| | By Darren Rovell
ESPN.com
With rubber gloves on and a mask over his mouth, dust flies in the face of the surgeon. Scraps lie on the operating room floor, while neatly stacked piles of 100-year old leather rest on the table.
The patient is a leg pad that once belonged to Georges Vezina -- a goaltender from the Hall of Fame's inaugural class, the first NHL goaltender to record a shutout and the namesake of the NHL's top goaltender award. The surgeon then affixes a 1½-inch by ¾-inch piece of the leather to a trading card bearing Vezina's likeness.
| |  | | This card, available on Ebay, contains a piece of Michael Jordan's jersey. |
He thinks that he has brought life to the item. But many hockey fans think that a piece of hockey history died a sorry death.
There's a whole lot of hacking going on at sports card companies around the nation. In high security rooms, with cameras panning operating tables, memorabilia surgeons are hastily slicing jerseys, dicing shoes, splicing balls, splintering bats, cutting hats, cracking helmets and chipping pucks. Add these ingredients to any card and voila!, that's what it takes to make a buck in the sports card industry today.
In 1996, Victor Shaffer sought to bring the fans closer to NASCAR drivers by laminating a piece of a race-used tire onto his trading cards. Tires-on-cards eventually lead to pit signs, flags, fire suits and sheet metal on cards. In the process, the founder of the Illinois-based collectible company, Racing Champions, started the fad that is being called by some the savior of the sports card industry.
Heather Maillard, an associate product manager for a division of Racing Champions, said that it gave the collector a true card to search for. "It was rare and this was something that was driver specific that they used in the race," said Maillard. "Not only did it help revitalize the industry, but it still has a profound effect on the market today."
Months after Shaffer's cards appeared, Upper Deck led the charge among major sporting card manufacturers by placing pieces of game-worn football jerseys on cards. Four years later, sports card companies are feverishly looking to secure unique game-used memorabilia, in order to slice it up and place it on cards for its collectors.
But it is the older pieces of sports history, sometimes Hall of Fame worthy, one-of-a-kind items, that is both fueling the industry as well as discrediting it.
"The average customer or collector doesn't necessarily have $50,000-$100,000 to spend on a game-used jersey," said Jim Stefano, director of product development for Fleer. "We provide an avenue for them to get a piece, however small it is, of a game-used item of some of the more marquee players in the history of the game." Odds of receiving a game-used memorabilia card at hobby stores average around one in every 250 packs across the industry.
Fleer, like many other sports card companies, has been trying to keep up with industry leader Upper Deck in the game-used card market. Two years ago, Upper Deck bought a Babe Ruth game-used bat for about $20,000, sliced it up and inserted it into their baseball packs. It sent shockwaves through the industry.
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THE MODERN-DAY MARKET
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"Game-used" memorabilia is relatively easy to get from modern-day players because of the turnover of their equipment.
"Current day players are wearing multiple jerseys and that allows us to provide more opportunity to share with collectors and sports fans than it has been throughout history," said Mike Monson, director of marketing and public relations for Pacific Trading Cards. Monson's company has not gone into the vintage market to date.
"Nowadays, these companies are cutting up jerseys from rookie photo shoots and NFL players supposedly wear two in a game," said Mark Bonavita of Huntington, N.Y., who has more than 300 jersey cards and maintains www.gamejerseycards.com to trade with other collectors. "These guys wear jerseys like we wear underwear."
Players are so aware of the game-used card trend that some have even signed exclusivity agreements, in which their gear can only been featured on the brand with which they've signed. Beginning next season, Vince Carter's game-used memorabilia will only be featured on Fleer, Kevin Garnett only with Upper Deck and Tony Gwynn's pieces are exclusively Pacific.
-- Darren Rovell |
"It is an on-going to mission to add as much snap, crackle, pop as we can, looking for a different angle," said Mary Macera, company spokesperson for Upper Deck. "Nobody had ever done a vintage item. The Ruth bat ... made headlines everywhere."
After Upper Deck cut up a Joe DiMaggio jersey, Fleer countered with a vintage Yankees line, featuring the jerseys of Mickey Mantle and Thurman Munson. The vintage market has spread rapidly across the industry with football cards now regularly featuring jersey snippets of Bart Starr and Terry Bradshaw and hockey cards with jerseys of Gordie Howe and Bobby Orr.
"It's the collectors chance to get what is the ultimate souvenir," said Allen Muir, senior editor of Beckett Hockey Collector. "Unlike a rookie or insert card, a piece of a jersey is not just more tactile, it seems to have a lot more legitimate value than a piece of cardboard."
Smaller companies have used a vintage acquisition to gain big publicity in the market -- companies like In the Game (which manufactures only hockey cards) did with Vezina's pads. Two months ago, company president Brian Price told Muir that he was going to cut up Vezina's pads and feature them in the "Be A Player" memorabilia packs (release date: Wednesday, Aug. 16). While the "Be A Player" cards are approved by the NHL Players Association, an item belonging to a player not currently active doesn't require union approval.
