Aw Pair

So here’s another handful o’landfill rescued from the storage-room floor.

If you remember the introduction to an earlier installment, I gave my son a box of hundreds of cards to teach him the value of a dollar and the valuelessness of trading cards. Looking at these cards has made me wonder, WHAT SORT OF FATHER AM I? WHAT DID THE BOY EVER DO TO DESERVE THIS?

While I figure out how I’m going to answer those questions before the grand jury, onward.

Making a card of a poster of a picture of a player reminds me of one of those parlor-trick pictures where Barack Obama is sitting in a rocking-chair by a fireplace reading a magazine with a cover showing Barack Obama sitting in a rocking-chair by a fireplace reading a magazine with a cover showing Barack Obama sitting in a rocking-chair by a fireplace reading a magazine with a cover showing Barack Obama sitting in a rocking-chair by a fireplace reading a magazine with a cover showing Barack Obama sitting in a rocking-chair by a fireplace reading a magazine with a cover showing … you get the idea. It’s a flavor of bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping, but I can’t tell whether it’s butterscotch or sarsaparilla.

The twilight of the draft-pick-card era actually produced some really nice cards. The problem was that the players on the cards continued to be steaming dung piles. Consider stonemason Tim Burroughs. According to his 1992 Star Pics card, Burroughs’ strengths were rebounding and scoring (not shooting) within 15 feet. According to his card, his weaknesses were shooting beyond 15 feet. According to pro-basketball-reference.com, Tim Burroughs had an NBA career of null, so maybe 15 feet was being optimistic, like when they say that the Decemberists create cerebral folk-rock when all they do is rewrite America songs with polysyllabic words. Discovering that Burroughs’ nickname was “T-Rock” was icing on the cake.

Designing trading cards has got to get old. I mean, you’ve got a box, and it’s small, and it’s got to hold a picture, a team name, a player name, a brand name, and a position. If it doesn’t contain all those elements in the right amounts suddenly you're the Ayn Rand of trading-card designers. And you need eight different designs for every set. I can totally understand why some of these frustrated artistes throw up their hands and say, “You want a name? Fine; there’s a name. Oh, you want a first name? Tough tinkles. You want a team logo? There. Nice big team logo for you, ya capitalist pig. A product logo? There’s your flippin’ product logo.” I absolutely get it. But you know, every card that uses a massive first name or a huge last name as a design element has looked stupid – even when it halfway makes sense, like it does with this Bruce Armstrong card from the 1992 SkyBox Impact football set. Check out the guns … Arm-strong … get it? Ha ha. I look at cards like this and whisper a prayer of thanks that they peaked too soon for LaRod Stephens-Howling.

Still, making a good-looking trading card is not hard. Even David Lipscomb College, the college with “tiny” permanently grafted in front of its name, could pull it off, for crissakes. The nicest thing about these cards is that they have the player's parents' names on the back, as in "Mr. and Mrs. Morey Joseph." All player cards should have this information. And how often they have meat loaf for supper.

I saw two-thirds of Ben Coleman’s games with the Bucks, and I can tell you for certain that the rock (as opposed to T-Rock) never, ever behaved like that when it was in his hands.

Repeat after me: Nothing good can come of a card showing a hockey player in a tuxedo holding a vase.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I really like the Canadian Football League. Actually, I just plain like Canada. It’s logical and doesn’t make me choose between a candidate named “Mitt” and a candidate named “Barack[1],” and it’s like that for everything except Canadian football, which plays like it sprung fully realized from the cleaved forehead of the Ways and Means Committee.

Canadian football is bizarre in ways that a sixer of Old Vienna can’t begin to explain. For instance, there’s a 50-yard line on either side of midfield. A 110-yard field? Why not make the Canadian yard 40 inches and put 50 of those yards on either side of the field? Also, the field is wider and the end zone is the size of a Walmart Supercenter. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the end zones are open in most CFL stadia -- more opportunities to get the breezes -- but it also means the goalposts are on the goal line. That gives all the kickers Tom Dempsey range, and I suppose justifies the rule where a team gets one point if they miss a field goal, even though teams don’t want those points. They’d rather kick a ball out-of-bounds at the five than get a point for booting a ball out of the end zone.

