That's a ticket to the 2010 NBA All-Star Jam Session Dallas Mavericks Night on February 10th. I'm not really a big basketball fan, although I do follow the Mavs, but I wasn't about to pass up the chance to take my kids to an event like this. Play a few games, get some Mavs autos while the boys meet some NBA players....that sounds like fun right?
Well, it really wasn't all that great. First off, this "exclusive" event really wasn't. It was JAM packed. Honestly, I expected the crowds would be crazy, traffic would be a bear and patience would a necessity. I also expected most, if not all, the Dallas Mavericks would be on hand to sign autos for the fans. After all, it was Dallas Mavericks Night.
Unfortunately, only two Mavericks were signing. Dirk Nowitzki was there and he is the big dog. He's the guy everyone wants. The only problem was that as far as I could tell, there was no publicized schedule of times for signing until you got to the event and picked up a schedule. I couldn't even find anything about the event on the Mavs website and never saw a list of times/players who would be there. Dirk started signing at 4:30...about 45 minutes before we got to the convention center. By the time we got inside, the line was MASSIVE and had already been cut off. My boys were very disappointed. They didn't have any interest in waiting nearly 2 hours for the other Mav, Eric Dampier, to sign.
Well, we spent a couple of hours playing games and getting pictures. They had fun, but never really got over the disappointment of missing out on meeing Dirk.
I was surprised that the only card manufacturer there was Panini. I didn't realize Panini has the NBA exclusively. I guess one of the downfalls of having exclusive licenses is there is less of a hobby presence at events like this one. We stood in line to spin a wheel where Panini was promoting some new basketball card game called Adrenalyn. We each spun the wheel and got these Panini All-Star cards:
I think we'll be doing some TTMs to the Mavs in hopes of getting some of the autos we were hoping to get at the All-Star Fan Jam.
I like Panini's base set for some reason. These cards look just like the base design, only with the all-star logo. I like how they're not all glossy and foiled up. If you had ended up with a special all-star Blazer card, I probably would have had to bribe you.
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