"It's caused a stir," said Price. "It was meant to cause a stir, because we are going to places where no one has gone before."
In April, he bought Vezina's pads, which are thought to be the only pads the goaltender used during his 325 consecutive regular-season appearances with the Montreal Canadiens. With the purchase -- and subsequent slicing -- Price knew he had the biggest thing going since the Ruth bat.
Originally, Price anticipated the preservationists would outnumber those collectors salivating over the prospect of touching a game-used Vezina item. But he now says that he miscalculated.
"The reaction was 5-to-1 in favor of doing it before all of the publicity, and 10 to 1 since it," Price said. "You have collectors who are now very serious about buying, who may have been interested before. It's the first time that we've had a product reordered before it was released."
"There have been a number of people who have asked, 'How can you do this?' And the answer is that for the past 25 years, these pads were in the hands of a collector," said Price, who says that he has gotten at least 40 e-mails in the past couple weeks objecting to the practice. "No one saw them anyway. People are now saying, 'You paid a lot of money for them, now give them to the Hall of Fame.' Well, that's pretty easy to say when it's not your money."
Price reportedly paid five figures for the pads, but refused to quote the actual amount.
Price rationalizes that by cutting up the pads, he will share a piece of history with 320 collectors, assuming a different collector gets each of the Vezina pad pieces in the $2.99 packs.
Price, who obviously has a thing for goalies, has also cut up pads of Hall of Famers Gerry Cheevers and Bernie Parent. In the Game will soon unveil a series with pieces of goaltender Terry Sawchuck's stick and glove and Jacques Plantes' skates as well as many other historical pieces that industry insiders say, along with the Vezina pads, will set a new pricing standard among collectors reselling the items.
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Would you cut up the Mona Lisa or the Magna Carta? There is something that is lost when history is eradicated -- the passing of information from generation to generation. That's what it's like when these things are cut up. ” |
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— Steven Solotist, a game-worn jersey collector |
But as the popularity of vintage on cards has increased, many have lashed out, pleading with the card industry to avoid putting their hero's garb "under the knife." Two months ago, an online petition went up advocating the end to the cutting up of game-worn jerseys by the card industry. To date, it has amassed more than 140 signatures.
"Would you cut up the Mona Lisa or the Magna Carta?," asks Steven Solotist, a game-worn jersey collector and petition signer from Philadelphia. "There is something that is lost when history is eradicated -- the passing of information from generation to generation. That's what it's like when these things are cut up."
"I personally don't find a one-inch square of cloth very exciting," said Derek Whitwer, a commercial lending officer who collects game-worn jerseys and also signed the petition. "I do, however, find the jersey that Orr scored 'the Goal' in, or a Gretzky jersey from his Edmonton years, extremely exciting to view. The destruction of history comes at a price and as we can see from what's left of history, that price has many times been high."
But how do the players feel? Red Berenson, a 16-year NHL veteran who tied the record for the most goals in a game (six against Philadelphia in November of 1968) said that these items are losers when history is subjected to the business side of the 21st century.
"Hopefully the fact that someone can make a lot of money from (a jersey), would never keep it away from the Hall of Fame," said Berenson, current University of Michigan coach whose stick from his historic game is safe in the Hall of Fame. "It should be saved for people that would go through (the Hall of Fame) to see all the great players. But there is no question that the motive behind this is profit. This isn't to make 300 people happy. Those companies are making it tough for kids and some average fans to get a look at anything any more."
Card companies say the practice of cutting up game-used memorabilia is simply good business. Cards with older jerseys can easily fetch $500 on the secondary market. Besides, no company can survive in today's highly competitive sports card industry without the latest gimmick.
"On a professional basis, it's a great piece of publicity generating for Brian Price and Be A Player," said Muir. "The fact that he gets press, that says that he's done something that brought the brand into the public eye. On a personal level I find it abhorrent. As a hockey fan it is very sad day, that a piece of memorabilia from a player of that magnitude -- and perhaps the only existing piece -- is lost to history."
While vintage items get the most attention, some companies, like Fleer, say they draw a line on what to cut and what not to touch. "Our take is that we wouldn't cut anything that would take away from history," said Stefano. "We've passed on the last uniform that Joe DiMaggio played in and Babe Ruth's bat when he gave his final speech."
In the meantime, Price has made a name for his company, and he still is not satisfied. "We are always looking," Price said. "I have people that know that I am looking. Do I have something as dramatic as the Vezina pads at the moment? No. But if I got my hands on it, will I cut it? Yes."
Darren Rovell writes on sports business for ESPN.com. He can be reached at darren.rovell@espn.com
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