A Collectable Mind

Been a real long time since I’ve written. I guess there just hasn’t been a whole lot in my mind that needed an escape.

Until now, I s’pose 

I have a cousin who is a youth Hockey Coach. He has one son in High School and one in Middle School, both play hockey for school and in the Rec League. My cousin is the head coach for Middle school and one Rec League team. They, like I, are huge hockey fans. My cousin played for Penn State in the late 70’s, and was pretty instrumental in me learning and loving the game. And around here, that’s kinda weird. This is and was baseball town, USA. And save for many years between the Baltimore Colts exit and the Clevelandtimore Brownavens’ entrance, this was and is a football town too. Hockey is like Polo to a lot of locals. Something they just don’t understand and is not played locally as far as they know.  

That should give you a bit of an idea of how “easy” it is to shop for hockey fans in stores around here. T-shirts, hats, hockey gear… All non existent. The few stores that wind up with hockey stuff sell out fast, probably to the bewilderment of most store owners. We hockey fans know that we can go to the pro shop at Ice World or the Mount Pleasant Arena. We know what stores carry gear, and those are the places we go to buy things. If I walk into a memorabilia shop and see no hockey, the place is “blacklisted” in my mind. They don’t have it, no point going back there, right? I’m not the only one either. When Service Merchandise dumped toys, most of us never went back, right?

McFarlane hockey figures rarely sit around, especially when a guy from the “local” team is out there. This year’s series included Alexander Ovechkin, the Washington Capitals’ outstanding rookie from last year. Naturally, both me and my cousin wanted Alex to add to our collection.  And as usual, the emails were exchanged. “Whoever finds him first get one for the other.” 

Enter a father of a girl who plays Field Hockey with my cousin’s daughter. He owns a sports memorabilia shop. They were talking and the guy mentions “I can order McFarlane stuff, I’ll get you a case. We don’t usually stock hockey stuff, but I’ll help you out.” The guy said he’d order them and my cousin could buy them at cost. My cousin was set to buy 6 of them. One Ovechkin for me and one for each of his sons. He had also planned to get me the goalie, and two others which are players I like a lot too. The guy ordered them. Since there were only Ovechkins two per case, he ordered two cases. 

In the mean time, I found two Ovechkins myself. 

I was talking to my cousin last week about the fact that I had found two and he said “Oh, I have a guy ordering some too, so if you want to return one of yours, go ahead.” 

I talked to him again a few nights later. “Hey, did you return that Ovechkin yet?” “No”. “Good, I still need him.” I wrapped mine and added him to the pile. 

He proceeded to tell me that this guy got in his two boxes and of all the dumb luck, three of the four Ovechkins were “variants”. The guy at the shop said that he couldn’t sell them to my cousin for the agreed price because they were variants, and offered to sell them for (get ready) 50 clams. My cousin bought the regular one and politely told the guy no thanks. He didn’t buy the others either.  

And naturally, my cousin was pretty angry. I simply said, almost under my breath, “welcome to my world”. 

Here’s a guy with a Memorabilia shop who couldn’t have cared less about hockey, who did something he normally wouldn’t have done to try and help someone out. But his lack of hockey knowledge didn’t diminish his knowledge of “valuable” items. And he lucks into three of them, and lets his greed take over and stand in the way of his good faith gesture. I guess he just couldn’t help himself. 

When he was helping out an acquaintance, the cardboard box was worth a certain amount. Once opened, the contents were apparently worth so much more. So much so that he had to kick a decent guy looking for a Christmas present for a kid in the mouth. How many times have we heard that story? 

“Can’t sell you this at my typical 35-40% profit, because it’s painted different. I will offer to sell it to you at the low low discount of 250% profit.” 

Maybe it’s “I do not care about this product. It means nothing to me. All I know is that someone out there will pay me more for it because it looks different, so I don’t care what I promised you, I can’t see through the dollar signs.” 

The “collectable” mind. Gotta love it. Know anyone like that? Are YOU like that? 

And what stinks is the Brownavens are pretty good and the Orioles figure to improve as well. With all the fair-weathers around here, the guy’s business is probably booming. When all I would love to see is a twirp like him lose money. 

And think about it. He bought a total of 24 figures he normally wouldn’t have, 6 of which were guaranteed sale immediately. But since he got greedy, he only sold one. Now 23 are going to sit in his shop that most people know does not cater to or care about hockey fans. I told my cousin to wait until they variants go on clearance. It would be hysterical if he wound up buying them for less than 10.99. What actually happened is even funnier. 

How, you ask? Christmas evening, the boys open their packages. One gets Ovechkin in a white jersey, the other gets one in a black jersey. My cousin looks at me. “You got the variant?” 

“No, I got the one in the white Jersey.” 

“That’s the variant, isn’t it?” 

I laughed. Hard. Seems the Shop Owner lacked a bit of follow up. He somehow had arrived at the conclusion that the three white Jersey Ovechkins were the variants and sold my cousin the “plain” one in the black jersey for cost. And yes, to state what is painfully obvious at this point, the Black Jersey is the variant.  

I have been laughing since that moment. This fool who essentially let his greed slap the face of a well meaning friend so he could cut open that Golden Goose and get at the Golden egg inside, lacked the simple ability to do a little research. My guess is that he looked on ebay, and some other bloodthirsty fool had listed a white Jersey Ovechkin as a variant hoping to snare some idiot who can’t follow up. And they caught one. A big one.  

It’s pretty funny to me how the collectable mind completely overrides common sense and decency. If I get four cars in my hands and three are identical and one has some different wheel or something, my logical mind says “the oddball must be the rarer of them”. That is the definition of common sense. I found four. One is different. 75% of them are one way, 25% are another. Therefore the 25% is less common. And if I somehow arrive at the conclusion that the 75% I have is more rare, I continue to research. Find conclusive evidence. 

Maybe that’s because I work in a field that is black and white. I work in zeroes and ones and absolutes. I do a lot of forensic investigation, and in my day the ruling phrase is often “it is what it is”. I would never be so presumptuous to think that three of the four things I have are the rare ones. The law of averages pretty much eliminates that chance. 

I guess I don’t have that collectable mind.  

I also don’t have three ordinary Ovechkins in my shop priced at 50 bucks each. I’m thinking about going to the guys’ shop and being the one to tell him that they aren’t. That would make my day.

-43Goalie

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