Show your most sentimental item

[mattjc1983]

The answer is easy for me, but requires a little context. Kurt Warner was born in Iowa and played college football at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI), graduating in 1993. He then played a couple seasons for the Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena League after a couple unsuccessful years of trying to get picked up in the NFL (although he was invited to the Packers training camp in 1994).

I was an Iowa kid, and even spent my teen years in the city of Cedar Falls where UNI is located. However, given that UNI is FBS and the smallest of the 3 state schools, and Kurt only started his senior year, and Arena League doesn't have a huge following, and I was just a kid at the time, I basically had no idea who the guy was before he shot to stardom in the 1999 NFL season.

Sometime between 1996 and 1998, the Cedar Falls mall hosted an autograph signing. The guest list will seem very random to non-Iowans: Don Denkinger, Terry Steinbach, and Kurt Warner. Don Denkinger was presumably there because he's a Cedar Falls native. Terry Steinbach was there because there was (at least at the time) some random painting featuring Denkinger and Steinbach, and someone had made it into a mass produced poster that the two were signing that day. I have no idea why Warner was throw into the mix, but he was there signing Barnstormers posters.

I have a terrible memory now, and can't remember meeting any of the 3 guys, but I do know that being a baseball-first kid, I was only there to get the Denkinger/Steinbach poster signed. Like I said, I had no idea who Kurt Warner even was, and actually folded the poster he signed into quarters and put it in the back of my closet after the signing (I was probably only 12-14 at the time and didn't really understand how to properly handle an autograph). I hung the Denkinger/Steinbach poster on my wall.

Fast forward 2-3 years, Dick Vermeil is giving an emotional press conference after Trent Green's pre-season injury, with everyone basically thinking the Ram's season is over. 5-6 months later, Kurt Warner is league and Super Bowl MVP, and the Hy-Vee grocery store I'm working at at the time has signs everywhere advertising that apparently Warner worked there on night shift between college and the NFL. We also sold "Warner's Crunchtime," a very short-lived cereal that someone created to take advantage of the hype

Anyways, I can't remember when exactly it was during that 1999 season that it occurred to me that this guy who was tearing up the NFL and making the cover of Sports Illustrated was the complete no-namer (at least to me) that had signed the folded poster in my closet. I pulled it out, lovingly admired it, and then carefully rolled it and placed it in a tube, and eventually had it framed as it is today.

I absolutely love it, both the fact that it's a Barnstormers poster and the personalized inscription he wrote that he hoped I "grow up to be a Stormer!" The fact that the poster has foldmarks both length and width-wise actually makes the poster even more special to me, because it reminds me that 1) I got it at not only a more innocent time in my life but also a time when I had the collecting mentality of a kid; it never even occurred to me that the poster would ever have value, and 2) it reminds me to never count people out. As for the Denkinger/Steinbach poster, I'm not even sure I have it anymore.

I've attached a picture of the signed poster, a Sports Illustrated from that season, and a box of Warner's Crunchtime that I bought while I was working at Hy-Vee


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