Posted By:
davidcyclebackIn case anyone, like ESPN, is interested in facts, the following timeline can be verified by searching Net54 and PSA/CU thread and newspaper articles.
1) This card was offered on eBay and there was much discussion about the card. People on both boards, plus others including Bill Mastro, said the card either looked like a fake or was a fake. eBay pulled the card and said it had to be graded before it could be put on eBay again.
2) A later article in the Cincinnati Enquirer first included a picture of the card owners (duly note that there was an earlier Enquirer article). Until this time, the earlier mentioned posters, and presumably eBay, had no knowledge of the owners' race when forming their opinions about the card.
3) In an even later newspaper article, the owners' lawyer was quoted as suggesting that he believed the reason the owners could not find a buyer is because of their race. This was the first time race was publicly brought up as an issue in the problem selling the card.
If ESPN wishes to verify this timeline they are welcome to, as all the information is available online.
Of further note, at the time they were made, I thought one or two of the members' race related posts (granted, made in reaction to the lawyers above mentioned quote) were unfortunate and plain stupid. If you're trying to make a reasoned case of why your side is correct, you don't do bone headed crap like that, even if it is only in jest.
////
As an interesting endnote: PSA does not allow the owner(s) of a card to be present during the authentication and grading process (well documented point of contention for the owners of this card), and PSA does not allow the graders/authenticaors to know who submitted he cards for grading/authentication. What does this mean? The PSA grader/authenticator does not know the race of the owner of the card he is examining. If the owners were to submit the card today to PSA, the grader/authenticator would be examining the card with no knowledge of the race of the owners. No doubt PSA gets many supposed T206 Honus Wagners submitted for examination, so to the PSA graders with no knowledge of submitter identities, this particular card would merely be one of many submitted potential Wagners to be examined and objectively judged as genuine or reprint. In other words, race of owner can be entirely removed as a factor or influence in the expert, reliable examination of this card if the owners want it to be removed. If the owners want the card examined without their race being influence on the final judgment, it's quite simple to do: Submit the card to PSA. If they have something against PSA, then submit it to SGC-- same owner blind examination process.
As the above illustrates, there is no race, sex, creed, sexual preference, political affiliation, religious belief, nationality, level of income or even type of music preference issue involved in the reliable authentication of a trading card, except as someone tries to make it an issue. The examiners of the cards know none of this personal information. I submitted an autograph for examination to PSA/DNA and not once was asked my race or religion. As the submission and payment was done via company name and payment account, they did not even know my sex. I can attest first hand that none of the above listed personal information was known by the PSA/DNA expert when he or she examined and formed judgment about the signature on my baseball.
If these personal qualities were seriously a positive or negative influence on the authentication and grading process, the Republicans would be sending all their cards to PSA (Orange County), the Democrats to SGC (New Joisey) and Cowboy fans to Beckett (Dallas). But those things aren't an influence on authentication, and I know a Republican Dallas Cowboys fan from Texas who sends his cards to SGC, a Boston Democrat who sends cards to PSA and a Green Bay Packers fanatic with Wisconsin return address who sent cards to Beckett (Cowboys versus Packers is a longtime rivalry).
If it was discovered by the hobby that a grading company used customers' personal information like sex, race and political affiliation to calculate grade and level of authenticity, the company would go under faster than the Titanic, the customers would leave it faster than rats leaving a sinking ship, the value of their products and services would fall faster than WAMU's stock. Just one reason the value of their product would fall is that, with all the selling and reselling and trading, when you buy a graded card you often to usually do not know who was the original submitter. The seller currently on eBay or wherever regularly is not the person who submitted the card for grading and often does not know the identity of the submitter. In other words, the grades on the company's labels would be considered by both buyers and sellers to be unreliable to worthless. This also should illustrate that the hobby does not want covert or overt bigotry in grading or authentication. Rather, it wants objective and unbiased grading and authentication, as the buyers usually do not know who submitted the card.