Twelve men on a side makes sense; you can drink a beer per player with no leftovers. The everyone-in-motion thing also has more internal logic than the current American-football rules. Why not let two guys move at the same time? It’s not like the coaches and talent can’t adjust. And who wouldn’t love to see what Randy Moss could have done with a running start? Three downs instead of four means more kicking, and as you’ve already seen, the CFL loves kicking like Beyonce loves chain mail.

All this nonconformist stuff makes the CFL eminently entertaining but totally Canadian, so there’s no reason to export it to the United States. We’re not talking Crown Royal or the Barenaked Ladies here. However, because it is a sport that remotely resembles football, the CFL is the continual subject of one or another boneheaded export schemes.

There were the American cable-TV broadcasts in the 1970s, noteworthy for the halftime entertainment: Alex Karras roaming the stands talking to women. Then there was the American expansion of the 1990s. It made more sense than the Professional Spring Football League, but only in an abstract sense. The CFL plays better when you know that a williwaw is going to come screaming through the Canadian-Tire-parking-lot-sized end zone at 10:21 of the third quarter and decapitate Ken-Yon Rambo. There were also no toques in Shreveport in August.

The Handful O’Landfill era contained CFL-related boneheadedness, though let it be said that through most of those years a Canadian company called Jogo made CFL cards, and did fine. Nothing that grabbed you by the tonsils, but no football-card-and-candy-cane combos, either.

However, in 1991 L.A. Raiders draftee Raghib “Rocket” Ismail didn’t like the numbers the NFL was throwing his way and signed with the CFL’s Toronto (Countless Screaming) Argonauts[2]. This made sense for Ismail, since he was the least NFL-ready Heisman winner since Gerhard Schwedes. But Ismail was the Lower-48 hook marketers were looking for to open the floodgates and let the CFL crud come screaming down.

The lead screamer was AW (as in "All World") Sports. Hailing from the CFL hotbed of Brea, Calif., AW dropped $87.50 and a side of poutine[3] for a CFL license, quickly signed Ismail to an endorsement deal, and built a set around him.

When I say AW Sports built a set around him, that’s exactly what I mean. The 110-card set contained five cards of Ismail, plus a half-dozen cards of people peripherally associated with Ismail, like Toronto owner Bruce MacNeill and semi-recognizable name Pinball Clemons, in addition to a “Legends” subset that was strictly for south-of-the-border consumption, in that every player pictured (except for Toronto Argonaut and former Notre Damer Tom Clements) made his name with American fans in the National Football League. Otherwise the set was well-balanced if a botch aesthetically; if Amy Winehouse ever designed a CFL football set exclusively for Pamida, this is what they'd look like.

The AW set hit the U.S. market the way the Red River hits Grand Forks in April. Only the devastation was restricted to collectors.

After a Facebook-IPO-like flurry of interest the set plummeted like an Alouette.[4] The market reaffirmed the all-American virtue of projectile-vomiting anything threateningly foreign – like American-made cards of mostly American American-football players who play a few hundred miles north of here.

AW got a second year out of its Ismail deal before riding off into the sunset, too soon for the Las Vegas Outlaws and Shreveport Pirates. And Ismail eventually evolved into a decent if minute NFL wide receiver.

If timing is everything AW Sports had nothing. And if star power is everything, AW had Pete Giftopoulis. The times were brutal that way.

 

On the other hand, I feel eminently reassured and fortunate to be living in a world where someone named "Joey Knuckles" is spinning a wrench at the absolute highest levels of wrench-spinning.

Watch for another handful in a couple of weeks.

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[1] It's not really a name thing. In Wisconsin we have a recall race between a candidate named “Scott Walker” and a candidate named “Tom Barrett,” and they’re a couple of dingleberries.

[2] Don’t you love teams with names derived from They Might Be Giants songs? When the NFL expands and creates the L.A. Blue Canaries in the Window By The Lightswitch, that’s the day I die with a smile on my face.

