1989 Collegiate Collection Georgia Football Trading Cards

The long weekend is over and it's time to open some packs. I went up to north Georgia for Thanksgiving and I stopped off at Dahlonega on the way back. The Dahlonega General Store had packs of Georgia Football cards, so I snagged a few. These were made by Collegiate Collection, who produced a bunch of college themed sets in the late 80's including a North Carolina Tarheel set that was pretty popular for people trying to pull a Michael Jordan card. The Georgia set has Herschel Walker, Vince Dooley and not a whole lot after that. I bought a bunch of this stuff as a freshman at the UGA bookstore and was somewhat bewildered by all the old black and white photos of players from the 30's I'd never heard of. Nonetheless, they were the only cards I saw all weekend and they were only 50 cents to boot! Let's get a' openin.

Collage set order form
186 Tony Flack
65 Wayne Radloff
59 Buck Belue
12 Joe Bennett
22 Aschel M. Day
155 John Bond
164 David Rholetter
54 Donald Porterfield

Not a bad pack at all, I recognize two players right off the bat. Buck Belue was the guy who got to hand the ball off to Herschel and is best known for his pass to Lindsey Scott at the World's Largest Cocktail Party. He's currently broadcasting afternoons on 680 the Fan in Atlanta, paired up with the unlistenable John Kincade. Wayne Radloff was a center for the Falcons who was the guy that replaced Jeff Van Note after his long career. Flack & Porterfield were drafted by the NFL, but I can't find any indication they played. Aschel M. Day's card is interesting in that his photo was obviously ganked from a team photo collage and looks like an FBI most wanted mugshot. Aschel (or "Bum" as his friends called him) was quite a mercenary. He starred for Ga. Tech in 1917 and 1918 because Georgia didn't field a team during the war years. He then bolted to the Bulldogs in 1919 after an All-America season and captained the Dawgs to an undefeated season in 1920. I'm sure an old-time Tech fan has a dartboard with this card on it somewhere, but Bum worked for the Coca Cola company so he's all right with me.

I really wish I had ordered the Collage set back when I was in college. Basically the collage set is a fancy way of saying 'uncut sheets' of the entire 200 card set. I'm not sure how they divided up 200 cards onto three sheets, hopefully they double printed the good players. The ad sheet also has a nice little illustration of what your dorm room could look like with the Collage set hanging on the wall that brings back way too many memories of my friend Jon's big squashy couch. I miss that couch. Unfortunately the Collage set cost 33 bucks which would pay for a pizza and several pitchers of beer or half a textbook, so I didn't shell out for the sheets. They probably would have gotten wrecked in one of my many moves from apartment to apartment, or worse, lost forever like my 1995 Topps set. The ad card for the set also mentions that these cards are dedicated to the memory of Fannie M Burnett (Mama Jesse). Godspeed Mama Jesse, wherever you are.