I thought I would share some of my collectibles of players with Swagger. Two of them are the 10/12 Pink and 7/9 Peacock Panini nft's of Zlatan Ibrahimovic as well as my Neil Steven Project 22 card of Eric Cantona. Here are 11 (Ibra's number) athletes who have swagger in no particular order but biased towards my futbol.
Shane McGregor - the Billionaire Strut.
Tiger Woods - Red shirt on Friday meant game over.
Eric Cantona - Oasis and the King of France.
Florence Joyner Griffith - FloJo with the hair, the nails, the fashion - looked like the fastest woman in the world before setting in to the starting blocks.
Mohammad Ali - The GOAT of Swagger.
Maradona - It was over at the warmup. Just give him the trophy before kickoff. Diego Maradona - Live Is Life 1989 (HD) - YouTube
Bugs Bunny - What's up Doc, he is not an athlete? I beg to differ, BB, as his close friends call him, is much faster than Usain Bolt. BB has serious Swagger.
Alan Iverson - You are talking about practice man, not a game. The step over. Even his nickname "The Answer" has Swagger.
Mariano Rivera - Walking in from the bullpen to Metallica's Enter Sandman.
Caitlin Clark and Angela Reese - Swagger meets Swagger.
Ibra - My favorite athlete with Swagger is Ibra, whose Walk the Walk mirrored his Talk the Talk with his 11 League Championships. Tube his best goals for confirmation. My favorite quote from IbraCadabra happened after he had been playing for the Los Angeles Galaxy a few months before Lebron arrived at the Lakers from the Cleveland Cavaliers. Ibra tweeted that Los Angeles now had a God and a King - Swagger.
Amused at the tweet, Lebron sent Ibra a signed Laker jersey. Upon receiving it, Ibra signed the same shirt with his own name and sent it back to Lebron - Big Swagger!
What is your favorite collectible of an athlete or character who has swagger?

I opened a card shop in Cincinnati six months ago and have been enjoying the hobby more everyday. Tomorrow my father and I are flying to Arizona to hand deliver this MLB Debut Patch card to Grant Anderson! My dad is coming along to share this trip with me and also to be my cameraman!
So excited for this chapter of the shop. We are huge baseball fans and this is going to be a special moment for me.
Good to be here!

Always love to hear stories of how other people got into the hobby, so I’ll start with mine….
For starters, I was basically forced into it as soon as I was born. I was born in Scranton, PA and a little known fact (aside from it being home of The Office) is that it’s actually sort of the home of sports cards as well. If you look at any vintage pack/box of Topps cards you’ll see “made in Duryea, PA” on almost all of them.
My dad and my uncle (his brother) grew up working in these factories who made cards for Topps/Fleer, and was actually where my dad met my mother too. In some way, I’m only here today because of sports cards.
Being single-digits old and so close to this stuff I naturally grew an obsession with ripping cards. Basically instead of being an iPad kid like today I was a “rip cards kid”
Around 4th grade, newly addicted to Pokemon, I just had so many loose cards that my parents forced me to do something with the junk ones/base cards, etc. Naturally, my friend and I (now co-founder) being in catholic school created what we called “Popemon”
So we took pictures of saints/religious figures on old Pokémon cards and we sold them at in the lunchroom for anywhere from $5-20 each, always doing limited print runs to maintain the hype, until eventually we were about to drop the 1/1 Jesus card (not a joke).
We marketed it for about a week, generating a ton of hype through all the grades, and silently taking offers until a 2nd grader came to us with a fresh $100 bill for it. We took it.
Next day, we get called over the loudspeaker into the Principals office… Apparently this kids wanted it so bad he stole the money from his mother’s wallet to pay us. They banned our operation from the lunchroom and forced us to donate everything we made or we’d be in serious trouble.
Those were the first cards I ever sold and now it’s part of what we’re building the future of.

What’s your story?

Stori behind the Colltbl #2
World Class: Purpose, Passion, and the Pursuit of Greatness On and Off the Field by Grant Wahl | Goodreads
Grant Wahl's worked at Sport Illustrated for 25 years. Grant is best remembered for being the author of Lebron's first feature/interview as 17- year- old high school junior titled the "Chosen One". Grant transitioned from covering basketball to being Futbol's premier American journalist. Grant sadly passed away while covering the 2022 World Cup (his eighth). World Class is a book on the collection of some of Grant's best articles. My favorite article Fast and Furious (2008), is an incredible read for Hoopsters or Coaches on how a Fresno City College Coach's Dribble, Drive, Motion (DDM) offence impacted Kentucky basketball, as well as the Boston Celtics and Denver Nuggets. I learned more about Futbol Manager Jose Mourinho in the article What's so special about Jose Mourinho (2011), than I did by reading the full autobiography about Jose. Grant was well known for his writing and stands on social causes. Inspired by @Cgcsportsillustrated and @sportsmagcollector (highly recommend as a Mantel follow), I purchased my first Sports Illustrated Collectible as I wait for PSA to start grading magazines. The May 2010 features Grant's cover stori The Beautiful Game on the first World Cup (2010 South Africa) to be held in Africa. Beautiful cover and beautiful stori within.
What is your favorite book with a tie to a collectible(s) that you enjoyed or would recommend?
SBC #1 Stori behind the Colltbl - American Comics A History by Jeremy Dauber