Sports

This article is part of our Women and Leadership special report that coincides with global events in March celebrating the accomplishments of women. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

As coach of the University of South Carolina women’s top-ranked basketball team, Dawn Staley is a dynamic leader at a time of surging global popularity in women’s sports. At 53, she is a Hall of Fame point guard who guided the United States to three Olympic gold medals as a player and one as a coach. And in her 16th year at South Carolina, Coach Staley just led the team to its second straight undefeated regular season. Now she seeks her third national collegiate title. A proud Philadelphia native, Coach Staley is an outspoken advocate for gender and racial equity in sports and beyond.

Her secret to guiding young people today? Honesty and discipline, lessons she learned from her mother.

You make statements with your coaching wardrobe, and a hoodie you recently wore declared, “Everyone watches women’s sports.” What’s different now?

I just feel like there’s more access to our game. There’s more demand. I think it’s OK to tell the stories of our game and people in our game. I hope it’s not a fad. I don’t think it is. Because the fabric of our game is strong. It’s bursting at the seams right now on all levels, not just collegiately, but the W.N.B.A., even high school. Younger girls have grown up on the W.N.B.A., and during my time in college, we didn’t have that. We’ll get a big bump when the Olympics roll around.

For the first time, there’s going to be the same number of female athletes as male athletes at the Olympics. Are you amazed it took that long?

No. I’m not. I think we have been held back, intentionally, and the numbers and the demand today prove that.

Have you ever caught yourself saying “back in my day” to your players?

​​No! They had no idea what my day looked like.

Do they care?

No. This is all about them. It really is OK; I get it. I’m so used to it. So this is all about me meeting them where they are. It changes every day.

The best leaders are the best communicators. How have you adapted your communication style over the decades?

I think I’m very consistent with who I am. As a young person, I didn’t really talk. I was the youngest of five kids, so I sat back and observed. Once I got older, I started figuring out the things that have to be said. I govern my life, being a leader, a coach, a colleague, on how something looks, feels and sounds. If something looks or sounds or feels wrong, I’m going to say something. I can’t not say anything. And then the same, if something looks, sounds or feels great, like, I give it the same energy the other way.

Enforcing discipline is central to your leadership. Did you get that from your mother, Estelle?

Absolutely. I am more like my mother. As a youngster, I loved her, but I didn’t like her because she was very strict. And it’s hard for young people to see what your parents are trying to shield you from.

How do you approach your leadership beyond the basketball court?

If young people come to play for you, you have to give them your all, give them their wants and needs. One of my former players, when she was on her official visit here, her mother was a little skeptical about South Carolina. If you look at the history books, you get a not-so-pleasant picture. Until you come visit. And then at the end of her visit, the mother actually said something that no other parent has said to me. But it’s the very thing that guides me, that allows me to have the stamina, that allows me to meet young people where they are and try to take them where they want to go. She said to me, “I give you my child.”

Whether I have to love them or show them a little bit of tough love along the journey, ultimately I keep that line in perspective.

You are always generous in sharing credit. After your two national championships, you mailed snippets of the net to other young Black coaches. Why?

I feel like I’ve been put in the position where I owe basketball. So I’m really trying to repay my debt. I want people to feel what I feel about basketball. The people that I meet in men’s and women’s basketball, they tell me what I mean to them and what I mean to the game. I’m inspired by their aspirations.

Besides winning another championship, what aspirations do you have left?

I want to be the best dream merchant I can be. That’s it, simply. I want all my players to check off all of their goals. I want our assistant coaches, if they want to be head coaches, to check off their goals. I don’t have a want for anything. Well, actually, I’ve got one want. I want to go in the Hall of Fame as a coach.

Why is that so important to you?

Because you’re amongst the best. And that means you’ve impacted lives.

The Phoenix Club of Philadelphia sponsors the annual Dawn Staley Award for the best female guard in Division I. Caitlin Clark, who just passed Pete Maravich to set the N.C.A.A. career scoring record, has won it three years in a row. How do you feel about that, especially after Clark’s Iowa team eliminated yours last year?

Well, I get a vote! In her first year, nobody was giving her the credit. But Caitlin was throwing these numbers from year one. And you know, I like to do things differently. I almost like to go against the mainstream and find young people who are doing things quietly and aren’t getting the publicity that they deserve.

