The NBA 50: Pete Maravich

By Ken, July 23, 2015

I acquired this signed card of NBA great Pistol Pete Maravich in 1998 from a dealer.

Funny story surrounding this one…I seriously figured that this was going to be one of the hardest ones to acquire but, thanks to the skill set I employed at my job at the time, I was able to land it somewhat easily.  I had spent countless hours during my quest performing searches for signed Maravich cards to no avail.  During a routine search engine crawl I got a hit on an autograph shop in New York that had just come online with its first website that said it had signed basketball cards of “Marovich”.  Over the years I’ve learned to do random searches for common misspellings of various players and have lucked out into bargains.  This time, I had hit the jackpot.

Fortunately for me the guy had developed his very simplistic site on his home computer using FrontPage, of which I had an absolute disdain for during my time as an HTML developer since it was a shoddy and extremely clunky site development tool.  When the guy saved out his code, all of the links contained hard coded address paths to his C: drive rendering every link beyond the homepage unreachable when clicked.  I viewed the source code and then began to trace my way, page after page, until I reached the one that contained the Maravich card.  It was beautiful…and reasonably priced.

I emailed him and inquired if the card was still available.  It was.  I immediately called him up and he explained to me that he was surprised that no one had yet inquired about his “web only items”, which included the Maravich card.  I explained to him the problem, he thanked me profusely, and I got the card.

He had a second one for sale but I told him that just the one was fine.  In hindsight I should have grabbed the additional one when I had the chance.  Oh well, I was lucky enough finding this one I own now.