Football Card Packs Earn Kid Super Bowl Trip

Content originally published by sportscollectorsdaily.com on 31 January 2008

A young football card collector from Virginia is heading for the Super Bowl as part of an Upper Deck promotion.

13 year-old TJ Cook from Burkeville, Virginia won the company's NFL Ultimate Score Sweepstakes, earning him an all-expense-paid trip for two to .
Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, Arizona.

“I was jumping up and down when I found out. I was so happy,” said Cook, a seventh-grader at the Amelia Academy in Burkeville, a private school where his father teaches computer science and middle-school math. “And I thought it would only be right to bring my dad along since he was the one who bought most of the packs for me.”

To enter the contest, collectors needed to register alphanumeric codes found on the back of various Upper Deck trading cards from the company’s assortment of football products launched in 2007 at UpperDeckkids.com. For every card they registered, the entrants received an entry into the sweepstakes. The more codes entered, the better their odds of winning. The sweepstakes ran from August 20 through December 31, 2007.

Cook estimated that he registered at least 300 card codes during the promotion. He was randomly selected from a pool of more than a million entries: 1,037,019 to be exact.

“I was in complete shock,” said his father, Tim. “TJ’s been collecting cards for a quite a while, but we never expected something like this. And we’ve never ever dreamed of going to the Super Bowl. In fact, that’s on the list of things you like to do, but probably would never be able to do. But now we’re going.”

In addition to winning tickets to the Super Bowl, three nights’ worth of hotel accommodations, meals and round-trip airfare, TJ and his Dad will also be given the VIP treatment at the NFL Experience interactive theme park and football card show, and partake in a special VIP Tailgate Party prior to kickoff on Sunday.