So you knew. You had it first.

Absolutely. It’s not hard to see. She’s a generational talent.

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When Emmanuel Morgan was hired as a sports reporter covering the N.F.L. and combat sports for The New York Times in 2021, the job felt familiar. After all, Mr. Morgan, who grew up playing football, had been writing about the sport since high school. He went on to cover the N.F.L. for The Los Angeles Times for nearly two years.

“I knew the N.F.L. and the U.F.C. and all these other sports so well,” said Mr. Morgan, 27, who also covered high school sports and basketball for The Los Angeles Times, including helping report on the death of Kobe Bryant in 2020.

So when The Times disbanded its Sports department last year, he took the opportunity to stretch himself and pitch a new beat: the intersection of sports and pop culture.

“I’m not a movie critic or a Broadway-goer, but I follow pop culture, I watch Netflix and I listen to music constantly — in the shower every day, on the subway,” he said. “I had my pulse on it.” Over the past eight months, Mr. Morgan, now on the Culture desk, has written about the pop culture phenomenon of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, the growing relationship between the N.F.L. and streaming services and the rise of athlete podcasts.

In an interview, he discussed how his daily news consumption has changed and what his favorite reporting experience so far has been. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

You’ve been in the role for a little over eight months now. How is it going so far?

I have definitely had to be a lot more creative when it comes to finding story ideas. When I was with the Sports desk, I knew the N.F.L. and the U.F.C. so well — covering sports is very formulaic. You know you have to have previews for big events like the Super Bowl and the N.F.L. draft, and as the season goes on the major story lines and the targets for profiles and features become pretty clear. But with this new beat, I’m reporting on stuff you don’t see on TV or Twitter, and there are a lot more options, since I’m not just focusing on the N.F.L. and U.F.C. anymore. I have to make a lot more phone calls and talk to more people.

In March, a meeting with a publicist led to a timely story about how Flau’jae Johnson, one of the best women’s college basketball players in the country, balanced her sports obligations with her music career.

What are some of your favorite articles you’ve written so far?

I worked on a number of pieces around the Super Bowl this year in Las Vegas — I followed a retired player around Radio Row for a day for a story about how it’s transformed into a colossus for the N.F.L. I wrote about how parties at the Super Bowl have become a business and use the event as a playing ground for brand activations. It was cool to show other people on the Culture desk that there’s more to cover than just the halftime show.

I also wrote about Joel Embiid, a basketball player who started a media production company, which is a big thing in the sports space now. And I landed a front-page story on how the N.F.L. is trying to branch out and do more long-form projects for streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.

Did you play sports growing up?

I played football in high school. I was a running back and a linebacker. I also wrestled. I’ve always been an athlete, but I loved to write, too. So putting the two together made sense.

What’s the most fun thing you’ve had the chance to do for an article?

I got to follow the U.F.C. announcer Bruce Buffer around for a fight. I was able to observe how he prepared, including color-coordinating index cards he reads in the octagon, which have the fighters’ names and stats on them.

What’s been your biggest challenge?

Trying to detach myself from the games. My instinct is to want to cover what’s happening on the field or on the court. I have to step back and look for things that aren’t involved in the actual sport itself. I’m training myself to think differently.

What are your goals for future coverage of sports and culture at The Times?

To keep building it out — it’s been cool to be able to experiment and try new things; to say, “The New York Times wouldn’t have covered that story before, but it’s important.” I’m not even a year in yet, and I keep finding new stories to cover. There’s an audience for this crossover between sports and entertainment, and my goal is to find it and tell stories that resonate with them.

Whitey Herzog, the Hall of Fame manager who led the St. Louis Cardinals to three pennants and a World Series championship in the 1980s, died on Monday in St. Louis. He was 92 and had been the second-oldest Hall of Famer after Willie Mays.

His death was announced by the Cardinals.

“Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it,” Herzog liked to say.

Signed by the Yankees in 1949, he never made it out of their minor league system, though he picked up a lifetime of baseball knowledge from Manager Casey Stengel at spring training camps. He played the outfield for four American League teams over eight seasons with only modest success.

