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Originally Posted by Exhibitman
I definitely think Tyson is an overhyped figure, and the specific generational placement of the newbies rushing into the hobby, especially for investment in this wave of whatever it is, buys into the narrative because they remember that baddest man on the planet stuff. The card sales would have us think he is second only to Ali, but all the sales in the world doesn't mean he is an ATG. I think he's #3 in his generation behind the guys who beat him, Holyfield and Lewis. The rest of his record are tomato cans, has-beens and never-wases. Granted, he messed up his prime years with jail, but then Ali was exiled for three of his prime years too and Louis lost prime years to WWII, so no excuses there. Also, if Cus D'Amato had lived, maybe the story is different, but he didn't and it isn't. Louis, Johnson, Dempsey, Marciano, Frazier, Ali, they all would have beaten him, prime to prime. I also happen to think both Klitschkos under Emanuel Steward's training would have beaten him--styles were all wrong for that matchup. If I could pick a match I'd most like to see with Tyson it is Ali, just for the trash talking; can you imagine what Ali would have done with Tyson's voice and personal narrative? It would have been priceless.
The interesting thing, from my perspective, about the whole market situation is whether the price hikes will draw out really nasty stuff. It has been years since some of the tougher cards in the field have come to market. Normally, someone has to die or get divorced for it to happen. That's the difference with baseball cards and boxing cards: in boxing the known pop of so many issues or of specific cards in those issues is in single digits that they stand apart from the market. Tyson's RCs are pricey but easy; try an N386 Sullivan. Now, if anyone wants to trade my Tyson RC for an N386 Sullivan, drop me a line.
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Great point. The issue of surviving copies is one I've tried to figure out (more T cards than N cards), but have made little progress on. In baseball, most of the big cards are publicly known I think, there are not many Wagners just sitting in a collection and not known to the broader hobby, they are so valuable that very few can really be hidden for long. You can then deduce reasonable guesstimates of the more common T206 cards, for example.
Boxing, I don't think this is true. The cards aren't very valuable historically, even the very rare old material. Very, very few collectors are active online talking about it (maybe 20 of us?), and most aren't selling the good stuff (there's much less incentive to sell an irreplaceable $1,000 card then there is an irreplaceable $1,000,000 one). Even a lot of my stuff is in a "hobby black hole", sourced offline from a collector who also doesn't share and got it from an original find, or I found 'in the wild' and haven't posted, etc. It's only a small number of us, those we talk too and know but are less active, and what appears on eBay/auction houses.
In addition, the lack of attention means, I suspect, that there are probably more 'sitting in a family attic' than there are Wagner's, for example. Most Americans know "old baseball cards might be worth $$$" to bring them out, but I'm not sure this applies to boxing and people have less of an incentive to sell great-grandad's collection of $10 T225-2's than they do T213's.
Makes it not too hard to do relative comparisons, but I've got really nowhere trying to figure out "How many E80 Jack Johnsons might be out there? Are there 10 T220 Silver Corbett's, or 50? Are there 200 Johnny Frayne's, or 2,000?" because I can't really deduce what % of anything is probably "known". We had 0 Donovan's in 2004, several decades into the hobby's existence as an adult thing, like 4 of them now. No clue how many actually still exist.
I hope this price raise brings them out, so far it seems more to have suppressed them than anything. Perhaps when people think this pump is at its pinnacle they will try to sell. They might be decent bargains too, so far the pumps appear to be on fairly common items, not the scarce stuff (I would think because the whole thing relies on having a fairly decent number of transactions and cards one can actually find to 'invest' in). There's a few I've been waiting plenty of years to have a chance at, may take a whole lot longer!