Hi I'm fessgreg with the gordie howe sgc 96 rookie card. I'm primarily in high grade vintage baseball cards, but BMW convinced me to try hockey. I understand that hockey does not have the following baseball does, but the prices are cheaper and hockey has the vintage tobbaco cards just like baseball. I really like the hockey cards and it seems the people on the vintage hockey card forum are more polite than on the vintage baseball card forum. I know most people here are working on lower grade sets but there is a wealth of info here and I'm a rookie. I have a wife,two kids,and a dog.
You're right about all of the things you said about vintage hockey collectors . However, in the end if you don't have an appreciation of the players and history of hockey, these cards are barely more than two-dimensional cardboard pictures of some dead guys who you might as well have a stock or bond. However, if you do understand the rich history of these players and what the league has gone through, these cards have a history value that rivals (for me, surpasses) baseball. Welcome and I hope that you can both learn and contribute much to the forum.
This message has been edited by hockey_jim on Jan 13, 2007 4:13 PM
Are you interested in a 1951 Parkhurst Rocket Richard rookie? I have a nice one grade KSA 8. It isn't the nicest one known to exist, but it looks very nice.
I need to sell a few cards to pursue my C56 set. Feel free to email me if you are interested.
Greg. First let me say, welcome to the forum. I noticed alot of your posts had to do with money and value of cards. I think you will find that if you base all of your buying decisions on future value, you will lose more transactions than you win. Just like a career, people who enjoy what they do will be more successful. I have found that guys that jump into the hobby strictly looking to make a few bucks from cards usually take a thumping. Just my opinion, Jim.
I noticed Jim F the moderator put out a message concerning my joining the forum and that others complained I was troublesome. The moderator called me misguided. Shame on all of you. I did nothing more or less than what others do on the forum. And that is talk about my hockey cards(unlike others who have dozens I only have 2). I talked about price since it's one of the few things I know a little about(I've been in hockey cards for only 2 months). Others talk about the price of their cards too. Also my cards are high grade and there is not too many of them. So its hard to put a price on them so I thought I would ask people who collect hockey cards a long time and who are experts what they thought of the price.
People should not be jealous of people who have hi end cards,just like people should not look down on people who can only afford PSA 1's(most people on the forum collect GOOD cards,psa 4,5,6's etc).
Jim F says I concentrate only on price,that is not correct. I've been in ancient coins for 12 years and I know what hi end and low end coins go for and there is a lot more ancient coins than hockey cards. Talking price only shows my inexperience.
I don't think its fair if people on this forum eventually gang up on me to ignore or put me down. But if they do I will go away. But I've been in antiquities,baseball cards,copper us coins,gold us coins,and ancient coins during my life and I never had an opportunity to own the finest known(subjective) or most expensive of something until I was offered the Vezina card so I bought it. I love to collect hockey cards and I want to remain on the forum.
Greg. I think you took my comments the wrong way. First of all, no one is jealous, do not make comments like that when you don't know who anyone is here or about thier financial abilities. No one is ganging up on you and I discourage that kind of thing in general and I think people were quite nice to you. Whoever knows me knows that I am a pretty straight forward guy and I'm not shy to be the one to say what everyone is thinking. When you come to a new place and meet new people, do you think it is a good thing to start talking about how much money you have, or make, or spend right away? Whether it's here, a coffee shop, your local bar or wherever, people don't like that in general and you will always be received with skeptism. Get to know people first and then lead to things like that. I think you will find it's a good bunch in here. Jim.
Dear Jim, thanks for the comments. I haven't talked about my salary,size of my home,etc. on this board. People would be suprised at how low my salary is(with 2 kids to raise) and that I live in a 1600 sq. ft. home. I buy quality foods on sale,clip coupons,etc. when I do the family grocery shopping. I like to buy quality items furniture,etc. But I am not a rich man. My wife does not work since she believes in having time in the evening to raise our kids right. The vezina card was bought thru my wife's inheritance and I was able to buy the best of something,which realistically fulfills every collectors dream.
Everyone knew the sgc 9 vezina was for sale for 100k by bmw. I've seen it talked about on previous threads. So I talked about my recent purchase. I'd appreciate your comments on this and this will show I'm not trying to get the last word in here.
Dude, I'll go ahead and say it: What kind of person drops a hundred grand on a hockey card while apparently knowing very little about the vintage hockey card hobby?
I can't speak for everybody here, but some of us at least figure you are either a) full of **** or b) a complete moron whose wife should divorce him for frittering away a chunk of the family fortune on a card that was probably very unlikely to sell at its asking price.
Steve respect your thoughts but I'm not a complete moron. I've made money on other collectibles. I usually hold them for 10 years. The vezina was expensive,but if you buy in auction aren't you spending 16-20% more anyway. I'm not looking at what it's worth now but in the future. I see you have some very good sets on the psa registry. congratulations,maybe you can answer my c55 lalonde vs. taylor thread. How long did it take you to build the sets and do you still have them? I'm on the forum today because I'm home sick from work.