But Herzog found his niche as a manager with what came to be called Whiteyball, molding teams with speed, defense and pitching to take advantage of ballparks with fast artificial turf and spacious outfields, first at Royals Stadium in Kansas City and then at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

Herzog managed the Kansas City Royals to three consecutive American League division championships in the 1970s, then took the Cardinals to the 1982 World Series title with a team he had built while general manager as well. And he managed the Cardinals to pennants in 1985 and 1987.

He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 2009.

“The fundamental aspects of the game were some of the things he always highlighted,” the Cardinals’ Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith once said. “It simply came down to the way he prepared us to play the game.”

But for all his baseball savvy, Herzog looked beyond Whiteyball in developing a rapport with his players.

As Bruce Sutter, the Cardinal reliever and also a Hall of Famer, once told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “How many managers can you blow a game for and go out fishing with him the next morning?

Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog was born on Nov. 9, 1931, in New Athens, Ill., about 30 miles southeast of St. Louis, to Edgar and Lietta Herzog. His father was a brewery worker. (The nickname Whitey came from his light blond hair.)

As a boy, Whitey sometimes cut school to visit Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis and watch the Yankees play the St. Louis Browns (the team later became the Baltimore Orioles).

Herzog was signed by the Yankees out of high school, but they gave up on him after a long apprenticeship in the minors and traded him to the Washington Senators in 1956. He also played for the Kansas City Athletics, the Orioles and the Detroit Tigers. He appeared in 634 major league games with a career batting average of .257.

After two seasons with the Athletics, as a scout and then a coach, Herzog joined the Mets as their third-base coach in 1966, scouted for them in 1967, then spent five years overseeing their farm system.

Herzog was named manager of the Texas Rangers in 1973, taking over a young ball club, but was fired in early September with the team in last place in the American League West. He became a coach for the California Angels in 1974, filling in for four games as interim manager during a managerial change.

He replaced Jack McKeon as the Royals’ manager in the middle of the 1975 season, then led them to A.L. West titles the following three seasons, losing to the Yankees each time in the League Championship Series.

He regarded his 1977 team as the best he ever managed. It finished the regular season at 102-60, featuring speedy players like Fred Patek, Frank White and Amos Otis, the hitting of George Brett and the pitching of Dennis Leonard.

Herzog was fired after the Royals finished second in their division in 1979 and was named the Cardinals’ manager in June 1980. He was given the general manager’s job as well in late August, when he turned the managing over to Red Schoendienst.

He reclaimed the managing job in 1981, remaining as general manager until early in the 1982 season, when the team he had assembled in a flurry of deals went on to capture the Cardinals’ first pennant since 1968.

That ball club, featuring Smith at shortstop, Keith Hernandez at first base, Willie McGee, Lonnie Smith and George Hendrick in the outfield, Darrell Porter at catcher and the relief pitching of Sutter, went on to defeat the Milwaukee Brewers in a seven-game World Series.

After managing the Cardinals to two more pennants, Herzog resigned on July 6, 1990, when his team was in last place in the National League East. He worked after that as an executive with the Angels.

He is survived by his wife of 71 years, Mary Lou Herzog; their three children; Debra, David and Jim; nine grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren, the Cardinals said.

Herzog never forgot his baseball roots, most notably the wisdom imparted by Stengel when Herzog was a Yankee hopeful.

“Casey broke it down into the hundred little things that would make the difference,” Herzog recalled in “You’re Missin’ a Great Game,” written with Jonathan Pitts. “Once I began coaching and managing, I kept passing them along to my own players, to everybody from the youngest rookie-league bushwhackers to the George Bretts, Ozzie Smiths and Vince Colemans of the world. In Casey, I had an Einstein.”

Stengel could discourse on every facet of baseball, but Herzog recalled how one piece of advice Stengel imparted had nothing to do with strategy.

As Herzog once related it to The New York Times, “Casey told me, ‘Let ’em ask you one question and you keep talking so they won’t ask you another one.’”

Victor Mather contributed reporting.

They had won one battle, and then sat to watch a battle of a different kind. Eight Ukrainian National Guard soldiers who had helped stall a Russian offensive in the northern Kharkiv region of Ukraine took the afternoon off on Monday to watch the men’s national soccer team play its first game of the European Championship.

