At last, the boxing price surge???

[Exhibitman]

[G1911]

I'd much prefer it be a reflection of a growing interest in the sport and its extensive history and great card sets, but I don't think the evidence supports this, sadly. I guess all the "real collectors" who didn't jump aboard with the 2020 hype train stand to make considerable profits by joining the pump, but a pump it is. Maybe it will crash, maybe the hype will be self-sustaining as it sometimes has been for sports cards (the entire Rookie card concept started as a pump by dealers to artificially inflate values on some cards, but has continued and continued to grow constantly for almost 40 years now). 'If you bull**** long enough, it becomes true'.

As a collector, I hope it crashes. I treat card collecting as beer money, I'm buying valueless pictures of men because I like the hobby, the research and pieces the little details of T card sets together, and collecting. I might sell a couple Johnsons in my dupe trade bait box, but none of my collection.

I would predict (and will probably be proven wrong) that some of the more common material returns to earth at some point (like the aforementioned superprinted T218 Johnson's, the insane prices on 1938 Churchman Johnson's of which there seems to be an EX+ condition copy for every person on the planet), but more difficult items may not. some % of pumpers will jump on board for a longer time, and there are many items with a very low surviving population. I would expect the pop report to explode, most boxing items just don't get graded because there hasn't historically been the "print money" attitude (key reason I focus on boxing) that has taken over the major sports card collecting. The modern guys may return to earth a bit less, as they have a surviving affluent fan base. Johnson is attractive to modern eyes as he was 1) truly great, 2) outspoken and has a fascinating story and 3) that story fits contemporary popular social narratives, but he lacks the living fan base of Ali, Tyson, etc. Baseball worships its history (and thus sustains Cobb, Ruth), boxing generally does not. I would think Ali has the highest chance of sustaining the growth.


I've thought for years that eventually people have to wake up and realize that a plastic slab and slip from a company that grades absurd numbers of altered cards and has been caught in bad business practices and inconsistencies too numerous to enumerate means absolutely nothing, and that the plastic multiplying a cards value 2x, 3x, 1,000x now for some cards is insanity. Thus far I have been wrong for decades. The pump seems to never end. None of this is in any conceivable way rational, which makes it hard to predict how this ends up.


I would say Joe Louis was priced about fairly pre-pump. He was a more valuable card, the guys driving bigger prices all doing so because of personality or modernity. Only Johnson and maybe Dempsey and Sullivan, I think, really outsold Louis, relative to period/population for guys before living collectors memory (his peak was before the memory of almost all surviving collectors). I value boxers more on ability than narratives, so I think of it as more that Ali/Johnson/Tyson are overhyped narratives than that Louis is unfairly forgotten.

[Exhibitman]

I definitely think Tyson is an overhyped figure, and the specific generational placement of the newbies rushing into the hobby, especially for investment in this wave of whatever it is, buys into the narrative because they remember that baddest man on the planet stuff. The card sales would have us think he is second only to Ali, but all the sales in the world doesn't mean he is an ATG. I think he's #3 in his generation behind the guys who beat him, Holyfield and Lewis. The rest of his record are tomato cans, has-beens and never-wases. Granted, he messed up his prime years with jail, but then Ali was exiled for three of his prime years too and Louis lost prime years to WWII, so no excuses there. Also, if Cus D'Amato had lived, maybe the story is different, but he didn't and it isn't. Louis, Johnson, Dempsey, Marciano, Frazier, Ali, they all would have beaten him, prime to prime. I also happen to think both Klitschkos under Emanuel Steward's training would have beaten him--styles were all wrong for that matchup. If I could pick a match I'd most like to see with Tyson it is Ali, just for the trash talking; can you imagine what Ali would have done with Tyson's voice and personal narrative? It would have been priceless.

The interesting thing, from my perspective, about the whole market situation is whether the price hikes will draw out really nasty stuff. It has been years since some of the tougher cards in the field have come to market. Normally, someone has to die or get divorced for it to happen. That's the difference with baseball cards and boxing cards: in boxing the known pop of so many issues or of specific cards in those issues is in single digits that they stand apart from the market. Tyson's RCs are pricey but easy; try an N386 Sullivan. Now, if anyone wants to trade my Tyson RC for an N386 Sullivan, drop me a line.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

I definitely think Tyson is an overhyped figure, and the specific generational placement of the newbies rushing into the hobby, especially for investment in this wave of whatever it is, buys into the narrative because they remember that baddest man on the planet stuff. The card sales would have us think he is second only to Ali, but all the sales in the world doesn't mean he is an ATG. I think he's #3 in his generation behind the guys who beat him, Holyfield and Lewis. The rest of his record are tomato cans, has-beens and never-wases. Granted, he messed up his prime years with jail, but then Ali was exiled for three of his prime years too and Louis lost prime years to WWII, so no excuses there. Also, if Cus D'Amato had lived, maybe the story is different, but he didn't and it isn't. Louis, Johnson, Dempsey, Marciano, Frazier, Ali, they all would have beaten him, prime to prime. I also happen to think both Klitschkos under Emanuel Steward's training would have beaten him--styles were all wrong for that matchup. If I could pick a match I'd most like to see with Tyson it is Ali, just for the trash talking; can you imagine what Ali would have done with Tyson's voice and personal narrative? It would have been priceless.

The interesting thing, from my perspective, about the whole market situation is whether the price hikes will draw out really nasty stuff. It has been years since some of the tougher cards in the field have come to market. Normally, someone has to die or get divorced for it to happen. That's the difference with baseball cards and boxing cards: in boxing the known pop of so many issues or of specific cards in those issues is in single digits that they stand apart from the market. Tyson's RCs are pricey but easy; try an N386 Sullivan. Now, if anyone wants to trade my Tyson RC for an N386 Sullivan, drop me a line.

