Long before young Hall of Fame center Shaquille O'Neal saw his own face on a trading card, he looked at two baseball cards and a pair of legends stared back at him.

"I got a Reggie Jackson, I got a Pete Rose," O'Neal told SI of a pack of Bazooka Joe cards he opened as a child. "I kind of got away from it, and then I got back into it when I became a pro."

However, according to O'Neal, looking at Tim Banazek's massive collection "really got (me) back into it."

Banazek is a former sales executive who lives in Virgnia, and has achieved a degree of notoriety in the sports-memorabilia sphere this decade for amassing what is thought to be the largest privately held card collection in the world. He purchased the collection in 2021 from the father of a Facebook friend he knew through his dau

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