​The 1968 and 1969 baseball seasons represented a line of demarcation for the sport. The 1968 season would be known as “the year of the pitcher” and the final gasp for 10-team leagues. The major leagues would expand by four teams in 1969, and divisional play was introduced.

In terms of leadership, baseball replaced its nondescript and ineffective commissioner with a man who would become one of the game’s most controversial leaders. Through Marvin Miller, the players were beginning to bargain effectively with the owners, and the game mirrored the cultural transformations that were taking place in the United States during the late 1960s.

“This was a volatile era during which visions of a better America were thought to have vanished, and a time when the world as a whole was jolted by unrest,” baseball historian Paul Hensler writes in his second book. In The New Boys of Summer: Baseball’s Radical Transformation in the Late Sixties (Rowman & Littlefield; hardback; $39.95) captures the essence of baseball in a turbulent time in his new book. Hensler, who owns a master’s degree in history, takes the reader into the dugouts and boardrooms, providing a careful, richly detailed narrative.

Hensler is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research and wrote the book The American League in Transition, 1965-1975: How Competition Thrived When the Yankees Didn’t in 2012. He also has published several articles for SABR and for Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture.

Fans of baseball history will enjoy the percolating issues that Hensler brings to the surface as Major League Baseball approached its centennial in 1969. Baseball was on the verge of expansion in 1968, and Hensler guides the reader through the tangled actions that finally landed teams in Kansas City, Montreal, San Diego and Seattle.

Baseball traditionalists may have cringed at the idea of divisions, but owners like Minnesota’s Calvin Griffith saw the value of “better opportunities for profit” when the number of losers could be minimized, and more teams could vie for a spot in the World Series.

Hensler presents a very interesting proposal that was floated before expansion — three “major’ leagues of eight teams apiece, with interleague play to supplement the schedule. It was groundbreaking, fascinating, would have created natural rivalries — but it never happened. Interleague would become a reality nearly three decades later.

Hensler also strips away the emotions and bias that have surrounded Bowie Kuhn as the compromise candidate who became commissioner in 1969. The owners’ sacking of William D. “Spike” Eckert and installation of Kuhn turned out to be a fortuitous move. It provided, Hensler writes, “a vivid contrast of leadership style and an ability to move the game forward.” Kuhn’s hiring would become “a critical turning point” in baseball history. Baseball went from the unknown soldier (Eckert) to the unknown lawyer (Kuhn).

Say what you will about Kuhn — I believe that Kuhn’s enshrinement in the Hall of Fame while Marvin Miller has been excluded is one of the game’s inexcusable sins — but he was the right man at the right time for baseball. There is no question that Kuhn loved the game, and though he would be ridiculed later for his “best interests in baseball” mantra, he was still on solid footing in 1969.

Miller has been lauded for his work in making baseball’s union the most powerful labor force in sports, but when he first took over his task “was fraught initially with the arduous chore” of winning over the players. While Miller lacked charisma, he made up for it by being “gifted with an ability to communicate and lead.”

Hensler also delves into racial turmoil, how Major League Baseball botched its reactions to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the dawn of cookie-cutter stadiums. Plus, he writes about the rise of statisticians, who rightfully could be called the ancestors of today’s SABR members.

There was good baseball, too. The New York Mets capped a new era of divisional play by shocking the experts and rolling to a World Series title in 1969. The old guard of baseball was retiring, replaced by a new breed of players that questioned authority and insisted on expressing their own individuality.

Hensler’s research is extensive and varied. Happily, he dips deeply into Jim Bouton’s classic baseball diary of the 1969 season, Ball Four, and many other books. He also utilizes documents, periodicals, articles, baseball team publications, special collections and websites. His bibliography is a diverse cross-section of sports, politics, culture, social awareness and history. Hensler provides plenty of background as he introduces each topic, giving the reader a firm basis to understand the events of 1968 and 1969.

It is important to take all the elements Hensler writes about as one tapestry, rather than distinct pieces of cloth. There is no singular event that could characterize the baseball seasons of 1968 and 1969. Rather, it was a combination of factors that allowed baseball to move out of the doldrums and back into competition with other sports, particularly pro football. It would take time, though.

