dr robbie
Let's Go Pens!
I am extremely happy to say that I’ve finally completed my goal of acquiring the autographs of everyone listed on the 08-09 Penguins cup winning team. This was my objective basically right after the Penguins won the cup. I knew it would take some time, especially being from St. Louis, but didn’t think it would take this long. It took me 1327 days to finally get this completed today. I figured I would share it on here because we all love hockey, right 
?
I had some rules going into this that made it even more difficult.
1) The signed item had to be a regular sized hockey card.
2) The autograph had to be 100% legit (either guaranteed by a card company or authenticated by an autograph expert). Even the autographs I received through the mail were authenticated by an authenticator.
3) The picture on the card had to be of the player wearing a Penguins jersey. This made it difficult from the start. For instance, I was never able to find a Zigomanis card with him on a Penguins jersey (still not even sure that one exists), so I actually had to make a couple hockey cards of him and get him to sign them.
4) Only the 25 players listed on the cup were going to be included.
I can’t even begin to tell you about the work that went into making this. Just for the autographs alone, I wrote 84 letters to players for autograph requests. The poster took me a ton of time to make as well. I’m not an artistic person in the least bit, especially when it comes to on the computer. I made everything in mspaint and it took me about 100 hours of resizing, redoing, and creating to make the background. I made stat boxes and put a sentence about each player from the 08-09 season on the background. In fact, I had to completely remake the background once because of spacing issues. Luckily, I know a guy that prints pictures of this size out (24 inches by 36 inches) so getting it made wasn’t too difficult. The easiest (albeit most expensive) autograph to get was Crosby’s. The hardest by far was Eric Godard. The dude just moves around teams too much and never had a signed card with a company. His retirement only made things worse. Luckily, I finally found a guy on an autograph collecting forum that had two cards of him signed, with Penguins jerseys, and for sale. Bought them, got everything authenticated by JSA, and here is the final result. All in all, it took 1327 days, $514.12, 84 letters, a ton of free time, and one dedicated fan to complete this.
Lets go Pens!
?I had some rules going into this that made it even more difficult.
1) The signed item had to be a regular sized hockey card.
2) The autograph had to be 100% legit (either guaranteed by a card company or authenticated by an autograph expert). Even the autographs I received through the mail were authenticated by an authenticator.
3) The picture on the card had to be of the player wearing a Penguins jersey. This made it difficult from the start. For instance, I was never able to find a Zigomanis card with him on a Penguins jersey (still not even sure that one exists), so I actually had to make a couple hockey cards of him and get him to sign them.
4) Only the 25 players listed on the cup were going to be included.
I can’t even begin to tell you about the work that went into making this. Just for the autographs alone, I wrote 84 letters to players for autograph requests. The poster took me a ton of time to make as well. I’m not an artistic person in the least bit, especially when it comes to on the computer. I made everything in mspaint and it took me about 100 hours of resizing, redoing, and creating to make the background. I made stat boxes and put a sentence about each player from the 08-09 season on the background. In fact, I had to completely remake the background once because of spacing issues. Luckily, I know a guy that prints pictures of this size out (24 inches by 36 inches) so getting it made wasn’t too difficult. The easiest (albeit most expensive) autograph to get was Crosby’s. The hardest by far was Eric Godard. The dude just moves around teams too much and never had a signed card with a company. His retirement only made things worse. Luckily, I finally found a guy on an autograph collecting forum that had two cards of him signed, with Penguins jerseys, and for sale. Bought them, got everything authenticated by JSA, and here is the final result. All in all, it took 1327 days, $514.12, 84 letters, a ton of free time, and one dedicated fan to complete this.
Lets go Pens!
