Monday, March 27, 2017

2016 Upper Deck Champions

I'm not much for collecting sports other than baseball but, as a multi-sport set, I've always liked Goodwin Champions. It's been hard to find. I haven't seen it in a store since 2014. I managed to get the entire 100-card 2016 base set on eBay for less than 10 cents a card. The set has 150 cards but cards 101-150 are short printed with a black background.

Although there are 150 cards only 50 people are represented. Here's card #1 and #51





The first 50 cards are repeated on 51-100 but in a horizontal format. Cards 101-150 have the same people, in a third photo, but in a different order. I kind of like the idea but I think it would have been better if one card showed a pose, maybe out of uniform, and the second showed an action shot. This comes close to what I'm thinking of.



Baseball is woefully under represented and there are no American football cards at all. Tom Glavin is the only baseball player in the set.



Golf is over represented with 7 different golfers, including Tiger Woods. All of the golfing photos show the player in his or her back swing, except for Woods. They could have dropped a few golfers for baseball players in my opinion.

She appears to be teeing off from the outfield in Wrigley Field.

There are a lot of other sports included: archery, climbing, fitness, boxing, MMA (3), wrestling, field hockey, rugby (3), ice hockey (5), skiing, track and field (3), motor sports (5), swimming and diving.

Most of the ice hockey players are in suits on both cards.


The cards are nice. They are printed on heavy card stock, with no gloss or foil. The design is simple, reminding me of the best of Allen and Ginter. The design is way better than the 2014 design.

In past years, Goodwin Champions included non-sports figures but this year there was only one.


Her claim to fame is that she appeared in the 2008 Sports Illustrated Swim Suit issue. The 10-year-old card collector in me is always happy to get sports cards with girls on them and there were plenty in this set. I always like to look up the Wikipedia entries for the people on cards like this. You never know what you're going to learn. According to her Wikipedia entry "Baker is considered curvaceous".

Here are a few more cards I like from the set.

Hall of Fame basketball player John Havlicek with a football.

One of two water polo players in the set. Azevedo is captain of the US National Men's Water Polo Team.

Here's another example of how I'd have liked this set to go.


Loring taught Jennifer Lawrence to shoot for the "Hunger Games" movies.

Enders, from Houston, started racing when she was 8.

She is a professional CrossFit athlete. I didn't know there was such a thing.

And finally, according to Wikipedia, Vaughn Gittin is a self-taught professional drifter. Which is apparently some sort of motor sport.

2 comments:

Tony Burbs said...

I always loved when Goodwin included 19th century ballplayers as part of the Champions checklist. It's a shame they've stopped - those photos would be quite easy to alter to get around license exclusivity and offer something unique for baseball fans. Oh well.

night owl said...

That's a well-designed set, although photos of players like Glavine in casual clothes are not interesting.