Growing up in Vadalia, Georgia, Will Driggers was about as far away from Seattle as you can get without leaving the United States — but that didn't stop him from becoming a huge fan of Ken Griffey Jr.
"Every summer morning, you wake up and you put on ESPN, and it's Ken Griffey Jr., Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa," Driggers, 39, said. "I already had friends who were Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa collectors, so I figured I'd be Griffey. ...
"He was kind of my guy from then on."
That fandom turned into a serious collecting addiction — and Driggers can recall the exact moment when his Griffey bug really became contagious.
"How I got hooked on baseball cards was I bought a pack of 1989 Upper Deck when they were like $7 a pack in 1998," Driggers recalled. "I pulled two Griffey No. 1s out of one pack. At that point, I think they were about $150 raw, and so when you're 11 or 12 years old in 1998, that's 300 bucks, man. That's huge money."
Driggers found himself amassing a vast collection of Griffey Jr. cards and tickets, striving to get every one of the Mariners star's key rookie cards in the highest grades.
"Not to be like braggadocious or anything like that, but I would say I probably have one of the top two or three Griffey rookie card collections in the world," he said.
Driggers' Griffey Jr. collection will become considerably smaller Sunday night when around three-dozen tickets from the Hall of Famer's career sells on eBay.
The batch includes most of Junior's major milestones, including his major-league debut, his first hit, stolen base, home run and grand slam, his 500th and 600th homers and his final major-league game. There's also the first game he played with his father, his consecutive-games with a HR record, his All-Star Game performances and autographed tickets from his minor-league stops in Burlington, Vermont, and Bellingham, Washington.
Driggers started building the collection after first acquiring the most difficult ticket in the lot, Griffey Jr.'s 1989 MLB debut in Oakland, in an online auction, thinking it would be a "cool relic" to own.
"That was my intro to ticket collecting, in general," said Driggers, who said he thinks he bought the ticket at Goldin Auctions, and that purchase led to him wanting more and more Griffey Jr. tickets over the next decade.
"At one point, I had 20 to 30 saved searches on eBay, looking for his tickets," said Driggers, who added that other collectors also came forward to offer him more milestone tickets.
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Now, as he moves into a new house in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Driggers said he's downsizing, which means reluctantly parting with the tickets.
"I don't particularly want to sell anything Griffey," he said. "It's just not enough space for everything. I had a man cave, and I had custom displays built where I could display all the tickets, all the games, all this stuff. And there's just not going to be space for that.
"And I just think it would be a shame for them to be sitting in some briefcase or something like that."
Driggers, who also collects memorabilia from his beloved Georgia Bulldogs and the "Back to the Future" movies, said he never considered breaking up the tickets into multiple auctions — even if that might yield a greater return.
"It would be just a really shitty thing to break them up and have them all in different people's collections," he said.
Driggers said he's hoping the lot returns in the neighborhood of $20,000, with the added bonus that it could go much higher if a bidding war breaks out.
But that won't make parting with the collection any easier for the lifelong collector.
"It's definitely going to be hard to give up," Driggers said. "It's been a labor of love. It's been a lot of work."
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Kevin Jackson is the chief content officer for cllct. He spent 25 years at ESPN Digital Media, where he was the founding editor of Page 2, and nearly four years as the Executive Director for Digital Content at FOX Sports.