John,
I consider you to be a personal and hobby friend.
To the best of my knowledge the card was purchased slabbed from SGC as a brown old mill.
I appreciate yours and others efforts to bust Chan and to make my dad whole on a clearly bad transaction. I think that drawing parallels to him here is grossly unfair however. What Chan did was fraudulently create a card with the intent to profit from it. What my dad did was buy a card (that was very likely preslabbed), hold it for awhile and re-auction it. IF my dad thought that is was black and he tried to pass the proverbial hot potato, I could accept the bulk of your criticism. BUT If my dad thinks (which he does) that the card is 'browner' that a typical Old Mill and decides that it should be auctioned off as it's labeled...even if it's not light brown - there is nothing unethical about that.
Did he offer the card to REA first and get turned down, Yes. Did he offer it to Bill G. next, Yes. Does he still think that it's visually different from other Old Mills, Yes. Do we recognize that it's not as brown as most other brown old mills -- of course we do. But that fact was never hidden from Bill G, it's not hidden now. Bill G. pointed out the differences that were noted under magnification.
Yes it's true that we are quite experienced T206 collectors and I know that Old Mills are usually 1) trimmed 2) on certain players 3) light brown. But I have seen exceptions ... even beyond this card. For example a card with 3 strikes of Old Mill on it ... with one being light brown. Just because this card doesn't fit a pre-described pattern doesn't mean that it's not different from others.
If I was ashamed that my dad brought a card like this out for auction, I'd probably be silent on the issue ---but I'm not, not then and not now. You can disagree with my dad or with me, and I'll respect that. But if I held a different point of view than you, I wouldn't call into question your integrity - especially if the difference was based purely on how something perceived to look from a scan. Which is the whole point of my post in a nutshell.
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