David Fahey just wanted some ketchup.
It was 10:40 at night, and he was tired. Pingry’s soccer team was in London, having beaten their opponents earlier in the day—a whopping 17 to 0. He was hungry. He and the other coaches made a pitstop at Five Guys for a late-night snack. They told their players to go back to the hotel and head upstairs to bed. By the time Coach Fahey trekked his way to the Hilton Wembley, he realized his order had no ketchup in it. Tired and annoyed, he made his way to the third floor of the hotel where an upscale restaurant was located. At this late hour, he assumed it was closed, and found a “dark, quiet, empty restaurant” with no one in sight but a lone waiter. With plenty of American directness, he asked the British waiter for some ketchup. The waiter returned a short time later with what struck Coach Fahey as a “tiny” bottle of ketchup and informed him it would cost five pounds. Coach Fahey could take no more. “I’m in my coaching clothes. I’m hungry. I’m exhausted. I’m smelly. I have a burger with no ketchup,” he recalls. Are you really gonna make me pay $5 for a bottle of ketchup? he demanded, apoplectic. “The waiter was embarrassed at me. Like, who is this… American?” Coach Fahey was on the verge of losing it, when, out of nowhere, his boiling frustration was interrupted by a calm voice, coolly calling out:
“On my check.”
Coach Fahey and the waiter looked around, confused for a moment, before they heard a throat clearing and say again:
“On my check.”
That’s when Coach Fahey saw him. There, having a late dinner with Vinnie Ferraro ’26 at nearly 11:00 at night, was Brody Mandelbaum ’26. Though it was just the two of them, Brody and Vinny were seated opposite each other at a large eight-top table. Coach Fahey would later recall it was as if they were “two CEOs meeting for a power lunch to close a deal… but instead it was Brody smiling knowingly at me with the poise and perspective of a 50-year-old man.” Coach Fahey was stunned by the sight and this sudden turn of events in his ketchup quest. The waiter promptly handed Coach Fahey the ketchup with a knowing understanding of who was really in charge in this little interaction. Coach Fahey walked away, ketchup in hand, mystified by the whole thing.
A few days later, after visiting the Chelsea FC Museum, Brody walked out with two large bags filled with soccer cards. Coach Fahey, confused, asked what they were all for. Brody calmly explained, “It’s what I do for a living.”
Brody often stood out to Coach Fahey for his sharp business acumen in the middle of what should have been more soccer-related moments. When the team held a ceremony at the beginning of the year to hang banners and open the two new soccer fields, the players went up on the hillside and listened to Coach Fahey extoll the tradition behind it all. He went on about the great teams that have trained there, how it’s a part of the School’s legacy, when Brody interjected with an unexpected question. What did this cost? he wanted to know. Coach Fahey, not accustomed to talking financial figures with his players, responded that “Normally, we don’t talk about that but I’ll tell you,” and began explaining the details behind the undertaking. Soon followed more questions, and the conversation shifted entirely from longstanding legacy to nickels and dimes. He was calculating what all those famous teams were paying to practice here, and realizing that, with two fields, the revenue was practically doubled. He was doing the math in his head now, realizing the project would pay for itself quickly and begin turning a profit for the School. “Everybody else was like, ‘Oh cool, Italy is gonna practice here,” notes Coach Fahey dryly, “but Brody was doing the math about return on investment. The kid’s already a CEO. He’s already plotting net present values and ROIs.”
***
Brody was always fascinated by trading cards. When he was a toddler and other kids his age were practicing their letters or writing their name, he was busy rattling off the names and cities of every sports team, including colleges and their divisions, right down to their mascots. “He’s always been an obsessed sports fan,” says his father, Jeffrey Mandelbaum ’94.
At sleepaway camp, he got into collecting and trading cards with other kids in his bunk. Parents would send trading cards, and the kids would eagerly tear open the packs and trade with each other, amassing collections they haphazardly stored in shoeboxes or binders—often trading cards for a kid’s most valuable currency: candy.
One summer, they took a day trip to the Basketball Hall of Fame. “I bought packs of cards there,” recalls Brody, “and I opened up these packs, and in one of the packs was an extremely shiny, glitter black card, and it said, in the top right corner, ‘One of One’.” Brody stared at it in wonder, unsure what it meant. “To me, this was so magical.”
The card was of Jeremy Lamb, a former NBA player for the Charlotte Hornets. “I still have the card with me ten years later,” says Brody. “A one-of-one means it’s the only card in existence. It’s the one of that print made. That’s why it was black and really shiny and said ‘One of One’. They only made one copy like that in the entire world. And I pulled it! It was crazy.”
When Brody returned home from camp, sports card collecting was no longer a hobby. Gone were the days he’d consider trading a card for candy. “I started looking up all the cards that I had,” he recalls, tallying up their value—“This is worth $10, this is worth $5 dollars”—and he started an Instagram account called BMZ Sports Cards. “I started looking around, researching, doing my due diligence, and seeing how much not just that card was worth, but every other card in my binder.”
The following summers at sleepaway camp, he honed his trading skills, building his collection with more valuable cards. He no longer stored them in binders or shoeboxes under his bunk. Now he walked them from his bunk to the front office and requested they be stored in the safe. He built up a community of sellers and buyers online from around the country. His time was consumed with selling cards. “There were days where the mail would come in, there were envelopes for him of trades he made or purchases from all over the country, and it was all in kids’ handwriting,” says his mother, Talia Mandelbaum. “It was almost like pen pals, but with cards. They were from everywhere.”