“American society and culture were in flux,” Hensler writes, “and baseball was affected by the changes in a country growing ever restive with a stubborn war in Southeast Asia.”

Those changes in American politics and culture were also felt on the baseball diamond. Hensler does a marvelous job of blending all the issues together in a coherent, entertaining narrative.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily that profiled Josh Brikis, a former professional poker player who now conducts card case breaks online:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/josh-brikis-case-breaks-poker/

Here is a story  I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 1965 Philadelphia football set:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/1965-philadelphia-football-set-still-looking-for-respect/​

Here is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about Series 2 of the 2018 Topps baseball set:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2018-topps-series-2-baseball-preview-checklist/

​Sporting a bold look with some intricate artistry, Topps Gallery returns in 2017 after a 12-year absence. This time, it’s a retail-exclusive product at Walmart and is offered in three options: fat pack, blaster box or Collector box.

The Collector’s box includes 20 packs and two autograph cards, along with Private Issue parallels, at a cost of $69.99. A blaster box contains seven packs, with four cards to a pack. In addition, a bonus pack includes four exclusive Artist Proof parallels. As usual, blasters cost $19.99. A fat pack costs $5.99 and contains 12 cards and a pair of Canvas parallels. These parallels are exclusive to the fat packs.

In 2005, Topps Gallery was a 195-card set, with the final 45 cards short-printed. There also were 10 variations. There also were Artist Proofs, along with sketch cards from longtime New York Daily News cartoonist Bill Gallo and cartoonist/columnist Murray Olderman. The prolific Olderman, who wrote and usually illustrated his own columns — kaff-kaff — turned 95 in March (if you don’t know this reference, you never read any of Olderman’s stuff) and has published 19 books.
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Some of the same elements return to 2017 Topps Gallery, but it is a fresher, more vibrant look. The artistry of Mayumi Seto and Dan Bergren dominate the product. Seto has drawn the cards in the base set, of which there are 200. That number includes 50 short-printed cards. Bergren is the artist mainly handling the inserts.

​The base design is clean, with a large drawing of the player in mostly posed shots — bat on the shoulder and pitching glove at the chest. Other poses include pitchers in their motion or players running the bases; all, however, are tightly cropped drawings. A small white frame surrounds the drawing, while the rest of the card uses a white border. The player’s name is in script form, stamped in gold foil at the bottom of the card. The lower left-hand corner showcases the Topps Gallery logo.

The card back has a rustic look at the top, with the colors feathering into the Gallery Notes — highlights from previous seasons. The player’s name, position and team are in white type against the rustic background, with the card number situated in the upper right-hand corner. In a nice touch, the statistics do not follow a year-by-year template, but a month-by-month breakdown of the 2016 season.

I pulled 24 base cards from the blaster box I opened, and four Artist Proofs from the special pack. The Artist Proof cards features Jose Bautista, Evan Longoria, Hunter Pence and Justin Verlander (and Kudos for displaying Verlander in an Astros uniform). The difference in these cards is a gold foil, “Artist Proof” stamped in gold foil in the bottom right-hand half of the drawing. At first blush, they are hard to distinguish from the base set; perhaps a different color border would have worked.

The base set also has parallels in green (numbered to 99), blue (50), orange (25) red (1/1) and printing plates (1/1). 

I pulled five different inserts from the blaster box.

The Hall of Fame Gallery is an attractive insert, consisting of 30 cards. The player is outlined against a rustic, marbled-looking background. Their names are stamped in gold at the bottom of the card front. The player’s induction year is on the card back, along with a descriptive paragraph. I pulled two cards: Al Kaline and Sandy Koufax. Collectors also could find parallels in green (numbered to 250), blue (99), orange (25) and red (1/1).
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I also pulled a Masterpiece insert. There are 30 cards in the subset, and I found a Mark McGwire card. The card front features a pair of drawings of McGwire — a large portrait and a smaller action pose to the right of the former Oakland Athletics slugger following through on his swing. The set concentrates on current players and stars from the 1980s and 1990s, like Frank Thomas, Derek Jeter, Nolan Ryan, Bo Jackson and Ken Griffey Jr. I also applaud the inclusion of players like Andres Galarraga and Omar Vizquel. Parallels come in the same configuration as the Hall of Fame Gallery.