“Football unites — it gives adrenaline and motivates,” said Evhen, 34, a soldier in the 13th National Guard Brigade who asked to be identified by only his first name, in accordance with military protocol.

The soldiers huddled in a bunker with soft drinks and chips to watch Ukraine play Romania in Munich, only to suffer heartbreak when their team lost by 3-0. But like most Ukrainians, they nonetheless take special pride in their sports team during the war.

“We have one team on the field and a million on the front,” said Andriy Shevchenko, a former soccer star who is Ukraine’s most famous player and now heads the national soccer federation. Like all Ukrainians, he said, “soccer players start their day by opening their phones and checking the situation on the battlefield.”

For the National Guard soldiers, who have been fighting together for more than a year, soccer became a chance to bond in the safety of a basement and cheer their national team. Huddled underground, they watched Ukraine quickly fall behind against Romania.

“At war, we look at things differently,” said a commander who uses the nickname Jackson. “Even now, while watching the game, we understand that at any moment we might have to leave and go into the trenches to fight. We are always ready.”

Soccer, he said, is important for Ukrainians, even during the war. “I don’t question it,” he said of people who support soccer players along with the army in wartime. “We are fighting and playing for our country.”

When Russia launched a cross-border attack north of Kharkiv last month, opening a new front in the war, Ukrainian soldiers stopped the advance within about 10 days. In one area of urban fighting, in the town of Vovchansk, they also drove Russian forces back from their leading positions.

With its soccer leagues all but hopelessly disrupted by war and occupation, Ukraine barely qualified for this tournament, needing to beat Iceland in a playoff on March 26 just to get in. That match was played in Wroclaw, Poland, since Ukraine cannot host games on its own territory because of the threat of Russian missiles.

Ukraine also has had no home games since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Since then, professional soccer players who joined the army have been killed, along with countless soccer fans. Numerous soccer fields and other sports training sites have also been destroyed by the war.

The Sonyachny soccer stadium, which was shelled in May 2022, was badly damaged. While under occupation for a month at the beginning of the war, the soccer field in Borodianka, north of the capital, Kyiv, was defaced by Russian soldiers who dug a trench in the form of a huge “V” across the whole field. Russian soldiers mark the letters “V” and “Z” on their tanks.

Oleksandr Tymchyk, who played in the game against Romania on Monday, lost a brother when he was killed in action in Donetsk Oblast in August 2023.

Since February 2022, FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, and UEFA, the European governing body, have imposed a ban on all Russian clubs and national teams.

The game on Monday began Ukraine’s fourth appearance in the European Championship. The first time, in 2012, Ukraine co-hosted the tournament, with Poland, holding several games in the city of Donetsk, two years before Russia occupied the city.

But this year, most of the nearly one million men in the Ukrainian Army, National Guard, paramilitary police and other units could not watch. Some on the front line watched on screens hooked to batteries and satellite internet links also used to convey artillery coordinates and other military data.

Unlike civilian fans of the game, soldiers are prohibited from drinking.

“Beer is really missing here,” Evhen noted. He said he missed his circle of soccer-fan friends at home. “But I also have a really good team of friends here,” he added. “These are great guys.”

Ukraine hopes to use the tournament to draw international attention to the country’s plight, including that of its sports facilities.

Kharkiv is the region where the biggest number of sports facilities have been destroyed in the war. And ahead of Ukraine’s match on Monday in Munich, the national federation, the Ukrainian Association of Football, displayed part of the badly damaged stand from the Sonyachny stadium on the Wittelsbacherplatz plaza in the city.

Members of the Ukrainian national team also recorded a video showing rocket damage to each of their hometowns. Some are from occupied Donetsk and the surrounding area. The midfielder Mykola Shaparenko is from Velyka Novosilka in the Donetsk region, which is under Ukrainian control but has been destroyed in the war.

Ukrainian sports news media and bars are also using the momentum of the tournament to bring in donations for the army. The Beer Pub Kutovy in Kyiv announced an auction of the soccer player Nazar Voloshyn’s T-shirt to collect the money for the Third Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian armed forces.