During his sixth-grade year, in the thick of Covid, he began going to card trade shows. He also started tracking card drops at the local stores. “I would go to Target and Walmart with my mom at like 5 a.m. in the morning. We’d sit outside and wait for the drops to come in. At that point, there was a lot of inflation in the card market. It was really hard to get boxes,” he says. They would bundle up in their winter coats and sit in chairs outside the door, beating the line that would stretch out behind them. ”When the store would open at like 7 a.m., we’d be one of the first people in there. We’d go run in, get as many boxes as we could, and then I’d go resell them on eBay.”
He spent so much time monitoring sports cards on eBay that he started a subscription service. He started a membership-based group chat where he would text everyone upcoming auctions. He had around 60 people in the group chat, each paying for the subscription service. He would find auctions that were about to close where high-value cards were being sold for significantly below their market value, then he would text the group, a member would claim it first, and Brody would send them the information. He was doing all of this on his bus rides home from school. “It was time consuming,” he says. And he knew the value of his time, so he charged accordingly. “It was my time,” he says. “I obviously wanted to charge for my time.”
Brody started posting cards to his Instagram, where buyers would message him to purchase, send him money via PayPal, and he’d ship the cards out to them. As his followers grew, Brody received a message from someone who wanted to buy the account. “I figured out he was 45 minutes away from a soccer game I had in two weeks,” Brody says, “so after my game, my dad drove me over to his house. I gave him the login and he gave me the cash. It was very smooth.” Was there any sort of legal contract for the sale? Brody gives a look like the question is absurd. “No,” he says. “I mean, I was only 13 years old!”
Brody was obsessed with becoming an entrepreneur. “That sense that you can get an idea any day and turn it into a full-blown business? That’s the fun of it,” he says. “[Entrepreneurship] is something where the next day, you can come up with an idea that’s totally going to change you, and you can build a business around it. You can meet new people through it. That’s the whole fun of it. You can create new things any day.”
For Brody, the draw was often what repelled others—taking risks. Brody does not want to be like most people. “I want to create my own business,” he insists.
***
Brody moved from buying cards off eBay and subscription services and buying sports cards in bulk at events to selling on the platform under the account BlazingPulls on Whatnot. What started as an ambitious idea quickly grew into a platform with 97,600 followers and over 43,000 sales. His basement has transformed into a pseudo warehouse, with stacks of sports cards everywhere. It’s an operation that now has employees and, this past tax season, required doing his taxes with an accountant. He and his mom make daily trips to the post office, mailing sports cards all across the country.
A few months ago, while in Lynne Cattafi’s English class, Brody and his friend Vinnie Ferraro were talking about card selling. Vinnie made a remark about working for Brody. “What do you mean?” asked Ms. Cattafi, baffled. “Why do you work for Brody?” she asked. “Because,” Vinnie responded, “he pays well.”
Upper School English Teacher Tom Keating, who taught Brody for his Freedom Honors class, considers him to be an enterprising individual with a “keen sense of process and promotion.” And, unlike entrepreneurs who started out by themselves, loners in their garage tinkering away, he considers Brody a connector. Having written his letter of recommendation, he praises Brody’s decision to attend the University of Miami, where they have a renowned entrepreneurship program.
Mr. Keating has no doubt Brody is on his way. “He’s got one foot already in the future.”
“I want to be an entrepreneur,” he says firmly. Does knowing the stats on how many startups fail within the first five years give him pause? Does he feel any trepidation not knowing even what business yet he wants to create?
“You’re not supposed to be certain,” he says adamantly. “You can’t call yourself an entrepreneur and be certain about something you’re going to do. I feel like that’s more towards a fixed job position. There’s a name for that. The whole thing about an entrepreneur is they just know they want to start businesses and create new ventures.”
It's the sense of adventure that he appreciates about it all. “Every day is an adventure,” he says. “Every day.”
“That’s the whole fun of it,” he notes. “As an entrepreneur, you don’t need to know what you’re gonna do. You just know that you’re going to do something.”
And he plans to do good with his success, too. Back when they were in London, after visiting the FC Chelsea Museum, Coach Fahey had asked Brody what he planned to do with all those leftover cards. If he found one worth hundreds or even thousands, would he just throw the rest away? “No, of course not, Coach,” he replied. “I’m going to repackage them and donate them to the children on the cancer wing at St. Barnabas.” Called BlazingKids, they were packs of fifteen sports cards that he had been donated to local hospitals for the past six months—always careful to include valuable cards so they are as excited as he was when he got his life-changing One of One card.
***
Indeed, Brody is ready to move on to the next big thing—the new idea, the next trend, the business that hasn’t yet been created—and can hardly wait to see what the future holds. And when it comes to his success in the present, he is not letting it go to his head. “The interesting thing about Brody is all the years he has had different businesses, he actually has never made a purchase,” Mrs. Mandelbaum shares. “I thought with the money he’s made, maybe he would go out and buy a pair of sneakers, or a cool jacket. Something. But the only money he’s spent outside of making purchases for his business is when he took his friends out for dinner.”
On my check.
***
To contact the author: Sara Courtney