Marvel bought Fleer, the trading card company, in the summer of 1992 for a little over a quarter billion dollars, and picked up SkyBox International three years later to sit alongside it. Both were treated as non-core assets when Marvel collapsed into bankruptcy in 1996 and reorganized through its merger with Toy Biz in June of 1998 — the same restructuring the original chapters already had Sam quietly involved in. In February of 1999, the real Fleer/SkyBox business was sold off to a company controlled by Alex Grass, the Rite Aid founder, and his son Roger, for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty million dollars. In reality, the company kept sliding through the early 2000s and finally collapsed in 2005, with Upper Deck picking up the Fleer name at auction for about six million. That collapse is the divergence point — everything would have been the same if I hadn't intervened.
I'd been a silent minority partner in the Grass family's Fleer/SkyBox purchase since before the ink dried in February of '99 — a piece of paper Skye had structured through the same layered accounts the SEC had spent an afternoon in our dining room taking apart three years later, small enough that it never once showed up as a name anyone needed to disclose. I hadn't done it for the cards. I'd done it because Marvel's back catalog of licenses ran through that business, and licenses are easier to steer from inside the room than from outside it.
By 2002, "inside the room" had stopped being enough.
The Grasses were good, honest operators who'd inherited a business already bleeding market share to Upper Deck and Topps, both of whom had spent the nineties eating Fleer's lunch on production quality and exclusive photography deals. I'd watched the numbers for three years the way I watched everything — quietly, patiently, waiting for the moment doing nothing would cost more than doing something. That moment arrived the week Roger Grass called me directly, which he'd never done before, and asked, without much preamble, whether Infinite would be interested in buying the rest of the company outright.
"You want out," I said. Not a question.
"I want it in hands that can actually compete with Upper Deck's production budget," he said. "That's not my family anymore. We kept it alive longer than anyone expected us to. I'd rather sell it to someone who loves it than watch it die slow under people who don't."
I bought the remaining stake within the month, folded Fleer and SkyBox both fully under Infinite's entertainment division, and did the one thing nobody in the trading card business had done in a decade: I spent real money on it. Better cardstock, actual photographers embedded at real practices instead of licensing wire-service photos everyone else was using, serial-numbered inserts printed in genuinely limited runs instead of the fake-scarcity marketing every manufacturer in the category had been running since the early nineties boom taught them that "limited" sold better than "available."
The NBA license, at that point, wasn't exclusive to anyone — Topps, Upper Deck, and Fleer/SkyBox all held simultaneous rights to produce cards, the same three-way split the league had run since Topps re-entered the category in the early nineties. I didn't need to win an auction to compete. I needed to be good enough that a kid opening a pack in 2003 reached for a Fleer box instead of an Upper Deck one out of habit rather than nostalgia.
The team sponsorships came out of the same instinct, dressed differently. I wasn't interested in slapping a logo on a jersey — the league wasn't going to allow on-uniform advertising for another decade and a half regardless of how much I offered, and I had no interest in being the guy who tried to force a rule change just to see his own name on a player's shoulder. What I wanted was smaller and, I thought, more durable: I became the league's first major sponsor of practice-facility infrastructure — funding new gyms, better recovery equipment, nutrition programs for teams whose ownership groups didn't have the deep pockets the glamour franchises did. Infinite's name went on training centers, not game jerseys. Community clinics, not courtside ad boards.
Shaq, predictably, had opinions about this the next time I was back in El Segundo. "You could've just bought the ads, little man. Would've been cheaper."
"Cheaper isn't the same as better," I said. "Ads wear off the second the game ends. A gym stays a gym for twenty years. I'd rather be the reason some kid's practice facility didn't fall apart than the reason his TV screen had one more logo on it."
He didn't have a comeback for that one. I counted it as a win, quietly, the same way I counted most things that year — not against a scoreboard anyone else could see, but against the only ledger that had ever actually mattered to me: what outlasted the headline.