Tim Banazek holds a handful of Zellers Department Store’s Tim Raines cards. It’s the card that got him into collecting back in the early 1980s and now he has a sizable stockpile of them.
There’s a moment near the end of the movie Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when Willie reminds Charlie Bucket in the film’s final scene, “Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted. … He lived happily ever after.”
That might well describe, Tim Banazek, my guest on this week’s episode Conversations with Sports Fans.
Like many of us in 2021, Tim was looking for something – anything – to bring him a modicum of joy as the world emerged from the COVID-19 Pandemic. He returned to collecting trading cards and had posted the contents of a recent purchase on his social media account when one of his daughter’s soccer moms noticed the post and wondered if Tim might want to check out her father’s collection.
Tim was gobsmacked by what he saw. A collection that, ultimately, totaled into the tens of millions and needed to be housed in a warehouse.
I discovered Tim through this New York Times story in 2024 and spent the past year, on-and-off, trying to contact him about joining me as a guest. I finally stumbled upon his website, The Big League Find and his YouTube Channel of the same name, and made contact and we talked. Or, rather, Tim talked and I did a fair amount of listening.
His passion for the collection is palpable.
His desire to try and share it with the world is, I believe, earnest.
I’m rooting for him.
And I think you’ll root for him to after you listen to this episode.