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Hey, hi and hello from James at MONKEY MAN Sports. First news post going up right now, so I’ll lay it all out for you – our dear customer and community member we will be working tirelessly to provide value to.
MONKEY MAN is ran by myself (James) and my lovely wife Shannon, and the company is named after our son Gabriel, who just turned six years old. Choosing a name was way harder than we thought it would be. We agonized on it for weeks. For almost a full month we were operating full steam ahead as ‘Unnamed Sports Card Company’ as we battled and debated each day and night to find a name for the company that fit the following strict, elusive requirements:
- The name wasn’t already in use by someone else.
- ???
We were inches away from calling ourselves Meridian Sports Cards and Collectables, which sounds all fine and good, except Meridian also sounds like a corporate law firm or potentially a real estate developer, and there’s no sense of FUN in that name.
MONKEY MAN, by comparison, is what I’ve been calling our kid for the last six years, pretty much every day, as I tickle him half to death. And when I say “MONKEY MAN Sports” out loud, it makes me immediately smile.
Our hope is that as we build this company up, hearing “MONKEY MAN Sports” will make you smile too.
So, you may ask, WHO are we? I mean why do business with strangers, if you don’t have to, right? Let’s talk a little bit about that.
I’m James, I’m 39 years old. I’ve been a hockey fan since a kid growing up in Ottawa, ON. When I was about Gabe’s age, I got into hockey card collecting with some friends, and at that time, the Pittsburgh Penguins were winning Stanley Cups and scoring titles, so I had binders and binders of Mario Lemieux and Jagr cards.
Then in 1992-93, the Senators came back into the NHL. They hung a bunch of newly printed banners in the arena about how they won Cups back in the 1910s. Nobody cared. Everyone in Ottawa was already a Montreal or Toronto fan anyway. I figured if they could stick with their own teams, so could I. Pittsburgh sports it is.
I grew up as one of the biggest kids in class, and I wanted to play football and hockey; proper warrior sports. We weren’t that well off though, so I was allowed to play basketball and soccer. Basketball worked okay for me as a hard driving, rebounding power forward until I stopped growing at 5’10”, and everyone else kept going. I had to switch to guard and would have to learn to shoot.
But I never learned to shoot. Shannon wins every game of 21 we play – she played competitive ball in high school. More on her in another post. 🙃
Later on in life in my mid-20s, I was working in the automotive industry. I found myself sitting in the lunch room with our shop foreman on pizza Saturday.
“You should come out and play hockey with us,” he said.
“I can’t skate, Jack.” His name wasn’t Jack. Jack was very much Chinese, but he went by ‘Jack’ because everyone butchered his name. I asked him once, in earnest, how to pronounce his real name. I wanted to be respectful of the guy. He just laughed at me,
“I can’t skate, I can’t shoot, I haven’t touched a hockey stick since street hockey as a kid.” I took a bite of pepperoni. “I also don’t have any gear. I’m fat. This would be a disaster.”
“So?” he asked, unphased. I thought about that, long and hard.
Buying an entire new set of gear, I got on the grind. Public skates, wobbling like a toddler, you name it. After a few months of pain and embarrassment, I was skating backwards without toppling over.
After a year, I scored my first goal in an actual men’s league game. Just a grindy, greasy thing after a fistfight in the crease. But it was a ‘hockey’ goal. If you know, you know.
There’s this scene near the end of Moneyball, that great sports movie with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, here’s the clip for context. I think about this clip every time I get emotional about sports.
And you know, he’s so right. It’s hard NOT to get romantic about sports, about heroes, about collecting cards, and watching the games, and crying at the incredible wins and the heartbreaking losses.
In 2020, I had another work colleague introduce me to fantasy football with much the same argument as Jack put forward. I didn’t know anything about the league, the play calling, the stars – I just watched the super bowl every year and was a NFL fan for that weekend. And in this case, the guy was English, proper English from the U.K. ‘Football’ to him should have been ‘soccer.’
But drag me in he did and I got lost in it, just lost in the stats and the player trading and the draft and the weekly stress and fun of it. Derrick Henry, Deebo Samuel and Lamar Jackason took me to the fantasy football championship and carried me to a win in a 14(!) team half-PPR league. I felt like giving a speech on that last week, taking home the W. I became a Pittsburgh Steelers fan for life that year – I knew the whole team and all the players from all the overspill from the Penguins media I read every week.
Then getting back into card collecting here in last 2024, I’m learning about Paul Skenes and the hype surrounding who was going to pull his 1/1 MLB debut patch; Crosby just broke Gretzky’s record with 20x point-per-game seasons; Saquon reverse-hurdled some dude on the way to a legendary rushing season, Ovi almost has the goals record locked up… the list of amazing, incredible things happening just goes on and on.
The former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Earl Warren once said,
“The sports page records people’s accomplishments and the front page has nothing but man’s failures.”
It’s the only place in the world sometimes you can go to read GOOD NEWS, to celebrate successes instead of reading about frauds and catastrophes and murders and pain.
One thing that happens when you have a kid is you start really thinking about the world you’re bringing your little dude into. You think about the time you spend, and where you spend it, and you start realizing that your little human is observing and copying your actions and choices every day of your life.
There’s a lot of ways to move around in this world, to make a buck, to make ends meet. I’d like to be working in an industry that celebrates the wins, that carries optimism into each new day. Sports has been a passion of mine for as long as I’ve been around on this earth and ripping packs and sharing the hits and the wins keeps me young at heart and feeling like a kid again.
Gabriel came downstairs this morning at 5:04am to find me sorting through singles and re-organizing our bins and getting ready to list more cards online. “Looking pretty good, Dad,” he said to me, rubbing his eyes. “Seems like you’re working hard.” He came over for a morning hug.
“Thanks, dude!” I said. “I’m doing my best.”
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