[G1911]

I think it safe to assume it is a southern issue. The content of the baseball Red Suns heavily implies as such; and the cards are so tough that they certainly were not issued broadly. They must be a regional, presumably southern though I'm not sure factory location is much evidence of where the packs were actually shipped, sold and smoked.

Perhaps distribution was better than we think it was; it's possible cards were somewhat regional in another way, in that certain sets (some brands had multiple at the same time, like Hassan) or individual cards within a brand were targeted to specific buyer demographics. Perhaps the black fighters were targeted to black retail locations that simply happened to constitute less of the brand's purchaser base and vice versa.

I don't think it was a 'direct' racism of customers throwing out cards of black (if this was so, we would see it in other sets, which we do not seem to. Jack Johnson is even the solitary super print in T218 and I suspect T9 as well), or the companies not wanting to issue them (none of the ATC sets are denigrating in the vernacular in use in that actual time, from T118 to T218 to T220 and so on).

I suppose we will never know. I thought it might just be that they are more popular today; and so do not come to market as much, but it really seems to me that these cards are indeed SP's of some kind. Perhaps, also, it is coincidence and there are other SP's of unpopular fighters that we just haven't noticed because there are so few set collectors of T226.

I've found so little about this set over the years that there is little to be said about it beyond a physical description and images of the cards. My type card is a Mike Sullivan.