Great thread and I'm glad someone dug it up to post and bump it up, has been an interesting read so far!
I think I got into basketball around 1992, was NBA on free to air TV then?, anyway, it was 92 or 93, i got into watching the games and then played when I was in High School.
I then got into collecting cards i think in 1993 or 94, was buying packs from newsagents mainly until they opened a card shop in Wollongong, damn that was awesome!
It may have been the same owners as the gong shop, but then another shop opened up even closer to me so we had 2 places to chose from! I remember doing heaps of trades mainly but a few pack buys, got ripped off in the trading i think but I didn't care, I was just going for the Grant Hill or cool looking insert or whatever I wanted at the time.
Mainly bought packs from the next few years, 94-95 Skybox, TSC, 94-95 Emotion - man I loved the design of them base cards, and the inserts like blew out your eyeballs they were so good looking!
I think I also got some packs from a place called Timezone if anyone had one in your area, like a video/games arcade and certain ones you get tickets for playing and redeem things for those tickets. They had some old 91-92 Upper Deck and some 89-90 or 90-91 Fleer, awesome stuff, getting the MJ All Star etc
A few years later I think I stopped buying/trading when the shops closed in the Illawarra, probably when ebay started, and I was studying at TAFE so had less time.
I still played basketball up to 3 games a week and played for the school and trained there etc but just didn't collect. I also didn't have any interest in the NBL until around 1996-97 when a friend had a ticket for me and we went to a Hawks game (then the Illawarra Hawks). The atmosphere in that little shed they call the Snakepit was crazy. 1800 people, about 30 degrees on a good night, front row about 1mtr from the court sidelines and locker rooms, a bar behind (above) one of the backboards
man, there was no place for the players to hide, would have been intimidating i think!
A few more years passed and then I found this forum! Seeing people in Aus so pumped and into collecting helped renew the fire, especially for my long time PC player, and haven't looked back since. Not sure if it will stay at this pace of doing so many deals and purchases, but if I have a sudden influx of funds there may be a few nicer ones coming in! but for now, I'm very happy to have a renewed interest in collecting and am riding that wave.