Sports Heroes, Feats & Facts

In a way, this issue was the 90s version of Sportscasters. I stumbled upon this site for the Sportscasters, but have not had time to fully check it out. Looks like it might be a cool site though.

http://www.sportscastercards.com/

Sports Heroes were available as a subscription, as were Sportscasters. The subscriber would receive a package of the cards every so often and presumably the subscription would run as

long as you remained current. As with any offering of this type, it seems the later issues are the toughest to find. Interest diminishes and eventually the manufacturer stops making them all together. Sadly, we don't fully appreciate issues like this until it is too late.

I believe the ads for subscribing are found in some of the more popular sports magazines of the time and I want to say I remember them being in the short lived Topps Magazine as well. Although I never subscribed, I took a liking to the larger (they are roughly the size of an 8x10 photo) "cards" and eventually ended up obtaining numerous binders full. After sorting through them and obtaining new binders, I found a number of variations. Sometimes a player changed

teams, other times a player was replaced by another, but the least noticeable variation is in the "small print" data on the reverse of each card. It appears that as these were reprinted over time, each print run got a new number assigned. For example, the first print run might be 33, with subsequent runs labeled 33a, 33b, 33c, 33d and 33e. I believe the highest run variation I have come across is an "e" series. I don't know enough about these and how they were

distributed to know if any are harder to find than the others, but it would be fun to find an expert of these to compare notes. Currently I have several hundred different subjects along with numerous variations. Someday I may make a checklist of what I have, but for now that is yet another project on the "to do" list.