[CarltonHendricks]

Originally Posted by Big Six

Hey Carlton...is that boxing piece signed by JJ? Says "from your old pal..."

Close in of Jeffries Sig

Mat/Big Six
Yeah funny you should mention that...I had been eyeballing that myself today. Now that I've got it home I was examining it closer with a magnifying glass.

I've gone on line and looked for examples of his sig. As far as I can tell it's kind of a minefield of pluses and negatives trying to tell if it's his. On one hand most of the examples I've seen, providing they're legit, have been signed "Jas J Jeffries" where as with mine it's "James J. Jeffries"...his first name spelled out completely....But from what I've seen the "Jas" sigs were from later in his life...maybe in 1910 he wasn't burned out signing his full name yet...Then there's the shape of all those J's...After a while it got overwhelming and I gave up trying to decide. The one thing that most impressed me was the slash between "July 27" and "1910"...I saw that on one of the examples and it seemed to quirky for an armature faker to remember to add....unless he was copying a real sig verbatim....which seems unlikely...

See what I mean? you get fatigued trying to figure all the possibilities and angles. If you stop and think about it, it's only signed by Jeffries...not Johnson....If someone was going to doll up the photo with fake autographs why just Jeffries?...why not Johnson too? And then there's the question why so small a sig? and why where it's at.. at lower right? why not by where he's standing in the ring?....

I just don't know...all this from someone who isn't an autograph guy....I just bought it because I liked the image and large format....I didn't even notice the personalization when I was buying it....I just dismissed it as part of a bunch of names someone wrote in.

Jack Dempsey and 1931 is also written on it...I'm too exhausted from the Jeffries to even get into that...why it's there and if it's a real Dempsey!