Dub is a awesome sports fan, a Georgia native who loves his Atlanta Braves, Falcons, Hawks, and especially loves to Hunker Down with his Georgia Bulldogs.
All he asked in the chat was to say hello and let him know who your football team was...and in a few days time I got a envelope in the mail with some Detroit Lions cards, including a Topps RC of the great Barry Sanders.
That's all he needed, for you to say hi, talk sports, and automatically, he became your friend.
Almost a year later it's hard to imagine life on a daily basis without reading Dub's tweets, or his review of cards and pop culture on DubMentality. com.
The thing that I like about Dub the most is his absolute love of baseball cards from the junk wax era, that period of the late 1980s and into the 1990s where Topps, Fleer, Donruss, Score and Upper Deck produced so many cards of every sport that they are, for the most part, not worth much...unless that's when you started to collect cards, and that's how Dub got started.
Dub and the young collectors of that era had so many choices, while I only had one set of Topps cards to focus on, and that made it had to make it hard on those kids...what do you spend your card allowance on, a pack of Upper Deck, Fleet, or the traditional Topps cards?
While I was cutting hair and selling pop and candy bars to fellow shipmates in the Navy, Dub was growing up rooting for his Atlanta Braves with the great Dale Murphy to cheer for, and falling in love with a few young ballplayers named John Smoltz, Tom Glavine, David Justice, and Terry Pendelton.
I moved back to my hometown of Portage, Michigan, in July 2016, and the one regret that I've had since we left Jacksonville, Florida, is that Dub, who I hadn't yet come across, was living just a few hours away in Georgia, and that he would come too JAX to see his Bulldogs play...just a few minutes from were we were living at the time.
One day we'll actually meet, maybe at a Tigers/Braves game, or maybe, if the football God's make it happen, at a game between his Dawgs and my beloved Wolverines...now that would be something!
Happy Baseball Birthday! Dub!
Play Ball!
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