TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051589/05158900.062

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 5.5 KB | 107 lines

                                                                                SPORT, Page 78

Assembly Line of Dreams


Ballplayers sell their good names at autograph marts

By Tom Callahan


    What is the market price of admiration? It can't be intimacy
that ballplayers are peddling for $5, $8 and $12 a signature to
children lined up at autograph marts. Almost any weekend of the
year in school halls and shopping malls, casino hotels and
churches, heroes are hired to lure hobbyists to baseball-card shows
where memories are for sale.

    Sometimes for a flat fee, often for a guarantee plus
commission, old and young stars typically stay four hours on a
Saturday and Sunday in an assembly line of dreams. Behind their
tables, the idols scarcely speak or stir. "No time for
personalizing" is the rule of the promoters, who keep the kids
moving along like sad-eyed paratroopers. It's said that quick-draw
artist Pete Rose averages two seconds a $15 scrawl. According to
the Boston Globe, Ted Williams made $100,000 in one weekend.

    Icons as regal as Ernie Banks ($12 an autograph), Willie Mays
($12) and Joe DiMaggio ($30) are involved. "It's the
free-enterprise system," says ex-Oriole pitcher Jim Palmer, who is
capable of modeling underpants on billboards without blushing and
is available to sign anyone's shorts for $10. Mostly they sign
bubble-gum cards and glossy pictures.

    So that's where DiMaggio has gone. Joe looks as cool at 74 as
he used to in center field. But the Yankee Clipper knows the value
of celebrity and the attraction of having the proof in writing. In
the greatest reversal since Serutan, DiMaggio brought a baseball
to a White House dinner last year, when Mikhail Gorbachev was
visiting President Reagan, and acquired their autographs for free.
"Reagan's is very precise," says DiMaggio, who once had to fight
a souvenir collector at his bank to retrieve a check made out by
Joe and endorsed by his then wife Marilyn Monroe. "Gorbachev signed
it the way a doctor writes a prescription. In my whole life, that's
the only time I ever asked anybody to sign a ball."

    Pope John Paul II signed one once after an outdoor Mass in San
Francisco's Candlestick Park. Like Whitey Ford, who writes "Ed
Ford" to conserve energy, the Pope went with "JP II." If he knows
baseball, he might wonder what ever happened to that era of
priceless memories when small boys leaned out over dugout railings
and haunted stadium gates. A number of contemporary players, like
the Dodgers' Orel Hershiser and Don Mattingly of the Yankees,
boycott the cattle calls. "Every kid is looking for a moment or
hoping for a word, but no one ever even glances up," Mattingly
says. "It's depressing." However, many of the modern stars -- Jose
Canseco ($15), Roger Clemens ($9) and Will Clark ($8) among them
-- seem to see the same lobby kids at every hotel, and have come
to look at all children as Fagin's agents in the burgeoning curios
and collectibles racket.

    For old-timers, a slash across a page can be a pensioner's
windfall. "In my day, if you turned down an autograph," Bob Feller
says, "the kids would spray ink all over you." These days he gets
$7. "Why shouldn't I sell my signature? If I'm on the street or at
the ballpark and someone asks for an autograph, no problem. But
with these shows, there's money to be made. That's where I charge."

    Limited editions are in particular demand. Edd Roush, a
.323-lifetime hitter with Cincinnati and the Giants during the
'20s, died last year at 94. His final days were put to use keeping
up with a mail-order frenzy for his trembling signature ($5).

    In sports the autograph is fundamentally a province of
baseball, though all athletes are besieged in some measure.
Football players who are able to write their name often do so. "I
won't sign anything flimsy," says golfer Lee Trevino, who recalls
autographing a $5 bill once for a persistent woman in a restaurant.
" `I'll treasure it forever,' she told me. Of course, I got it back
from the cashier in my change." The only autograph basketball's Tom
Van Arsdale ever solicited was from an Indiana high school kid,
Oscar Robertson, when Van Arsdale was even younger. "He was eating
a hot dog. I'll never forget the way he shoved it in his pocket to
free his hands. Mustard and all." They became teammates in the
pros.

    Certainly not all autograph seekers are innocents. A collector
in England nearly kept sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner from a
starting line last season. "I told him I would give him an
autograph after the race," she said, "but he grabbed hold of me and
wouldn't let go." Reggie Jackson often conducted debates of this
kind with his public, including a beery brawl in Milwaukee that
escalated when a shredded Jackson autograph got sprinkled on his
french fries.

    During Henry Aaron's 1974 stalk of the lifetime home-run record
set by Babe Ruth (who dispensed autographs cheerfully and without
charge but never could fathom their allure), Aaron took the alias
of Diefendorfer in an attempt to throw off his pursuers. He
registered that way in out-of-the-way havens and avoided the
company of his Atlanta Braves teammates. But a small boy with a
ball-point pen still found him in a cavern of the stadium. "Are you
a Brave?" the boy asked. Aaron was charmed. "Sure am, son," he
replied with a great laugh. "May I have your autograph?" "Of
course."

    It would be a better story if he had signed "Henry
Diefendorfer," but the truth is he wrote "Hank Aaron." Too bad.
Diefendorfers are going through the roof.