Latest Pickups

[G1911]

Stretching the definition of a recent pick-up, but I bought these months ago and had COMC finally ship them not too long ago and finally got around to sorting everything into my collection. When I see old boxing for .50 to $1, I tend to just buy it even if I don't know much of anything about it, that's a fun price to just accumulate old stuff of champions.

[D. Bergin]

LOL, nice Ingemar's.

Thanks to about a 5 year span in Sweden and some of it's neighboring countries, and taking Muhammad Ali and modern rainbow variations out of the mix...Ingemar Johansson probably had more different cards produced of him than any other boxer in the hobby.

Floyd Patterson might be in 2nd place...just because of his affiliation with Johansson.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by D. Bergin

LOL, nice Ingemar's.

Thanks to about a 5 year span in Sweden and some of it's neighboring countries, and taking Muhammad Ali and modern rainbow variations out of the mix...Ingemar Johansson probably had more different cards produced of him than any other boxer in the hobby.

Floyd Patterson might be in 2nd place...just because of his affiliation with Johansson.

After seeing just how many different Ingemar photos there are from just Dutch Gum alone, I am not surprised to learn this lol

[G1911]

And an 1889 N269 card from Lorillard's, with the Ballin & Liebler credit that I got this week. Personally, I think Mr. Pendergast's sweet mustache is more impressive than any won/loss record in the boxing ring.

[Exhibitman]

Yeah, the guys in that era had some serious face furniture. You could do a collection of them. Actually I did...

John C Heenan:



Paddy Ryan:



Joe Goss:



George Godfrey:



The Great John L.



Richard K. Fox:



IMHO Goss wins that contest. I don't even know how you eat with a crumb catcher like that over your mouth.

[G1911]

Now those are some 'staches. It's just not the same these days when our champions don't have extravagant facial hair

[G1911]

Broke my normal pattern to win these three. I don't care about slabs and bust free anything that isn't in my trade bait box, so I usually don't win anything graded over a 3. The silvers are my favorite set, and I'm building a couple sets of it, one as nice as I can get and one as beater as I can get (which is a ton of fun to do and incredibly cheap).

This set was listed last year, I won the James J. Corbett and since then the others have slowly sold. The final ones were put up at auction instead of BIN's, I put in what I thought of as lowball bids on everything, under the previously sold cards by a fair bit. Erne was $103, Carney $126, Choyinski $271. I thought I might get Erne because the card is obviously short.

This set has sequentially serialized PSA slabs (James J. Corbett's is different) and has been the registry set for a long time. I've assumed the cards came from a find of 24 cards (there was no Donovan in this set), presumably from a scrapbook based on some of the backs, but I don't know. Some size variance is normal in T220 silver; I don't fully understand why (because of the large margins on the sheet above and below the cards), but naturally short top/bottom cards tend to be those in the top row, especially Jordan. This Erne, in hand, is very short. Erne is also a top row card (the others are Frayne, Burke, and the James J. Corbett extreme SP rarity) and frequently found short top/bottom, but this is a bit extreme of a variance and it gives me some doubts this collection is unaltered.

I figured I'd throw them into my trade bait bin if I won anything, but I might crack them all out for my set now as I am not confident these are unaltered, it is very difficult to examine them properly without being able to directly handle, and I do not believe 2 of them to be accurate grades. I tend to find most cards graded in this set to be 1-2 grades inflated, they are very very generous on this issue and forgiving of corner damage, slight missing paper at corners, and even tiny corner creases. I would call my set mostly EX/EX-MT now, with a couple VG/EX's the graders would call 5-6 and a VG Donovan. The Choyinski here is the closest to an actual 7 if unaltered. They are still very nice condition and would go well in my main set of silvers.