The 40-card Heritage insert set pays a shiny tribute to the 1951 Bowman set, and the card I found was of Yankees slugger Aaron Judge.
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The final insert I pulled came from the two-card Artist Promo set, and was a photograph of Bergren at his work station. The back of the card provides an interesting biography.

The blaster box for Topps Gallery has a short note tucked inside one of its flaps: “The art of collecting.” All collectors are artists, in a sense. They just use different palates to create their collection. Topps Gallery is a nice tribute to that idea. ​

​Panini America’s 2017 Playoff set has arrived just in time, as the NFL playoff spots begin to crystalize. The distinctive “Playoff” logo has been familiar to football card collectors since it debuted in 1992.

A hobby box contains 12 packs, with eight cards to a pack. Panini is promising one autograph and a relic in each hobby box. There also will be 12 rookie cards, 20 inserts and four parallels.

Blaster boxes have eight packs, with seven cards to a pack. The base set contains 200 cards, with an additional 100 rookies. The blaster box I opened contained 47 base cards.

There are parallels that complement the base set: Goal Line, Red Zone, Kickoff (which is numbered to 299 for veterans and 199 for rookies), 1st Down (numbered to 99), 2nd Down (49), 3rd Down (25), 4th Down (10) and Touchdown (1/1).

The base set design is simple and understated, with a team’s primary color being used as part of the card border. The “Playoff” logo is situated in the upper left-hand corner of the card. The player is featured in a large photograph on the card front, with the team logo, his name and team name underneath the picture.

The card back displays a smaller version of the front photo, along with a biographical paragraph. The player’s height and weight are listed beneath the paragraph, and a statistical recap of 2016 spreads across the bottom of the card.

For collectors wanting to scratch their itch for shiny cards, the 2017 Topps Chrome Update series fits the bill.

This retail-only product is exclusive to Target stores and can be purchased in a Mega Box format. For $19.99, a collector will receive seven packs of chromium cards, with four cards per pack.

The base set contains 100 cards, and the design mirrors Topps’ flagship Update series. If you liked the design for Series One and Two baseball and the Update series, then the chrome version will be just as pleasing.

Parallels for the base set include refractors, which fall every 22 packs and are numbered to 250; and X-Fractors, which fall once in every eight boxes (or 56 packs, if you’re counting) and are numbered to 99. Harder to find are gold refractors, numbered to 50; red refractors (25); and 1/1 SuperFractors and printing plates.
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The set does include autographs, although they are sparsely seeded in boxes. Figure on finding an auto every 56 packs or so. There are 61 autograph subjects.
The main insert in the chrome set is the All-Rookie Cup, which consists of 20 cards. The chrome really makes a difference in this subset. Two of the three that I pulled — a 1968 Tom Seaver and a 1969 Johnny Bench — are really eye-popping. The third card was a Future Star card of Noah Syndergaard, and while it was nice, too, it did not measure up to the cards that have retro designs.

The other insert I pulled was an X-Fractor of Michael Fulmer.
The final tally was 24 base cards and four inserts. It is not a bad haul for a retail product, and the price is reasonable enough. The Mega Box looks large, but there is a lot of wasted space inside. It’s not as compact as a blaster box, for example. But as a collector, packaging is not a concern as long as it is not prohibitive.
The 2017 Topps Chrome Update is another shiny product that will resonate with collectors who like cards that have a buffed appearance.

Here is the link to my first podcast on the New Books Network. I interviewed Dr. Adam J. Criblez, who wrote Tall Tales and Short Shorts: Dr. J, Pistol Pete, & the Birth of the Modern NBA.

​​newbooksnetwork.com/adam-j-criblez-tall-tales-and-short-shorts-dr-j-pistol-pete-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-nba-rowman-and-littlefield-2017/

​If you’re looking for a card design that really assaults your senses, then check out 2017 Topps Fire baseball.

This year’s product is exclusive to Target locations. Collectors can buy a Collector Box, which features two hits and a 20-pack format; fat packs; or a blaster box.

A blaster box includes seven packs, with six cards to a pack — plus a bonus pack of four “exclusive gold minted” base parallels.