Ukraine will play its next game, against Slovakia, on Friday. Teams play three matches in a group stage to determine who advances to the knockout rounds. This means Ukraine still has a chance for a victory.

The soldiers lamented the team’s loss against Romania.

“Well, we are all upset,” said Evhen, the soldier in the 13th National Guard Brigade. “But it is good that no one’s life depends on this match.”

Still, they joked, they had plenty of opportunities to vent their frustration.

“We will get some rest with the guys, then go fire mortars until the victory, to let a bit of steam out in this way,” Jackson, the commander, said.

“I guess I’ll just need to win Wimbledon to shut everyone up.” — Andy Murray to The Daily Telegraph in June 2004

Mission accomplished, although it took nearly a decade for Murray to manage it. He had to scrap and scream through all sorts of tennis trouble before finally putting a halt to all the annual chatter about when a British man might finally win Wimbledon again.

Now, at 37 and at the end of his career — win or lose (or forced to withdraw because of recent back surgery) — he is saying goodbye to a tournament he conquered not once, but twice. Three years elapsed between his first victory in 2013 and his second in 2016, when his proud country rewarded Murray with a knighthood. In that same year, he won his second Olympic gold.

For more than 70 years, the hope that a British man would win Wimbledon had become a tradition in a country that still likes its tradition: a part of the landscape at the well-tended All England Club where Fred Perry had won the men’s singles in 1936, but had long gone without a British successor.

Tim Henman was still the local focal point when Murray emerged in 2005. Henman had reached four singles semifinals by rushing the net, but had always fallen short, handling each setback with a firm handshake and a dignified demeanor.

Murray — a scruffy shock-absorbing baseliner from Scotland — managed the pressure and the project quite differently: muttering, moaning and sometimes swearing between points. But above all, he embraced the challenge as he trundled about the grass with a heavy gait only to move with astonishing quickness once the ball was in play.

He was a prodigy who first played in the Wimbledon junior tournament at age 15 and first played in the main event at age 18, immediately becoming a star by reaching the third round in that 2005 debut.

Murray declared his intentions. He wanted to win Wimbledon, and watching him chase it each summer you could feel how much he wanted to win it. There was no masking the raw ambition and no stopping the tears when in 2012, with his complete game coming together, he lost in the final in four sets to Roger Federer.

“All right, I’m going to try this, and it’s not going to be easy,” Murray said to the crowd after he lost, his voice cracking with microphone in hand.

He did not have to speak again for about 35 seconds as the fans roared their support. When he resumed, he managed a joke about Federer being pretty good for a 30-year-old, thanked his team and family and then broke down again when mentioning the crowd.

“Everybody always talks about the pressure of playing at Wimbledon, how tough it is,” Murray said. “But it’s not the people watching. They make it so much easier to play. The support has been incredible, so thank you.”

Murray did not know it quite yet, but he had turned a corner. Just a few weeks later, on the same patch of grass and dirt, he routed Federer in straight sets to win the 2012 Olympic gold medal.

“The biggest win of my life,” he said.

It was not quite Wimbledon, but it was an extraordinary achievement in a very familiar place.

“The similarity is that it’s at the All England Club, and that it’s against Roger, but other than that, it’s a very different dynamic,” Paul Annacone, a Federer coach, said after that Olympic win. “When Wimbledon is happening, the country stops. But when the Olympics are happening, there are four million other things going on. It’s a different level of expectation, a different level of pressure in my amateur psychologist’s opinion. But I also think Andy is playing every big match better, and I think this victory will help him.”

That proved true. He won his first Grand Slam title at the U.S. Open later that summer, defeating Novak Djokovic, his former junior rival and doubles partner, in five grueling sets.

When Murray returned to Wimbledon in 2013, he was ready for the real deal.

“I think both of them obviously will have helped me in different ways,” he said of the Olympic gold and U.S. Open title. “But the Wimbledon final last year was also important for me. There are some shots I would have liked to have changed, but I went for it and kind of lost the match on my terms. I felt I didn’t just sit back and sort of wait. I think that’s maybe why I managed to recover from that defeat well.”

With history on the line in 2013, Murray beat Djokovic in straight sets in the final to end Britain’s 77-year men’s singles drought.

