Wrestling was the best thing ever when I was around 10 years old. Everyone was a fan of it and when they released a sticker album you can imagine what kind of hype this created on the school yard.
Everyone had their album and doubles with them and the during the breaks it was trade time.
We did not quite understand the meaning of rare cards but some pulled some shiny cards which not many people had which you could trade with a premium if you were lucky enough to get them double.
Allowance was not calculated in money anymore it was more about how many packs you can buy. It was also a sign for me that others had way more allowance than me as they were able to afford many more packs...sucked.
I was decent at trading though and could trade my way up which made it way more satisfying when I sticked in the last sticker and was done.
I cant remember how the hype died down to be honest but it did and we moved on to other things.
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A couple years later I was into Basketball and lucky me there were also cards to collect.
While I was mostly doing this by myself and at this time things like forums, ebay etc were a couple years down the road I lost interest pretty quickly.
If I see now what gets paid for some old cards I should have taken better care of them as I pretty much let them rot in the cellar.
I collected quite a bit of stuff in my life so far but as far as I remember the others had very little to do with sports.
The things which I enjoyed by far was the trading and haggling but also going through your collection of course.
This is probably one reason why I go down the rabbit whole with coins at the moment.
People pay a lot of money on some sports memorabilia if you check some prices on here for example