Whether a puck that flies into the stands during a game, or an auctioned Mickey Mantle signed jersey, sports memorabilia collecting is a fun hobby to have, and depending on the item, can bring forth nostalgic feelings of an event. While some individual collectors have a great deal of memorabilia, the best places to view these one-of-a-kind items is generally the Hall of Fame’s of a given sport. In Canton, Cooperstown or Toronto, one can find rare memorabilia and normally a story to go along with it.
For example, the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto houses Wayne Gretzky’s first pair of skates. To a non-hockey fan, they’re just a pair of old, ratty skates. But to a purist, those skates can be seen as something they can relate to; out of those old, beat up, ratty skates grew the greatest hockey player of all time. That’s part of what sports memorabilia can do. It can help the everyday person feel, through some small way, connected to their favorite hero’s.
Individual collector’s often indulge in a more personal sense of revalry. Seeing a signed Jagr hockey stick at the Hall of Fame is neat. Yet, it’s far more personal when a collector has a memory to go along with it. They might be able to remember the morning that Jagr, yes actually Jaromir Jagr, showed up at practice to get his skates sharpened then stayed and signed sticks and gloves and hats for all the kids on the team! He just laughed and smirked and talked in his broken czech-english and, man, that was a great day! For someone who has a memory like this, the sight of the autographed hockey stick invokes a far deeper connection than seeing it on some silly wall in the Hall.
Values of sports memorabilia can range greatly, depending on a multitude of factors. Rarity of a signature or item, impact of an event in a sport and the condition of the item all play significant roles in valuing memorabilia. A foul ball from a spring training baseball game probably isn’t going to be worth much, but the basketball which Michael Jordan shot, and sunk, to beat the Jazz in the 1998 World Championship would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. If it were signed, it’d be worth even more, since Jordan is notoriously a non-signer.
Because of the high price certain sports memorabilia can command, forgery’s pollute the industry. The safest thing to do when evaluating the integrity of an item is to search the internet or the phone book for reliable certifying companies.