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Show them a sign

Nothing turns a grown man into a little child faster than an autographed card or a ball from a sports hero. How else to explain all the hubba-bubba and big bucks in the sports memorabilia game?

It was at 12:45 p.m. on Aug. 6 that Marc Bonham was instantly transformed from a Metro bus driver into a very large little boy.

Buster Dean / Chronicle

It happened just after he had shelled out $150 to catch a single pass thrown by Joe Montana, who was making an appearance at a memorabilia collectors show in Houston. Montana, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback and recent inductee into the Football Hall of Fame, looked trim and relaxed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts as he threw a perfect spiral right at the waiting bus driver.

One thought went through Bonham's mind -- "Please don't drop it. Please don't drop it" -- as the pass sailed through the air. The football struck the stocky 28-year-old in the chest, right where a pair of designer sunglasses dangled from his shirt front.

The shades cracked loudly, but Bonham held on to the pass. And he couldn't stop beaming, even though he knew the fancy glasses were done for.

"I can't believe I caught a pass from Joe!" Bonham said, breathing as hard as if he had just climbed five flights of stairs. "This is great. I think I am the biggest kid here right now."

Hovering nearby were two Houston businessmen -- Jeff Rosenberg and Bobby Mintz -- who make their living organizing this and other collectors shows that bring together fans, dealers of sports memorabilia and celebrity athletes like Montana, Pete Rose, Willie McCovey and Herschel Walker.

"That is what our business is all about, bringing you back to your childhood," said Rosenberg, president of Tri-Star Productions, one of the largest producers of sports memorabilia shows in the nation.

A collectors show is indeed a celebration of youthful obsessions, but these overgrown kids are carrying some princely allowances in their pockets. This is a world where fans will pay $500 for a baseball autographed by Mickey Mantle. Where $1,500 is considered a fair price for an autographed Michael Jordan jersey, and a mint-condition rookie card of Ken Griffey Jr. can fetch as much as $5,000.

Earlier this year, a collector bought a rare 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card for $1.1 million -- plus a 15 percent sales commission.

Even the bus driver had no complaints about the $150 price tag on the Montana pass.

"It was worth every dollar," Bonham said emphatically. "I would have paid $1,000 for this."

Serving fans in pursuit of lost youth, Tri-Star Productions is itself the grown-up business of two young Texans who spent a good portion of their teen-age years trading cards, attending games and stalking athletes for their autographs.

"I was a baseball-card nut. All my allowance was going to trading cards," said Mintz, Rosenberg's partner and the No. 2 guy at Tri-Star. "I started going to these shows as a consumer. I met Jeff at a show in Dallas back in 1983."

Mintz was 14 and growing up in Dallas at the time. Rosenberg was 18 and growing up in Houston.

"I found a contemporary who shared my interest," Mintz said. "We kept in touch by telephone. He would send me baseball cards to get autographed by American League players in Dallas to play the Texas Rangers, and I would send him cards to get autographs of National League players who were playing the Astros in the Astrodome."

The very day Mintz got his driver's license, he headed straight to a hotel in Arlington where the Baltimore Orioles were staying. He waited out in the parking lot in 100-degree heat until he cornered a player and asked for his autograph. It was John Sefero, a backup catcher for the Orioles who is probably not remembered by too many fans besides Mintz.

"Most guys my age were driving to girls' houses. I was driving to the ballpark and to players' hotels," Mintz said. "And I had a great time doing it."

Rosenberg was well on his way to becoming a lawyer -- he'd already been accepted at the South Texas College of Law -- when he decided to take his hobby to a higher level. In 1987 he and two friends decided to organize their own card show at a Ramada Inn on the Southwest Freeway.

Most collectors shows of that era featured old-timers like Hank Aaron and Bob Feller. Rosenberg traveled to a lot of those events to buy and sell cards, and he figured he could carve out a niche for himself by recruiting current players and appealing to younger fans who did not grow up watching Hammerin' Hank or Feller's fearsome fastball.