Graphic artist Tyson Beck put together another challenging, and in many cases, intriguing set of designs this year. The intricate looks range from stunning to murky. I am not a fan of very busy designs, but if I was, I would choose the brighter, orange or yellow flame backgrounds. The Miguel Cabrera base card, for example, uses bright yellows and oranges to create a nice backdrop. The darker colors used on some of the designs, however, do muddy up the look quite a bit. But bold, bright colors tend to be successful.
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The card backs contain a six-line biographical sketch in the center of the card, flanked by sharply edged flames and bolts of lightning.

​The base set contains 200 cards, and there are parallels in each type of configuration. For example, Gold Minted parallels are limited to blaster boxes, while Blue Chip parallels are exclusive to fat packs. Onyx parallels are part of the Collector Box product and are case hits. Other parallels include Red Flame, orange (numbered to 299), green (199), purple (99), magenta (25) and Inferno (1/1).

In the blaster box I opened, I pulled 35 base cards. There also were two Red Flame parallels (Nolan Arenado and Manny Margot), an orange parallel of Jose Canseco, and a purple parallel of Willie McCovey.

I found two different types of inserts. There was one Walk It Off card of Justin Upton, one of 15 cards in the set. Collectors can expect to find these in every other blaster box, on average. What they depict is obvious — walk-off winning moments.

I also uncovered two Monikers cards, of Babe Ruth and Rickey Henderson, and both were Gold Minted parallels. The Monikers are interesting, as it celebrates the player’s nickname (“The Great Bambino” and “Man of Steal,” in the cases of Ruth and Henderson. The background has a graffiti-like quality to it, as the player’s image is set against a backdrop of a brick wall.
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Topps Fire is definitely not one for those collectors who like sedate, safe designs. Fire has been a useful outlet for Topps to think out of the box in terms of design, and it takes advantage of a standalone product to highlight it even more.

​Fans of shiny cards usually gravitate toward Panini America’s Prizm products. And the 2017 Prizm football product will be no different. These are some slick-looking cards.

If you buy a hobby box, you will receive 12 packs, with 12 cards to a pack. Panini is promising three autographs per hobby box.

In blaster boxes, the numbers are slightly lower: six packs, with four cards to a pack. Panini also promises at least one relic or autograph card in a blaster, along with three Disco Prizm cards.

That Prizm technology looks good on this year’s set. The card front design is vertical, with the player shown in an action shot against a soft-focus background. The player’s name is displayed in black, capitalized block letters, with the team name underneath in a smaller, italicized font.

The card backs include a cropped version of the front photo, along with a five-line biographical paragraph. The color scheme on the back matches the primary colors of the player’s team. Where applicable, a player has a 2016 statistical line, with a lifetime line beneath it.

The Prizm base set includes 300 cards, with a nice mixture of veterans and rookies. Veterans comprise the first 200 cards in the set, while rookies make up card Nos. 201 through 300. There are parallels to be found in Prizm, blue (retail), Disco (retail blasters), green, pink, red/white/blue (in retail fat packs), orange (numbered to 275), light blue (199), Blue Wave (149), Green Scope (99), Purple Crystals (75), Red Power (49), camo (25), gold (10), gold vinyl (5) and 1/1 Black Finite. White Sparkle parallels are limited to online packs and are numbered 20 or fewer.

The blaster box I opened yielded 17 base cards and three Prizm parallels. There also were Disco parallel cards of Falcons wide receiver Taylor Gabriel, Saints running back Alvin Kamara and Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown. The insert card I pulled was a Rize Up insert of Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson. The Rize Up design was horizontal, with an action shot of Wilson looking downfield for a receiver. The card back features a black-and-white version of the photo on the card front, along with a five-line biographical sketch.

The Wilson card is one of 15 in the subset.

The box hit was a Premier Jerseys card of Steelers draft pick R. Joshua Dobbs, who was drafted at No. 135. Dobbs played collegiately at Tennessee. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to think this relic is not one of the more coveted hits in the set, but Dobbs is basically a rocket scientist. He graduated from Tennessee with an aerospace engineering degree. When his football career is over, he plans to use his degree to design and build airplanes.

I guess you could say he had a rocket arm in college, too.

Some of the more recognizable names one might find in this subset are Mitchell Trubisky, O.J. Howard, Deshaun Watson and Leonard Fournette.
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The Prizm set looks nice and has plenty of parallels to chase. If shiny is your game, the cards have an almost buffed quality to them.