“You needed a tough gritty kid to do it,” Pat Cash, a former Wimbledon champion from Australia, said after Murray won.

Andy and his older brother, Jamie, were coached by their mother, Judy, who had spent a short time on the pro tour. Andy would become No. 1 in the world in singles and Jamie No. 1 in doubles. But her sons might not have had pro careers at all. In March 1996, a gunman and former scout leader shot and killed 16 students and a teacher at the gymnasium of their primary school in Dunblane, Scotland. According to Judy Murray, Andy’s class was on its way to the gym before being turned away.

“At the time you have no idea how tough something like that is,” Andy Murray told the BBC in 2013. “It wasn’t until a few years ago that I started to actually research it and look into it a lot because I didn’t really want to know.”

By the end, Sir Andy’s body started to break down. He had arthroscopic hip surgery in 2018 and then, more radically, hip resurfacing surgery in 2019, breaking new ground for singles players by returning to the tour after that procedure. He has been competitive if rarely triumphant, winning just one singles title, in Antwerp, in 2019.

His tennis legacy was secure more than a decade ago, but perhaps sooner rather than later, the chattering classes at the All England Club will resume wondering when the next British man will win Wimbledon.

A sealed case filled with unopened boxes of Canadian hockey trading cards sold for $3.72 million on Sunday after a father and son found them while cleaning the father’s house in Saskatchewan.

The high price takes into account the mystery inside: The case could contain as many as 30 of the holy grail of collectible hockey cards, a Wayne Gretzky rookie card from 1979. Or it might not.

The buyer is likely content with the uncertainty, and prepared to never know the answer, explained Jason Simonds, a sports card specialist at Heritage Auctions, the Dallas-based auction house that brokered the sale.

“The person who buys this, one night could crack open a couple beers and open up the case and then go to town on these 16 boxes,” Mr. Simonds said. “But chances are it’ll stay as a case for at least the foreseeable future.”

This is because unopened boxes are not purchased just for the potential riches inside. Some people appreciate the nostalgic value of boxes from the 1970s and 1980s and might display them as they are. Others buy unopened boxes as investments. If the Gretzky card and others continue to increase in value, so will the case sold on Sunday, Mr. Simonds said.

“When it comes to card collecting, a lot of times it’s not just purely for profit,” Mr. Simonds said. “It’s because they have some sort of draw toward Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio or, in this case, Wayne Gretzky, which is the hockey equivalent of those guys.”

The 1979 Wayne Gretzky card issued by O-Pee-Chee is prized by collectors. In May 2021, one of the cards sold for $3.75 million in a private sale that was brokered by Heritage Auctions.

Mr. Simonds said that the case sold on Sunday, the kind that would have been shipped to a corner store or other card distributor, could include 25 to 30 of the Gretzky cards and that it would be a “statistical anomaly” for the box not to contain any based on how many cards are inside.

The case was found while a father and son in Saskatchewan, who remained anonymous, were cleaning out the father’s house, which had a storage room stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, Mr. Simonds said. He said that the father was an “avid” collector in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, often purchasing a couple of cases of cards each year from a distributor and selling or trading the cards inside. He never got around to examining the case that sold on Sunday, which would have cost him about $150 in 1979, Mr. Simonds said.

The box went to an anonymous buyer in Canada, Mr. Simonds said, breaking the record for the most money spent on unopened sports cards and the most anyone has spent on a hockey collectible.

Baseball Card Exchange, an authenticator that specializes in unopened vintage sports cards, confirmed that 16 wax boxes were inside the case. Each box contains 48 packs of cards, with 14 cards per pack, for a total of more than 10,000 cards. The set contains 396 different player cards, which means that if the assortment were perfectly random, it would contain 27 Gretzky cards, according to the auction house’s listing.

If the case does contains a couple dozen of the prized Gretzky cards, they might not be in good condition, Mr. Simonds warned. The cards could be slightly off-center, have ink smudges or other flaws.

The buyer might never find out.

Mr. Simonds said that if the case were to be opened, it would likely be to sell the individually sealed boxes inside. “There’s not a lot of people that are willing to spend $4 million on a case of hockey cards,” he said, “but at a quarter-million dollars a box, there’s a slightly larger audience.”