The three friends called themselves Tri-Star and somehow convinced an up-and-coming slugger named Mark McGwire to appear at their Houston show.

"We didn't know what to expect. Would anybody really come to a show we produced?" Rosenberg said. "When we picked up Mark McGwire at the airport and went to check him into the hotel the night before the show, it was like a rock concert. There were all these kids camped out to get into the show the next day."

The show was a big hit, and still the young promoters did not realize exactly how lucky they had been. They had no way of knowing that McGwire would go on to become one of the brightest lights in baseball and a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame.

"After the show McGwire told us, `Gentlemen, I won't be doing this again. I am going to be a big star, and I won't need to sign autographs for money,' " Rosenberg said. "We weren't smart enough to listen to him. We sold almost everything we got that day. I only hung on to a few autographed McGwire baseballs."

McGwire made good on his promise. As a result, a genuine autographed McGwire baseball -- if you can find one -- is now rare enough to be worth something in the ballpark of $500 to $1,000 each.

With one grand slam under their belt, Rosenberg and partner Eddie Suchart kept on. The other partner, Gerald Gibbs, already had a full-time job and decided he didn't need the headaches of a time-consuming hobby with an uncertain future. Suchart eventually left the company to start his own collectibles store in Houston, Celebrity Sports, which he still runs.

Rosenberg got his degree at South Texas but never practiced law. He focused on his little business, Tri-Star, and began organizing several shows a year. He hired a local advertising heavyweight, Adie Marks, founder of Gulf State Advertising, to do his marketing. He hired another marketing expert who had hawked the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to help hype Tri-Star's shows.

Tri-Star recruited the Harlem Globetrotters, Sandy Koufax, Ted Williams and Morgana the Kissing Bandit to appear at its shows. As luck would have it, the company hit the sports collectible market just as it was cruising to its all-time peak in the early 1990s. Attendance at the shows soared, and memorabilia prices were going through the roof.

"In the early 1990s you could find a card show almost every weekend in this town," Rosenberg said.

It was an easy time to make easy money, with the hobby going through an unprecedented boom. But the boom was carrying with it the seeds of its own undoing. Collecting turned from being dominated by collectors who were out to indulge an interest and have some fun to being overrun by investors whose real aim was to make a buck.

"People were buying cases of trading cards like they were stocks," Rosenberg said.

They bought up everything in sight, inflating prices and creating the illusion that owning sports memorabilia was a shortcut to wealth.

ou should never `invest' in a collectible like this," said Tom Sharon, co-owner of a Hockley-based business called Smoking Pistols. His business buys and sells real baseball uniforms used during games. It gets its name from the Smoking Pistol that once adorned the front of the Houston Colt 45s jerseys.

"If you are going to invest, invest in the stock market. This is too volatile," Sharon said. "Those collectors drove up the prices and drove a lot of the collectors out of the game. They didn't have enough money to compete."

That left only the investors to bid against themselves, and the bottom fell out of the memorabilia market.

"Prices fell dramatically," Sharon said. "In 1991 a Stan Musial game-used jersey was worth $25,000 to $30,000. By 1996 it was worth $10,000."

Another damaging factor was the baseball strike of 1994, which poisoned the relationship between fans and the game. While baseball is only one of the major sports that attracts memorabilia collectors, it definitely has the strongest hold on the hobby and the imagination of its aficionados.

"Baseball is King Cotton out here," Carl Gerjes, owner of a trading-card business called T&C Investments, said while manning his booth at a recent collectors show in Houston. "Everyone plays baseball growing up, but not everyone plays football. It's just American. Have you ever seen a shop with a sign out front that says, `Football Cards'? No. It says, `Baseball Cards.' "

It is baseball memorabilia that attracts the most attention and the biggest dollars. The million-dollar Wagner card is the most valuable trading card of any kind.

After McGwire set a record by swatting 70 homers in a single season, jaws dropped when comic-book magnate Todd McFarlane paid $3 million for the 70th home run ball.