​The 1967 baseball season was secondary to the turbulence that was gripping the United States. On the one hand, 1967 was “The Summer of Love,” where hippies and rock ’n’ roll bands preached friendship and togetherness. The Beatles captured that feeling with their iconic album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, while groups like the Jefferson Airplane embraced a psychedelic sound that was uniquely American.

On the other hand, it was the summer of race riots in urban centers like Detroit and Newark. On still another level, it was a summer of protests as the stalemate in Vietnam caused disillusionment among young and old alike.

In major-league baseball, 1967 marked one of the wildest American League pennant races as four teams battled for the flag until the final weekend of the season. The Boston Red Sox, who finished barely out of the cellar in 1966, was the surprising champion thanks to the Triple Crown season of Carl Yastrzemski and the pitching of Cy Young Award winner Jim Lonborg.

In the National League, the St. Louis Cardinals breezed to the pennant, winning by 10½ games over the San Francisco Giants. But they were extended to seven games in the World Series before finally outlasting a gritty Red Sox squad.

Thomas J. Whalen captures the excitement of the baseball season and provides ample context of the social and cultural change in the United States in his latest book, Spirit of ’67: The Cardiac Kids, El Birdos, and the World Series that Captivated America (Rowman & Littlefield; hardback; $35; 300 pages). Whalen, an associate professor of science at Boston University, is a Massachusetts native whose résumé is not limited to baseball. He has written about the Boston Celtics, the Red Sox, and John F. Kennedy.

Even though he grew up in Beverly, Massachusetts, as a Red Sox fan, Whalen employs an even-handed look at the 1967 baseball season. The Red Sox and Cardinals were an interesting study in contrasts, both in team personnel and its managers.

St. Louis was a veteran squad, a multi-cultural team led by Orlando Cepeda, the unanimous choice as the NL’s most valuable player. The Cardinals were diverse, with Cepeda, Bob Gibson, Curt Flood and Lou Brock meshing easily with southerners like Tim McCarver. When they gathered for spring training in 1967, the Cardinals “had a certain swagger in their step,” Whalen writes.

Guiding that swagger was manager Red Schoendienst, who was savvy enough to allow his veteran team — the core of the 1964 World Series champions was still basically intact — to excel without a lot of prodding.

Where the Cardinals had been enlightened, the Red Sox had the reputation of a country club, Whalen writes. That came down from the top, as owner Tom Yawkey treated his players well but never really held them — or his managers —accountable. The Red Sox also were the last team to integrate when Pumpsie Green made his debut in 1959.

Accountability smacked the Red Sox with a vengeance in 1967 when Dick Williams took over as manager. Williams, a no-nonsense perfectionist, lit a fire under the youthful Red Sox and used the best players at his disposal — black or white. That meant that blacks like Reggie Smith, George Scott and Elston Howard were just as important to the squad as Yastrzemski, Tony Conigliaro and Rico Petrocelli. Williams stressed fundamentals and eliminating mental mistakes. Most of all, Whalen writes, Williams commanded respect.

“The hell with grace,” Whalen quotes Williams. “I wanted wins. Isn’t that what the fans wanted?”

One player observed that Williams “was a Dale Carnegie dropout.” The manager may not have won many friends, but he influenced a lot of people on his baseball roster. He orchestrated what became known in baseball lore as “The Impossible Dream,” a nod to the song that was the most memorable tune from the 1965 Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha.

Whalen peppers his narrative with biographies about the key players for both teams. Stories about Roger Maris, Brock, Lonborg, Conigliaro and Scott give the reader a nice cross section of baseball talent and cultural diversity.

Whalen’s research is also stellar. In addition to drawing from his own books, he conducted interviews with Lonborg, McCarver, Petrocelli, Gary Waslewski and Gary Bell, among others. He also combed through 43 newspapers and periodicals, 17 Hall of Fame player and inductee clip files and 14 websites. His bibliography is diverse and extensive.
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For a lover of baseball history — indeed, to any lover of history — Spirit of ’67 is a satisfying read. There are plenty of subplots to the season and to the news events of 1967, and Whalen pays equal attention to both.

