Multi-sport athletes collection - a visual guide

I wanted continue seeing if I could display certain collecting subset cards in nine-pocket pages - as featured in previous posts on this blog over the summer, I started to make sampler pages of my favorite mini collections to see if I could put together a binder to flip through.

With a new box of Ultra Pro pages, I wanted to add cards of my bloodlines, inking it up and multi-sport athletes collections as priorities - I put together 17 cards using one page as a snapshot of prominent pro athletes in one sport, yet might have been good enough to dabble in at least one other sport [high school / college / pros] at one point in their playing careers.

These cards were originally referred to as 'two-sport stars' collection, though in my collection, there are cards of players who simply forgettable - guys who may not have developed professionally in a sport they tried to play, like a baseball player who spends four or five years in the minors, but ends up going back to college to play football in anonymity.

First row: John Elway [NFL / MiLB], Bill Spiers [MLB / NCAA football], Todd Helton [MLB / NCAA football]
Second row: Bo Jackson [MLB / NFL], Jim Thorpe, Dave Winfield
Third row: Brian Jordan [NFL / MLB], Dick Ricketts [NBA/MLB], Ron Reed x2 [NBA/MLB]

First row: Nyjer Morgan [MLB / hockey], Zack Von Rosenberg [MiLB / NCAA football], Tony Gonzalez [NFL / NCAA basketball]
Second row: Frank Thomas [MLB / NCAA football], Deion Sanders [MLB / NFL], Tony Gwynn
Third row: Ron Reed [second card] and Michael Jordan [NBA / MiLB]

In my collecting life, it was Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders who made the idea of two-sport players a real attraction during the junk wax era - Jackson had all-world potential as a baseball player and maybe I saw Sanders as an ersatz version of Bo, maybe more flash than substance on a big league field.

Looking at his stats, Sanders was actually decent MLB player, though the NFL was always the priority - as it goes, Neon Deion was the one who didn't get hurt [insert of some of tired tackling joke here] and ended up in the Pro Football HOF while Jackson's NFL career was cut short by injury.