Great point. The issue of surviving copies is one I've tried to figure out (more T cards than N cards), but have made little progress on. In baseball, most of the big cards are publicly known I think, there are not many Wagners just sitting in a collection and not known to the broader hobby, they are so valuable that very few can really be hidden for long. You can then deduce reasonable guesstimates of the more common T206 cards, for example.

Boxing, I don't think this is true. The cards aren't very valuable historically, even the very rare old material. Very, very few collectors are active online talking about it (maybe 20 of us?), and most aren't selling the good stuff (there's much less incentive to sell an irreplaceable $1,000 card then there is an irreplaceable $1,000,000 one). Even a lot of my stuff is in a "hobby black hole", sourced offline from a collector who also doesn't share and got it from an original find, or I found 'in the wild' and haven't posted, etc. It's only a small number of us, those we talk too and know but are less active, and what appears on eBay/auction houses.

In addition, the lack of attention means, I suspect, that there are probably more 'sitting in a family attic' than there are Wagner's, for example. Most Americans know "old baseball cards might be worth $$$" to bring them out, but I'm not sure this applies to boxing and people have less of an incentive to sell great-grandad's collection of $10 T225-2's than they do T213's.

Makes it not too hard to do relative comparisons, but I've got really nowhere trying to figure out "How many E80 Jack Johnsons might be out there? Are there 10 T220 Silver Corbett's, or 50? Are there 200 Johnny Frayne's, or 2,000?" because I can't really deduce what % of anything is probably "known". We had 0 Donovan's in 2004, several decades into the hobby's existence as an adult thing, like 4 of them now. No clue how many actually still exist.

I hope this price raise brings them out, so far it seems more to have suppressed them than anything. Perhaps when people think this pump is at its pinnacle they will try to sell. They might be decent bargains too, so far the pumps appear to be on fairly common items, not the scarce stuff (I would think because the whole thing relies on having a fairly decent number of transactions and cards one can actually find to 'invest' in). There's a few I've been waiting plenty of years to have a chance at, may take a whole lot longer!

[sthoemke]

1960 Hemmets Journal Boxing Cassius Clay PSA 9's sold for $200,000 and $210,000 about a month ago.

Are those the current record prices for boxing cards?

[maniac_73]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

I definitely think Tyson is an overhyped figure, and the specific generational placement of the newbies rushing into the hobby, especially for investment in this wave of whatever it is, buys into the narrative because they remember that baddest man on the planet stuff. The card sales would have us think he is second only to Ali, but all the sales in the world doesn't mean he is an ATG. I think he's #3 in his generation behind the guys who beat him, Holyfield and Lewis. The rest of his record are tomato cans, has-beens and never-wases. Granted, he messed up his prime years with jail, but then Ali was exiled for three of his prime years too and Louis lost prime years to WWII, so no excuses there. Also, if Cus D'Amato had lived, maybe the story is different, but he didn't and it isn't. Louis, Johnson, Dempsey, Marciano, Frazier, Ali, they all would have beaten him, prime to prime. I also happen to think both Klitschkos under Emanuel Steward's training would have beaten him--styles were all wrong for that matchup. If I could pick a match I'd most like to see with Tyson it is Ali, just for the trash talking; can you imagine what Ali would have done with Tyson's voice and personal narrative? It would have been priceless.

The interesting thing, from my perspective, about the whole market situation is whether the price hikes will draw out really nasty stuff. It has been years since some of the tougher cards in the field have come to market. Normally, someone has to die or get divorced for it to happen. That's the difference with baseball cards and boxing cards: in boxing the known pop of so many issues or of specific cards in those issues is in single digits that they stand apart from the market. Tyson's RCs are pricey but easy; try an N386 Sullivan. Now, if anyone wants to trade my Tyson RC for an N386 Sullivan, drop me a line.

Tyson thrives on the myth and Aura. For guys my age (40), we were old enough to understand and watch boxing but young enough to still see him as this kind of superhero monster. Even though most boxing people including myself know he was overhyped and Lennox/Evander were better, he was still the man and our superhero growing up. Now we collect the guys we grew up with like Hulk Hogan, Tyson, Bo Jackson,Griffey Jr, Michael Jordan etc. Outside Jordan these aren't guys who are all time historical figures but they are to us. If that makes any sense?

[Peter_Spaeth]

Not enough images in this thread.

[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by maniac_73

Tyson thrives on the myth and Aura. For guys my age (40), we were old enough to understand and watch boxing but young enough to still see him as this kind of superhero monster. Even though most boxing people including myself know he was overhyped and Lennox/Evander were better, he was still the man and our superhero growing up. Now we collect the guys we grew up with like Hulk Hogan, Tyson, Bo Jackson,Griffey Jr, Michael Jordan etc. Outside Jordan these aren't guys who are all time historical figures but they are to us. If that makes any sense?

Makes perfect sense to me. We all do it with our childhood heroes. Though in my case (Hank Aaron) he really is an historical figure.

You're right, Peter:

[wicker56]

Due to all the talk about the Johnson 218’s I figured I’d post a few pics. Looks like I’m going to have to try scanning these. Lol..

[Tao_Moko]

I've been collecting both prewar and post war since 1985 and got my first pack of cards in 1978. I kick myself in the ass for not being wise to boxing cards sooner. Prices are rising rapidly. I love the sport and have even competed in many contact sports(boxing, wrestling, jiu jujitsu and mma). However, this card is still wildly under appreciated and not only because its foreign, but because it is not Ruth solo. An amazing card with two of the greatest.