Here is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 1974 Topps football set:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/1974-topps-football-featured-powerhouse-teams-and-players/

​During his pro wrestling career, Ric Flair oozed cockiness and arrogance, and had the heavyweight championship belt to back it up his bluster.

​There was the “Nature Boy,” on cable television during “Georgia Championship Wrestling,” and later with the WWE, strutting in his immaculately tailored suits and flashy, expensive robes as he prepared to bring down his next opponent.

Flair told wrestling fans that he was a “stylin’, profilin’, limousine-riding, jet-flying, kiss-stealing, wheelin’ ’n’ dealin’ son of a gun, punctuating interviews with his trademark “Woooo!” yelp.

“I thrived on the attention to detail that enhanced my character,” Flair writes in a collaborative effort with his daughter, current WWE star Charlotte. “That mentality served me well in my career; sometimes a little too well.”

Be prepared for a different side of Ric Flair. In Second Nature: The Legacy of Ric Flair and the Rise of Charlotte (St. Martin’s Press; hardback; $26.99; 368 pages), readers will be treated to an introspective, no-invective, very objective and highly reflective look at his life and career, the mistakes he made and a ton of regrets.

​Even Flair had trouble sorting out when the time was right to finally step out of character and return to being Richard Morgan Fliehr, who is now 68. But it hasn’t been easy, and an ESPN “30 for 30” segment set for Tuesday will air plenty of dirty laundry — fame, broken marriages, drinking, his recent health issues, financial woes, the death of his son and the insecurity of knowing that he might not have been the best family man. Flair addresses that in Second Nature, too.

What has buoyed him has been the success of his daughter Ashley, now known professionally as Charlotte. Both father and daughter are candid in this book, partitioned nicely into two distinct sections with the help of author Brian Shields. Charlotte, now 31, knew that she was going to have to break the perception that any success she experienced would be because of her ties to her famous father. Second Nature, which is a marvelous pun on Flair’s coming to grips with his career out of the ring and Charlotte’s life as a second generation wrestler, gives the reader a personal, inside look at the business and allows both to tell stories.

I have always believed, and still do, that pro wrestlers are the best storytellers. All those road trips create memories that remain fresh. Wrestling fans are legion, too. They want to hear stories, because they already know that at its heart, pro wrestling is a blue-collar version of a morality play.

“Wrestling has all the grace and simplicity of a folk ballad, but none of the significance,” said Edward J. Golden Jr., who in the 1970s was the director of Baltimore’s Center Stage theatrical group. “Wrestling’s appeal is a world beyond reason, a purely instinctive world and it succeeds beautifully.”

And that appeal succeeds whether it is taking place at a massive WrestleMania pay-per-view event or at a small auditorium. Back in the mid-1980s, I watched Flair wrestle Florida favorite Wahoo McDaniel in an auditorium at Indian River Community College in Fort Pierce. Despite the hokey-looking venue — instead of “walking the aisle,” wrestlers emerged from behind a curtain — Flair treated his match seriously, doing his pratfalls, tumbling backward into the turnbuckle and resorting to his usual bag of dirty tricks.

Great theater and an hour-long match. Priceless. Flair writes that McDaniel “changed my life,” because of his toughness.

“He had a vasectomy at 4:00 and wrestled me the same night at 8:00,” Flair writes. “I did not appreciate what that meant until I had my own vasectomy years later.”

Now that’s intimate.

The first 146 pages of Second Nature is all Flair. “I was so proud that when I became the Nature Boy, I was one of the few performers who didn’t need to reinvent himself and come back under a different persona,” he writes. “There were times when I was a ‘bad guy’ and times I was a ‘good guy,’ but I was always the Nature Boy.”

He writes with raw emotion and passion about his inductions into the WWE Hall of Fame and his career-ending match against Shawn Michaels. He speaks about trips on the road, his battles with self-confidence and anxiety and how to cope with “real life” when the ring lights dim for the night.

“In this business, you feed off the crowd,” he writes. “But when you step through the other side of the curtain and the show’s over, your ‘real life’ begins.
“… We make choices. There are some of our brothers and sisters who went into their hotel rooms and never came out.”

