Performer: Temple of the Dog
Songwriter: Chris Cornell
Original Release: Temple of the Dog
Year: 1991
Definitive Version: None
I bought this album after
the Pearl Jam explosion, like most people, I would suspect. But other than
Hunger Strike, I didn’t really connect with it at the time—not enough Pearl
Jam. It was only years later after I jumped on the bandwagon for
Soundgarden—the other half of Temple, of course—that I began to realize what a
great album this is.
I was listening to it a lot
in 1998 when the first SportsFest was announced. SportsFest was the bright idea
of the folks at Krause Publications, one of the two major media of card
collecting at the time and who, in my estimable opinion, worked to destroy the
industry by playing up the greed aspect to the detriment of the fun aspect.
SportsFest came about as the immediate result of the fallout over the shrinking
of the National in 1997. SportsFest would try to be what the National was in
1996 when it was held in June.
Of course, I had to go. The
National that year was scheduled for Chicago, and Dave and I had made plans to
attend that in August. But he couldn’t do SportsFest, so I, being unfettered by
young children, went by myself.
I also went without Debbie.
She had had a great time at the National in 1997 (story to come) but didn’t
think it merited a repeat appearance. Fine with me. I didn’t have to produce
any stories for The Dispatch this time, so I could be far more hard core about
my purchasing, like in 1996.
I took off in the morning of
the first day of the convention loaded with a boombox to listen to my old Steve
& Garry tapes (I was in a big archiving mode) and Debbie’s cellphone, which
she had bought not long before then for emergency car use only. (Yeah, people
didn’t always have them attached to their hands.) I made the 8+ hour drive from
Columbus in enough time to get my media credential (my free entry, heh heh)
before the press room closed on preview day.
The next day, I hit the show
early thanks to the aforementioned credential, and it was immediately clear
that it wasn’t quite the same as Anaheim in 1996. The major sports booths
weren’t much—just a foamy goalpost for kids to kick field goals and one other
football-related thing. I don’t recall anything that was baseball-, basketball-
or hockey-related.
But it was a good show.
There were lots of deals to be had—particularly at one table where I added a
1957 Rocky Colavito and Roy Campanella for $30 total, which was about 10
percent of their book value.
The most memorable thing
that first day took place when I walked through the other end of the convention
center, down the main hallway, where they still had SportsFest-related vendors
if not actual card dealers. I was leaving to hit a nearby Italian restaurant
for dinner, and I needed to go out the main entrance.
I’ll never forget coming to
the escalator that led down to the main lobby of the Philadelphia Convention
Center and suddenly looking around curiously at the airport-hangar-like décor.
Wait … I KNOW this place. How do I know this place? I couldn’t figure it out.
When I came back from
dinner—the show ran till 9 that night—and I had the vantage point of looking at
the escalators from the ground that I figured it out. This was the setting of
the Philadelphia airport that Terry Gilliam used in the climactic finale of
Twelve Monkeys, which was one of my favorite movies. The fact that the villain
of the movie first releases a virus that kills nearly everyone on the planet at
this airport (SPOILER ALERT!) made this a freaky realization.
And that was only the
second-freakiest thing I saw in the convention-center lobby that day. The
freakiest was seeing Roy Firestone, a famous ESPN interview show host at the
time, sing My Love by Paul McCartney on my way to dinner.
There was some VIP cocktail
gathering or dinner on one side of the lobby. I assumed Firestone was emcee of
the event, and it seemed to be over, because there weren’t a lot of people at
the tables, as I recall, but who knows? Regardless, he was belting it out,
complete with woahhh woah-woah-woahs and a backing band, and in all fairness,
it wasn’t bad.
Now, Terry Gilliam should’ve
filmed that.
(To be continued)
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