After reading Diecast Dude's blog today about feeling like an outsider for liking NASCAR, I started remembering when I felt like that. Back in the late 80's and early 90's when I was in University, it wasn't cool to like NASCAR let me tell you. One day I accidently wore my Dale Earnhardt hat instead of my customary UNLV Runnin' Rebels hat to class and man people looked at me weird. Some people that I knew asked me who or what the hat was about, but this one girl in my Political Science class knew about what my hat was about. She thought she was the only NASCAR fan at University until she saw my hat. We hit it off quite good - no not that way! She had a boyfriend (who was really into racing too) and I had a girlfriend who later became my wife.
Anyway, our class was on Monday evenings (3hrs of Political Science on a Monday night, ugh!) and every Monday we would sit at the back of the class and discuss the race that happened on the previous Sunday. She too was an Earnhardt fan, as was her boyfriend. One weekend in November of 1989 I went to this car show in Toronto and came across MAXX Race Cards (the second set) and bought them. Wow, they were cool, I felt like a kid again when I collected hockey cards. The next Monday I told her about them and she said she already knew about them because she bought some at a race a few months before. The following April she went to another race with her boyfriend and I gave her some money to get the latest set of MAXX Race Cards for me, and she did. That was the 1990 set, and to this day they remain my favourite set. Bordered in black is just killer (see picture).
I was hooked, I became a member of Club MAXX and eagerly bought up any and all sets that came out. This continued until the mid to late 1990's when the stuff from Club MAXX stopped coming in the mail. I learned later they went out of business, but I never found out why. Does anyone know? I'm quite sure that I have every set and sample card that came out, except for the first complete set that came out in 1988.