The second half of the book belongs to Charlotte. Like her father, she is haunted by the 2013 death of Reid Fliehr but has used it as a motivating factor. “Reid pushed me to pursue a WWE career, and now I’m living his dream,” she writes.
Growing up Ashley was a pleasant experience, as Charlotte excelled in gymnastics, cheerleading and volleyball and lived a life of luxury at her parents’ home in the city that bears her professional name. While her father bemoans his lack of family interaction because of his commitments on the road, Charlotte remembers it differently.

“For all the ‘stylin’ and profilin’’ he was famous for, when my father walked through our door, all he wanted to do was spend time with his family,” she writes. “He wanted us to have the best of everything and anything we wanted.”

Charlotte goes into great detail about her childhood and her athletic success. She was thrown for a loop when her parents divorced, and an abusive relationship to her boyfriend (and subsequent husband) Riki Johnson severely played havoc with her self-esteem. She was able to get out of that relationship and move on.

And while she was estranged from her father for a while, Charlotte writes that the WrestleMania that signified the end of Flair’s career “reunited him with me and my siblings, and me with them.”

Going into pro wrestling, though, was something she never expected to do.
“I felt it took a vivid imagination to see me as a WWE Diva,” she writes.

She went into training with the expectation that there would not be a free ride, that whatever she achieved would have to be earned.

“I had a high mountain to climb. I had to prove that I belonged,” she writes. “I had to earn people’s respect.”

The death of Reid in 2013 rocked both Flair and Charlotte, and their anguish is palpable in Second Nature. To lose a child or sibling is devastating, and both father and daughter wrote emotional tributes to him to close out the book.
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Second Nature is not your typical wrestling book, but it is a great literary tag team event. Neither Flair nor Charlotte ever asked for any quarter, and they certainly never gave any. Both have bared their souls in a highly personal way, but when the bell rings, they are ready to go.

Topps dips into pro wrestling’s past, present and future with its newest release, WWE Then Now Forever. The set, essentially an extension of the WWE set Topps released in May, features wrestlers from WWE and NXT, along with logos paying homage to “Raw” and “SmackDown Live.”

The design, like the WWE set earlier this year, is modeled after Topps’ flagship baseball product for 2017. The angling, parallel lines are a nice complement to “the squared circle.”

The base set contains 100 cards and is generously sprinkled with wrestlers from the past such as Dusty Rhodes, Harley Race, Jerry “The King” Lawler, Bret Hart, Bruno Sammartino, Shawn Michaels, Andre the Giant, Ultimate Warrior, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Wendi Richter.

As someone who enjoyed wrestling in the 1970s and deep into the 1980s, to me these names are like magic.

​More current stars include Roman Reigns, Sasha Banks, Dolph Ziggler, Daniel Bryan, Charlotte Flair, Nikki Bella, Rusev and Becky Lynch. There are NXT competitors within the set, too.

A blaster box contains 10 packs of seven cards, plus an additional relic card packaged in a separate pack. If you buy a hobby box, you should find two major hits, including at least one autograph card. The blaster box I opened yielded 44 base cards and four bronze parallels, which fall in every other pack. The relic pack was an NXT Takeover: San Antonio Event-Used Canvas Mat relic from Jan. 28, 2017, numbered to 350 and featuring Australian women’s wrestler Peyton Royce.

The main insert out of the blaster box was the Finishers and Signature Moves collection, part of 50 cards. While hobby boxes average two of these per pack, the blaster box I opened had 20 of these cards, or almost three per pack.

The final 10 cards in the John Cena Tribute is the fourth grouping in the 40-card insert set. I pulled two of these cards from my blaster box.

The pro wrestling sets that Topps puts out are slick and attractive. It’s not the cheesy stuff that used to prevail in the cards that were issued during the 1980s and 1990s. I wish that there had been a nice-looking set devoted to the old Championship Wrestling from Florida wrestlers. That would be amazing.
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But the WWE Then Now Forever set is a nice substitute. Since the days of Lou Thesz and Gorgeous George, including Mildred Burke and the Fabulous Moolah, professional wrestling has always had an appreciative audience. The list goes on. A new generation of stars has entered the ring, and Topps is keeping them fresh for a new audience.

Here's a story  I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 1985 Topps football set:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/1985-topps-football-card-set/