"I am a sports fan, and this is a way to live out childhood fantasies," the 39-year-old creator of Spawn comics said from his office in Phoenix. "I remember Roger Maris hitting 61 homers and thinking at the time, `Wouldn't it be cool to catch that ball!' We didn't think of it as a money thing. It is a piece of history that you can share with people."

McFarlane considers himself a "collector" rather than an "investor." When the Los Angeles Dodgers called him to ask how much it would cost to display his collection of McGwire homers -- he has the balls from homers No. 1, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69 and 70 -- he told them there would be no charge.

"I asked them to let me take batting practice in Dodger Stadium, and they said, 'Cool!' " McFarlane said.

It was the home run race between McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998 that restored much of the popularity baseball enjoyed before the strike of '94. Likewise, the collectibles industry is gathering strength again.

That Musial jersey that would have sold for $30,000 in 1991 and then $10,000 in 1996 would now fetch something on the order of $15,000. QVC and other home-shopping television channels hawk sports collectibles with a fury. Online auctions have created another outlet for the hobby, generating more interest and creating a ready market for those wanting to buy and sell memorabilia.

Some changes within the collectibles industry have helped create more of a buzz around the hobby. Perhaps the most significant is a new grading system for hotly sought-after cards. There are companies that have experts who examine cards and, on a scale of 1 to 10, grade the condition on their printing, sharp cutting of the edges and their preservation.

"It used to be people just looked at cards and said it looks fair or it looks mint. Now there are people who actually use specific standards to determine the grade," Rosenberg said.

The standards are exacting, to be sure. Most cards are not a 10 even as they emerge from the pack.

"Back in 1991 and 1992 there weren't many graded cards. Now it's 20 percent of my business," memorabilia merchant Gerjes said. "Another new thing is cutting up a player's jersey and putting a scrap of material in with the trading cards. They are extremely popular, and without the jersey the card wouldn't be worth hardly anything."

Through the hobby's slump and recovery, Tri-Star kept growing, slowly but surely. It had the advantage of being small and scrappy. When Mintz joined the company in 1992, he was one of only four people working for Tri-Star.

A lot of the competition vanished during the dark days, giving Tri-Star the opportunity to grab more of the market when things got better.

"In the go-go days, some people made a lot of money by not working very hard. All of a sudden you had to work hard to make any money," Rosenberg said. "It's probably better for us as a business this way."

These days Tri-Star employs 30 people and produces about 14 shows a year. Rosenberg and Mintz also host a biweekly radio show about sports collectibles on KTRH-AM.

One thing that hasn't changed from sports memorabilia's halcyon days is the crucial importance of booking top-name athletes to appear at the shows and get fans streaming through the doors. With 13 years under its belt and a reputation for square dealing, Tri-Star is able to book some of the best in the business.

"I do this because I have a good relationship with Bobby Mintz and Tri-Star," Hall of Fame first baseman McCovey said after signing autographs at a Tri-Star event. "He is a nice guy. There are a lot of people in this business who are not nice. In every business there are nice people and there are crooks, and this is a big business."

People in the memorabilia industry admit there is plenty of fraud out there, but they insist it is a very small part of what is overall an honest business.

Forged autographs are the biggest problem. Fans should be wary of buying what appears to be a golf ball autographed by Tiger Woods, because Woods autographs very few balls. Likewise, McGwire signs very few autographs anymore, and when he does, he prefers to do so with a felt-tip pen -- acceptable to the casual fan but typically scorned by serious collectors.

Some signatures allegedly belonging to Joe DiMaggio are under a cloud of suspicion, too. According to legend, the Yankee Clipper hired his sister to sign many of the requests for autographs that he received by mail.

To stem the tide of fraud and boost the legitimate majority, companies that specialize in authenticating memorabilia are growing in demand. These authenticators hire handwriting experts to analyze collectibles and verify their authenticity. According to Rosenberg, OnlineAuthentics rejects as fakes about 85 percent of the McGwire autographs it inspects.

Of course, if you want to make sure it's the real thing, there is nothing more reliable than standing in line and getting the signature yourself.

