Sign This…
Today I hate on the autograph biz...but not how you think
I am 110% in the camp of athletes and celebrities being compensated for their time and effort. Showing up and signing and meeting and greeting the fans is a job just like any other, a parasocial relationship where each side gets a reward from the other. You decide to take it on for pay and you do it with professionalism. That is all I can expect: no more and no less. Show up, sign, smile and be polite. In short, I respect and expect that a celebrity will be compensated for performing a professional task in a professional manner and will respect my time and effort to support him. When I had the chance to discuss pay for play signing with Eddie Murray several years ago (I wrote a column on it last year before the National) on a flight we shared from Chicago to L.A., he certainly approached signing at the National as a professional endeavor and I respected that, didn’t even ask him to sign something for me on the plane or take a selfie.
Now when a celebrity is courteous enough to sign for free, I am pleased as punch to be the recipient, but I never expect it or demand it. I stopped giving free legal consultations when I realized that my time was my stock in trade, so I certainly do not expect these guys to do me a service for free, especially when it has value for me. Not even TTM. I got some great stuff signed by AJ Foyt and Darrell Waltrip through the mail and when Foyt and Waltrip decided to stop signing, that was entirely their prerogative and I was fine with that, just pleased to get what I did get.
I even can understand, though maybe not like, when an athlete has variable charges for signing different things. It doesn’t take longer for Reggie Jackson to sign his 1969 Topps card than to sign his 1970 Topps card, but I get that a signed rookie card’s value can increase so massively that charging more is understandable in the same way that a PSA upcharge functions. They suck and it sucks that Reggie wants $421 to sign my rookie card (and I am not going to do it), but at least I have the choice.
What chaps my ass is when an athlete being paid a fortune to sign his name behaves like a “no green M & Ms backstage, spray my scent before I come in the room so I don’t have to smell other peoples’ man-stink” self-important, arrogant, obnoxious diva jerkwad J-Lo wannabe. In this case, it means refusing to sign broad categories of things that are the most basic forms of memorabilia most fans might own. Take Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield. These two ex-heavyweight champions are scheduled to sign at the National this summer. Great, I have items I’d like signed by each. One small hitch:
Evander Holyfield: “No trading cards, event tickets, Type 1 photos, or belts.”
Mike Tyson: “No trading cards, event tickets, or Type 1 photos.”
Whaaatttt? These guys want hundreds of dollars for a signature and won’t even sign cards, tickets and original photos from their careers, not even as premiums, just no and fuck off. What does that even leave, some stupid 8 x 10 Tri-Star printed up last week that has zero connection to the events that make us want to get an autograph in the first place? Hard pass.
This nonsense has gone too far. We are being manipulated, people. They restrict signings of things like tickets and cards not because there is some inherent badness in signing tickets and cards but because they are trying to create scarcity in those items. If you want a signed ticket or card, I guess you are going to have to deal with their designated marketers only and it isn’t going to be cheap. Take a look at the insane prices for signed Tom Brady crap on Fanatics under his exclusive deal and tell me how collectors aren’t being fucked by manipulated scarcity.
Well not me, no way.
Bluto: “Not me! I’m not gonna take this. Wormer, he’s a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Niedermeyer...”
Otter: “Dead! Bluto’s right. Psychotic... but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional weapons, but that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part!”
Bluto: “We’re just the guys to do it.”
We are the guys to do it! I think it is time that we fans push back against any athlete or celebrity who abuses us unless and until they and their management show us the same respect we show them. I am not going to get a damn thing signed at the National this year and I urge you to do the same…and to email the people at Tri-Star and let them know that you won’t be there this year at their autograph pavilion and more importantly why you are boycotting all of the signings. If enough consumers refuse to be their dancing monkeys, maybe we get a better experience in the future. Couldn’t hurt to try.
Our eBay Jackass of the Week is…eBay. Is it just me or has eBay’s back office slipped badly over the last year? eBay’s administrative functions used to flow smooth as baby shit, but it now has all manner of dead ends, endless loops, and useless buttons to click and get error messages.
I got another item caught in the eBay DEI machinery again, another trade card with ethnic images. Setting aside the merit of trying to erase our history because maybe it might make some people feel ‘icky’, the mechanism that eBay has in place to deal with these listings is broken. I get the notice and have the option to appeal or end the listing. I won’t waste my time on an appeal; there are myriad Facebook groups that do not engage in that sort of Orwellian history erasure, and I will sell those items there instead for free.
I click on the link to end the listing. My total capitulation to the eBay Nomad bot’s effort to sterilize all of my imperfect listings should resolve the matter, right? Yeah, it should…but the dashboard keeps saying that I have an issue to resolve, so I try again. I follow the link to resolve it by ending the listing, and it says: “End listing failed. Please try again later.” This goes on for months; the Ali card that was rejected a few months ago still shows up as needing resolution on that dashboard and gives me the same error message when I click even though the listing is dead and gone. Since the “Thoughtcrime” sign no longer shows up on my main dashboard as a glaring red notice, apparently the imperfect listing has been sterilized, just not according to the page that actually shows the status of the ‘bad’ items.
That’s a jackass in my book 24/7/365.