Cleaning up the "Hobby"

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Posted By: warshawlaw

No one would debate that position seriously. But it is nothing compared to the memorabilia potentials for fraud. Memorabilia is nothing more than someone's word for it, unless you have a situation where, say, Bobby Feller wrote on the bat that it was the one Babe Ruth used to make his farewell, or where the little boy's family consigns the gift ball directly to the auctioneer. Otherwise, the provenance (def: the background information of an object of art) of these items is often very mysterious if not impossible to establish because unlike a painting, they were not considered more than curios until relatively recently. This means that the process of handling these items is the "X File" method ("I want to believe"): someone supposedly in the know makes up a story to go with the item. There is no objective ability to check the story. It is a battle of hired "experts" (we lawyers call this a "whore fight" BTW).

I'll give you a great example of how come I never buy memorabilia and rarely buy autographs: I purchased a very rare Jim Thorpe card at the National (some of you might have seen it on the National coverage cover of SCD, or at the show while I was walking around with an especially stupid grin ). I'd never held any example of that card before, but I have several others from the same rare set of cowboy exhibits and have studied their characteristics very carefully. I looked at the Thorpe and could tell it had the same characteristics as the other cards in the series INDEPENDENT of having to believe any story as to its origins or any wonk giving a testimonial about it. Now, authenticating the autograph on my Lennox Lewis autographed 1991 boxing card is a situation where anyone looking at it would have to believe my story rather than judge with their own eyes. I went to a pre-fight workout promoting the Lewis-Klitschko fight and managed to catch the champ on the run with the card, which he signed with his wraps on (they are the bandages that go on the fighter's hands under the gloves) while walking to the podium to speak to the press. Consequently, the signature is a scrawl but I got it myself so I know it is real. Would some buyer ever be able to independently determine whether I'd really gotten it signed? Nope. Maybe he could hire a whore to say it is real and slab it, but he could never prove it is a real sig based solely on an examination of the item itself. Anyone could scrawl it and say they'd gotten the sig.

All I am saying in my typical long-winded way is that memorabilia often rests on non-objective beliefs as to the nature of an item that often cannot be independently determined from examination of the item itself. For that reason, I stay away from memorabilia except in very limited circumstances.