Seemingly enhanced/altered Harry Truman signed baseball featured on haulsofshame.com

[travrosty]

Originally Posted by mighty bombjack

See, my point was that someone would have to select the real and fake autos. So, the contest would be one of who agrees or disagrees with the judge more. Who would the judge be? Who is never wrong?

nobody is never wrong. but the third party judge could pick autos with information about them that the participants don't have, like impeccable provenance, in person autos with the recipients still living, and so forth.

not a perfect system but the chances that one autograph making the difference and being in dispute to taint the whole contest would hopefully be slim.

i know if two guys were involved and asked me to be the judge, i am confident i could find a bunch of autographs i knew were good and bad because i would have a lot of time to pick the autographs and use outside help too. the trick is to find some that are not dead on or dead off because you need some of them a little challenging, but not a trick autograph either that doesnt give clues as to its authenticity. i.e. a real autograph written left handed by a righty who did it as a lark. I would have fun doing the contest with anybody I knew had real experience, because maybe i would lose or win by one or two autographs and nothing to be ashamed of, but i know i could beat psa, because they say they know boxing, but do they really? Mix in a preprint, stamp or secretarial in there too. make it a hard test but fair. Losing to psa would be quite embarrassing I would admit but i'm not too worried, they ain't taking me up on the offer because who is their best boxing guy, steve grad? they are the ones who said they needed help in boxing, i am afraid they still do.

http://www.fighttoys.com/PSAHolyfield.htm

http://www.fighttoys.com/PSAMarciano2.htm

psa used to have a contest at the national to test peoples authentication skill, they called it the psa world series of autograph authentication or whatever, richard bond won the first year and mark theotikos won the second year, and then they stopped doing it. but they had some silly time limit and is that what authentication is all about, rushing somebody?