[sports-rings]

I wanted to alert the collecting community to two items in the upcoming Heritage Platinum Night live and internet Auction to take place during the National.

I believe there is evidence that I am going to show below that these two rings have been tampered with and the story that goes along with the rings has a few holes in them.

Heritage was told the stories by the consigner, so in a sense, Heritage is not embellishing anything, just repeating the claims of the consigner.

Before I go further, I'd like to make some disclosures.

I consider my relationship at the current moment with Heritage to be in good standing. I won a high-ticket item in their last live sports auction and I have consigned football rings with them in the past (the last item I consigned with them was NY Jets super bowl ring that sold for over 53,000 during a live NY City auction).

I truly hope that Heritage will not ban me from participating as a bidder in future auctions for this post. If I am banned then it would have to be from this post.

I hope that Heritage will modify the two listings to more accurately describe the rings, or pull them since they have been heavily modified from their original state.

I further want to disclose that I was contacted by the consigner of these two rings and invited to buy them from him before he placed them in this auction. I was very excited about the opportunity to purchase these rings as we have done business together over the years.

As soon as he sent me pictures of the rings and I verified the story about these rings, it became obvious that they were modified and that the story does not make sense. I declined to purchase the rings at any price and the seller decided his best course of action was to send them to Heritage for auction.

I contacted Chris Ivy at Heritage and emailed him pictures and my concerns. Chris has been great, returning my emails and letting me know that they are investigating the two rings. I don't understand why the investigation is taking as long as it is and Chris's response on this is that they want to get the changes correctly and that they have time to modify it before the auction.

Chris did indicate in one of the first emails to me that he agreed with me, that the rings looked to have been modified.

It seems like this is taking much too long and I worry someone will buy the ring, not realizing the issues.

I believe these were real rings (probably salesman sample rings) but Mr. Edwards had his name engraved on them.

Mr. Edwards claimed he tried to make the teams but didn't make the roster. He told the consigner of these rings that Ownership really liked him and kept him around on the practice squad. This claim is stated in both Heritage lots.

Please examine the photos below. The "Edwards" rings in the auction are shown on the left. To the right of each ring are examples of real rings.

The "44" on the XIII ring is wrong, and the dots on his helmet are square, not round. The "44" is too big, and there are some issues with the lettering in both rings.

The "DB" looks wrong too on the xiii ring.

Yet, the markings on the super bowl XIII ring are good, but the lettering/engraving is awful. And why is the black paint so much more shiny than it should be?

On the super bowl X ring, His "A" and "W" are not the same as two real rings I have in my database. And don't get me started on the "S"

And, there is absolutely no person named "Don or Donald Edwards who played for the Steelers, and no "Don or Donald Edwards" in college football other than a qb who played years before.

I also researched practice squads from this era and it looks like practice squads were not used during the time Mr. Edwards claimed to be on the squad. You either made the team or you were cut. I believe the practice squad concept started in the 1980's or 1990's when teams reduced players on the team to save salary. It was a way to deal with injuries to active players while keeping team payroll lower.

What do you net54 folks think?