Card: Wild Card WLAF 1992
Acquired: TTM 2015, C/o Home
Sent: 3/4 Received: 3/27 (24 days)
Dean Witkowski was an outstanding player at North Dakota. He arrived at the college in 1987, and was the school’s all-time leading tackler at the time of his departure in 1990, with 548. He is also notable for holding the single season school record for tackles in a season with 185 in his final season. Witkowski was selected in the 9th round of the 1991 draft by the Green Bay Packers, and joined a selected handful of North Dakota players who have been drafted into the NFL.
In 1992 Dean was selected by the Orlando Thunder of the World League of American Football in the 11th round. Coach Galen Hall was rebuilding after the Thunder defense collapsed late in the 1991 season. Among his moves was bringing in Witkowski. The defense indeed saw an improvement over the 1992 season, culminating in an appearance in World Bowl II against the Sacramento Surge.
He was inducted into the North Dakota Fighting Sioux Hall of Fame in 2004. Dean sent me a nice note along with the autograph.
WLAF Tac N/a Sac 1.0 Fum N/a
Int 0 Yds 0 Avg -.- Td 0 Lg 0
When Lance’s ‘trainee’ asked for his autograph, Dishman asked the kid how old he was. I wasn’t sure if it was because he was too young to remember the Oilers or because he looked too young to be in the bar. Anyway it was a good laugh. When I approached Cris, he threw me off. He told me that he’d sign anything as long as it didn’t end up on EBay. I had already paired down my selection of cards, because I did not want to go into a bar with a long box- so I left probably 5 or 6 additional Dishman cards in the car. I am not sure how he felt. He signed what I had and reaffirmed he’d sign anything else as long as it didn’t end up on EBay. Maybe he was actually hoping I had more. I then told him that I felt like after that humbling preseason game against Minnesota (in which he intercepted a pass and got busted showboating at the 2 yard line) he really turned a corner and became one of the best DBs in the league for a few years there. He stopped for a second, looked at me and told me that, “It meant a lot that I said that.” I told Cris that I wasn’t going to sell them, that I was a true blue fan thru and thru, and he and I had even talked on SotL for a bit. After telling him that I was ‘the guy with the mask on’, he smiled briefly at me and finished signing.
Cris had some pretty good cards, and despite signing a few for me over the years, he still has a pretty deep selection of decent action shots, even on bad looking cards. I rarely, if ever got Pro Set Platinum cards signed. They provided me nothing different than the base Pro Set. While they were daring with the blank canvas and full color photo, the logo is gigantic and garish. Still the card itself is a great photo of Cris. Unfortunately by this time I had already begun to scale back my card consumption, or else the Skybox ‘Colors’ set would’ve been a must have. It may have been a combination of things: Discovering girls, a market being flooded by too many products, drop in quality, etc- but whatever it was my interest in the product had dropped off the map by 1993.