I hope you make a killing on the card, but it just gets a tad tiresome to read "What's it worth?" in virtually every one of your posts. To most of us, these are more than just commodities that we can turn a profit on in some predetermined amount of time. That you seem to be looking for validation at least as much as information also rubs people the wrong way.
As for my stuff on the Registry, the C56's are gone - except for the 2's and 3's that I kept and cracked out - but I still have the '23-24 Patersons. I'm working on another set of C56's now, but am just looking for raw and low-grade stuff that I can crack out without destroying too much "value." To make a long story short, I had grown too disillusioned with PSA, hence the sell-off of most of my C56's and my '53 Parkie set. Mid- and high-grade cards are nice, but at least for me, the premium just isn't worth it in relation to what I might pay for a decent-looking g/vg card.
Steve, sorry to hear your disillusioned about PSA. If its not too much can you share your thoughts with me. I became disillusioned with ancient coins. I sold my collection before I should of even though I had it for 10 years. Ancient coins are a narrow hobby controlled by a few dealers. I dealt with one dealer,the others shuned me because of it. The dealer gave me some good deals however I had too many bad experiences with him. I did business with him on a handshake(which is done in that hobby) but every once in a while he'd screw me on price. For instance he gave me a discount commission(he was the house)and when I got a coin that was a good deal he upped the commission on my bill a few percentage points. These kind of deals happened and I was in the hole 3 to 4 thousand because of it. I like ancient coins and I still bought some lesser silver coins(before I was in gold) but I'm just got feed up with it. So I quit.
Have to agree with you Steve. The what it's worth threads are becoming a little tiresome.
If one had 100k and a 10 yr plan, there are far more lucrative and safer ways to invest than in a single hockey card.
You have to have a passion for this stuff and be able to appreciate the games history.
I can't say there was ever a straw that broke the camel's back in terms of me deciding to stop using PSA and the Registry. It was more the accumulation of a lot of little things that chipped away at my confidence until I just decided to say, To hell with this mode of collecting.
A few of the issues, in no particular order:
- The shoddy quality control when it comes to label information. If PSA's half-assing this fundamental part of the operation, it raises the possibility that they're similarly lax with the grading. I really think we as collectors sacrificed a fair amount of accuracy and consistency by demanding quicker turnarounds and lower prices for grading.
- The often huge difference in price between a card graded X and one graded X+1 not always corresponding to a huge difference in actual condition. This was especially true with my '53 Parkies. I was hoping to get every card in PSA 8 or better, but I reached a point where it just became increasingly absurd to upgrade. I had $35 7's that looked really nice, but would still spend $200 for 8's that were only marginally better = and in a few cases worse - than the cards they were upgrading. That problem, if you want to call it that, is particularly an issue with "investment-grade" cards but I eventually applied that logic across the grading scale and am now fairly content with cards VG and under.
- PSA's refusal to own up to problems. This is more of a vicarious situation for me, but a couple of hobby buddies have had scandalously overgraded cards: a heinous PSA 8 Joliat rookie and a high-grade '36 OPC with an obvious tear through the fold line. In both cases, I believe, Joe Orlando stood by his graders, even though virtually any collector could've told you the cards were not properly graded. In the case of the Joliat, we're talking about a major, high-profile card. Maybe a top #10 hockey card if it were a legitimate 8.
- The crack-and-resubmit game. I could probably count on one hand the number of cards I've resubmitted - if I could remember them, of course - but I've read countless stories of cards being submitted multiple times, sometimes getting rejected for trimming or whatever along the way, until they're in the highest possible holder. I've seen results that make the grading process look almost random at times.
- The commodification of cards. This might have been what really hit me with my first-ever invoice, a batch of '56 Topps baseball Hall of Famers that I collected as a teenager back in the mid- to late-'80s. Once my pride and joy, when they came back from PSA, they just no longer seemed as special. And in fact, I wound up unceremoniously dumping them on eBay during my unpaid semester of student teaching. I could ramble on forever, but my point here is that in my more cynical moments, I felt like I was collecting cert numbers, not cards. I don't bust everything out, but I'm now one of those freaks that likes to sense cardboard instead of plastic.
Don't get me wrong, I still think mid- and high-grade cards are beautiful. They're just not for me anymore. And I still consider buying graded cards online to be generally safer than buying raw, but I don't think the gap is as wide as the third-party authenticators would like us to believe. Nor does it seem as wide as it did when I got back into the hobby about 7 or 8 years ago. I guess I've come to trust my own eye at least as much as the McGraders in Newport Beach.
Hey Steve old buddy I just think you got tooo many plastic slivers in those frail hands from all those slabs. My old chef buddy used to be able to crack four eggs at a time without breaking the yolks. Pretty talented eh!!! Dan
I've definitely sustained some shrapnel and puncture wounds - Beckett slabs are the worst but every now and then there's a stubborn SGC one - but I am proud to say that I've yet to harm a card.
