t look like there is a steep learning curve. There is an entire language, economy, and set of unwritten rules about how to grade, store, and define a “hit.” Marcus built something that looked less like a hobby and more like a second job that he paid for the chance to work on within a few months.
It’s interesting that the pandemic collection started out as a distraction and slowly turned into a way of life for a lot of people who got into cards during those months. As of now, Marcus goes to local card shows, pays for a grading service, and keeps a very detailed binder of cards he refuses to sell, no matter what the offer is. He got the Patrick Mahomes Rookie Patch Auto in a trade that he still thinks was the best thing he’s ever done in the hobby. It sounds like the way he talks about a really good Burgundy.
On the other hand, the cork wall is still getting taller. He hasn’t given up on it. But it has been moved to the corner of the room so that there is room for another shelf of binders. There’s something a little strange about the way the old collection stays put while the new one grows around it. You pick up some hobbies at odd times and then put them down again. It turns out that some of them become permanent parts of how you spend your time.
