This Week I Learned: Sports Cards, Wrestling, and Vice Presidents
This week I learned boasts very timely pieces of information. One about some big money being spent, and the other about the history of Vice President selections.
Additionally, as the United States prepares to elect yet another, not young president, we dive into the connection of sports and politics.
Expensive Piece of Cardboard
I love sports cards. I love cards in general, games, and collectibles. Holding a physical card of a player just has a special feeling to it. Over the past year, I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on sports cards as both investments and for my own collection. But, this week I learned the most expensive card ever was just sold for $1.8 million. Seriously.
It was a LeBron James rookie card with his autograph and part of a jersey. And the thing is, there are going to be more and more cards being sold for huge amounts of money. Here’s a podcast in which one of the buyers talks about buying the card and the sports card market in general. An interesting listen regardless of your knowledge about cards.
Presidents and Wrestling
Small, but maybe important disclaimer, I’ve been unable to verify this through Google searches. While listening to a recent Tim Ferris podcast episode with Mike Novogratz, Mike says the most common sport played by United States presidents, is wrestling. I’m sure this is exclusive to either high school and college or maybe just college.
His specific point is that 14 previous presidents were wrestlers.
His reason for bringing this up is to create a link between the hard work and dedication that is needed to be good at wrestling, as well as the president. Now, this could be said for really any sport, but regardless, I would not have guessed wrestling to be that common among previous presidents.
Picking a Vice President
Well isn’t this timely. Earlier this week Joe Biden announced his running mate for the 2020 election, Kamala Harris. While there has been talk, and most certainly will continue to be talk about previous women as Vice President-hopefuls, and Geraldine Ferraro in particular, something else stood out to me this week.
The Presidential podcast put out an episode about how Walter Mondale, in 1984, chose Geraldine Ferraro to be his running mate. It was a big announcement for the obvious reason, but also because it changed how VP’s were picked in the future.
Usually, the party chose the VP, Mondale however took it upon himself to select his running mate, meeting with potential candidates personally. Something that at the time was unheard of, but is now the norm.