"When I was a kid, it was very hard to get to the players, because they didn't have shows like this," said Celso Suarez, a 43-year-old baseball fan, as he waited for McCovey to sign a book already containing the signatures of baseball legends such as Juan Marichal and Bob Gibson. "I am never going to sell this stuff. I am a kid at heart. I want to meet the players, shake their hands and tell them that I loved seeing them play."

At the recent show in Houston, hundreds of fans waited in line to pay $45 for Rose to autograph photos and baseballs. Fans paid even more if they asked Rose to sign a specialty item like a bat or a helmet.

Lori Maddox paid a premium price -- $250 -- for Montana to sign a 5-foot-tall oil painting of the quarterback that she had lugged down to the George R. Brown Convention Center.

"Joe looked amazed when he looked up and saw this huge painting," Maddox said.

A longtime fan of Montana's, she bought the painting in San Francisco three years ago. It is one of two Montana paintings in her Houston home. She said her husband, her children and her friends were not the slightest bit surprised to find out that she intended to drag the painting downtown for Montana to sign.

"They know I'd go to the ends of the earth to meet him," she said.

That kind of adulation is not easy for every athlete to bear graciously. Some seem uncomfortable surrounded by the crush of fans. Little eye contact and a muttered "thanks" are as interactive as they get.

Smiling, posing for photos and asking little kids about their favorite Pokémon character, Montana is an athlete who is obviously at ease with a crowd.

Growing up in Pennsylvania, Montana didn't squirrel away bubble-gum cards or collect autographs. The whole idea of living vicariously through memorabilia was foreign to him -- until his kids started collecting on their own.

"They are real big into wrestling and Pokémon," Montana said as he signed stacks of red No. 16 jerseys that would later be auctioned off via eBay and home-shopping channels, "so whenever wrestlers are around at these shows, I grab some stuff for them to sign. My kids love it, so I understand this better now."

Rose, a pariah to official baseballdom, eats up the fans' approval with a spoon.

Despite being banned from the Hall of Fame because of allegations he bet on baseball, Rose is a fan favorite at these shows, and he clearly glories in it. When he signs autographs in Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, his tent outdraws all the others, even those featuring legends such as Willie Mays.

"I do this to make money and to meet the fans," Rose said after a marathon autograph session. "The fans are smart. They know I made some mistakes, and they are willing to let me go on with my life."

For a young player like Lance Berkman, only a year out of the minor leagues, the attention can be overwhelming.

"I am just an ordinary guy. Just because I play baseball good doesn't make me different from anyone else," the Astros outfielder said. "People tend to elevate you because of your athletic ability. It's weird for me."

But Berkman likes doing it, and the money he makes for an hour of work is not too shabby, even if it's a pittance compared with what the big boys make.

"It's a blast to interact with the fans," said Berkman, who made about $1,000 for an hour of work. "I really enjoy it."

By the time Berkman is an old-timer and making the rounds at these shows, the landscape of sports collectibles probably will have shifted. It seems clear the Internet will become a bigger and bigger player, and shows will become a smaller factor in the economy of the sports-collectibles business. Some small vendors, such as Smoking Pistols, are planning to stop manning booths at all but a few shows because business is not enough to cover costs.

"The money you make doesn't justify the travel expenses," Sharon said. "We do a lot of our sales on eBay now. EBay has hit the shows hard, but it's been good for the hobby, too, because it generates a lot of interest."

In some ways the shows already exist as feeders for the online auctions and home-shopping channels. The thousands of jerseys, caps and helmets that Montana and Rose signed backstage at the convention center will fetch handsome prices after Tri-Star ships them off to memorabilia merchants doing business through retail stores, online auctions and home-shopping channels.

Three out of four dollars earned by Tri-Star comes from sales done outside the shows, and that portion will likely grow even larger as the business of sports memorabilia evolves in the 21st century.

"People will always be interested in sports," Rosenberg said. "And entrepreneurs will always be trying to figure out what they want to collect."

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