Your friend is the biggest sports fan you know. He has been on a mission to collect jerseys for nearly fifteen years now, and he shows no sign of stopping now. Any kind of sport, it doesn\’t matter. He has shirts from hockey teams, baseball clubs, football squads, you name it.

Some of them are vintage uniforms, and they are displayed behind glass panes much like a great painting or photograph would be. You remember the story behind one of them, a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey uniform with the number five on the back. It\’s one of only two numbers that the Maple Leafs have ever retired, and it belonged to Bill Barilko.

Bashing Bill Barilko was a defensive player for Toronto in the late forties and early fifties. He was called up from the Hollywood Wolves in nineteen forty seven and played with Toronto until his death in nineteen fifty one. During this five year span the Maple Leafs won four Stanley Cups, including one that resulted from Barilko\’s amazing overtime goal against the Canadiens in game five. It was the last goal he ever scored.

That summer Barilko went on a fishing trip in Quebec with a friend of his. Their small engine plane ran into problems on the return flight and the two men crashed somewhere in the Ontario hinterlands. Toronto would not win another Stanley Cup Championship until nineteen sixty two, the year Barilko\’s body was finally found.

That story always sends a shiver down your spine. You\’re not even a particularly big hockey fan, but that story is just so ghostly and eerie that it gets you right in the guts. Sometimes you find yourself just staring at the uniform and thinking about that coincidence.

Your friend has different favorites. He tends to have new ones each week, and they are often tied to whatever he has managed to obtain most recently. You remember when he bought that nineteen seventy five World Cup strip from another collector. He didn\’t stop talking about it for hours.

He has an entire room devoted to his favorite team. Replicas of vintage uniforms hang proudly next to modern outfits. He has all the various home and away uniforms for the past twelve years, and many of them are specific to his favorite players. It would be almost like a professional locker room in there if it were not more like a weird museum of sports memorabilia.

It\’s easy to buy your friend things for Christmas and birthdays, though. You don\’t even need to make sure that you\’ve got him something unique. He\’s perfectly happy to have multiple instances of the exact same piece of memorabilia, but something new to add to the pile is always appreciated.

If he didn\’t collect jerseys, he\’d probably have some other fascination. He\’s just one of those sorts of people. It\’s not exactly hoarding because these things are on display for other people to see as well. He just really likes the idea of sports memorabilia, and uniforms in particular.

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Category: Sports
Keywords: signed jerseys, Sports memorabilia, sports, homes, family, business, entertainment, fun, kids, sport