I agree with much of what Jim says about Ali; his behavior was horrible to Joe Frazier. I have quite a few of his earlier or obscure cards but that is more a reflection of my personal OCD with breadth of collection and history than any regard for him as a person. My personal avatars as a collector are Jim Jeffries, Joe Louis and Benny Leonard, and I will cop to a modern era collection of Lennox Lewis cards and related materials. Probably not worth the paper they're printed on but I did enjoy his career and personality.
I also agree 100% about condition. Who gives a $hit. The key to everything has been [and will be] supply; the number of cards available from many prewar boxing issues remains at a handful or single specimen for a given fighter. Under those circumstances you take whatever you can find. I just added a very rare card to my collection via trade. It is trimmed and has a back paper pull. It is also the only one I have ever seen, so I am not complaining that it is hacked up.
Not sure about the marketing as driving force idea over rarity, though. This is a field in its very early days of organization.
Everything Jones [
Seconds Out], Hanvey [
Boxing Card Digest] and I did/do could crudely be considered marketing, but as encyclopedists it is more about kick-starting the conversation about the boxing card hobby segment
as a whole than pushing individual cards to manipulate demand and pricing, which is how I define marketing. I look at my ideal result to be giving collectors the language and metrics to make for an intelligible conversation about boxing cards. That's more akin to basic organization. If a card is rare, my experience is that collectors will want it without a push
if they know it exists. We are all completists and obsessives to varying degrees simply by being collectors. I've picked up stuff I never imagined collecting simply because I had to have that particular Jeffries item, for example:
That said, there are some collectors who've approached me in the past obviously trying to put a gloss on a particular issue in the hope that I'd bandwagon their views and they could use my 'blessing' to market the issue into prominence and profit from the outcome. Unfortunately, I tend to investigate things. Makes for some really funny exchanges as they try to get me to opine on the value of an item that hasn't sold, which I don't do unless you want to retain me as counsel at my regular hourly rate, in which case I will spew opinions for as long as your retainer holds out. J/K.
Ali is by no means the only investment out there, btw. Self interest precludes my explaining except to state that Johnson, Dempsey, Louis, Sullivan and La Motta are all solid performers, and there are a lot more 'sleeper' items out there but I ain't letting those cats out of their bags until I finish getting mine
. I may be dumb but I'm not stupid. My experience in boxing card 'investment' has been that you don't see 'breakout' performers like T206 misprints or rare backs but with the right rare items you will be able to name your price in the long term. There are also a lot more opportunities for finds and lucky breaks than in baseball card collecting. In baseball cards every jackass with a box of 1990s Donruss thinks he's gonna pay for college with it.
In general, from what I can see the boxing card market bottomed out during the fall of 2010 and has been rebounding slowly but surely since then, and has picked up steam in the last six months. The Dreier liquidation, which is still ongoing w/Legendary but not under their names [that Baguer lot in the last Legendary was theirs] was sold into a down and slowly rebounding market, so many of the same cards as Jeff Hull sold went for a lot less. I also think that the sheer accumulated wealth that was returned to the marketplace tended to depress prices. I know that the volume of material meant that I had to triage the offerings and in many cases just decide to chase after one or two lots per auction so as not to bust my budget. I ended up getting most of the top priority items on my list [some by sheer luck in post-auction trades] but pulled out of bidding on lots of other stuff that I'd have pursued hard under normal circumstances. Some of the other collectors I've talked with had much the same experience: they plunged into one or two lots and had to pass on the rest. As those lots are broken down and resold we will see the real market prices emerge.