[3] I don’t understand why central Wisconsin isn’t all over poutine – brown gravy over French fries and cheese curds. The curds are 13 miles down the road, the potatoes five. The gravy we can figure out. I could see poutine crushing it at Riverfront Rendezvous. Especially when you chase it with a funnel cake.

[4] Per Red Smith’s obit of football coach Peahead Walker: “On his first evening in [Montreal] he dined with the football team’s owner and his wife. ‘By the way,’ he asked between the escargots and boeuf fondue bourguingnon, ‘what’s an alouette?’ “A bird, the owner’s wife told him. ‘The most ferocious of birds, king of the skies. It attacks and drives off hawks, shrikes, the eagle, anything that flies.’ It was two years, Peahead confessed later, before he learned the truth. When he did, he thought back to his dressing-room orations when he wanted to stir his warriors to a peak of savage ferocity. ‘Remember,’ he would cry, appealing to their pride, ‘remember – you’re alouettes!’”

Houses of the HOLy

I grabbed another handful of cards that spilled out of a shoebox as I was reaching for a different box. Here are some of the wonders I uncovered.

I am 178 percent for historical accuracy. If a card company chooses to take up a fallen flag and make a retro set, and especially if it’s trying to flat-out copy an old set, it’s taken a blood oath to create not a Dart but a Challenger, an Historic Series Les Paul, a 50th-anniversary KitchenAid, a screw-for-screw duplication of the original. I want to open that case or sink into that upholstery and smell 1958, taste 1967, rub 1964 between my fingers.

Thankfully, the 1954-styled Topps Vintage cards take me there – and in the process they create the most worthless Joe Mauer card ever.

That’s not a bad thing. Oh no no no no.

The card, a takeoff on the so-bad-it’s-good Johnny and Jimmy O’Brien card from the original ’54 set, pairs Joe with his nominally baseball-playing brother Jake, who checks in below Henry Mathewson and Tommie Aaron on the Rotten Baseball Brother scale.[1]

The front’s not exactly the way they did it back in the day, but how many pictures of Jake Mauer in a Twins uniform – heck, any baseball uniform – kneeling side-by-each with his brother could there be?[2]

For forsaking collectiblity in favor of historical accuracy, Topps gets a big ol’ attaboy. And this card gets chucked – fondly – back into the commons bin.

One of this blog’s most popular entries, “Truly Comic,” starts with me asking, “Which property was more screwed up (and over) by trading cards: Disney or Looney Tunes?”

It’s clear from the evidence that of the Big Three properties done dirty by the trading-card biz – Looney Tunes, Disney, and Peanuts – Looney Tunes, via Upper Deck, got the short, filthy end of the stick. All the stars aligned and produced the trading-card version of John Carter[3].

Peanuts suffered from alienation of affection, and having its signature set made by a company called Tuff Stuff Productions. Disney wasn’t abandoned or mismanaged as much as niche-marketed to death.

You know how Disney operates: No matter how old you are, no matter where you live, no matter your socio-economic status or species or party affiliation or feelings about cilantro, Disney has a property for you. In a cup[4].

Little girls get Disney Princesses. Big boys get ESPN. Medium-size boys[5] get The Avengers. Native Americans get Pocahontas and Brother Bear. People of one color get The Princess and the Frog. People of a different color get Mulan. People of a still different color get Aladdin, with a tan Tom Cruise and Robin Williams sputtering gibberish, for the looneys. Navel-gazers get Dancing With The Stars. It’s still unclear to me who gets GCB – people who wished for Hee Haw with cheerleaders, I guess.

Disney (and its cardmaking partner, Impel) took that approach with its trading cards and finally ran afoul of the immutable rules of marketing. Its first set was fine – a general-interest Disney set, Middle America in Mylar, with a few character cards, some activity cards, some screen grabs from really old cartoons, and lots of that mysterious cultural icon, Mickey Mouse. Disney easily had enough material in the can for 20 years of such sets. But it quickly abandoned that approach in favor of a bigger target and the potential for much more money.

Impel followed Disney Collector Cards with a set called Minnie ‘N’ Me. Its purpose and positioning was clear: It was a trading-card set for girls – young girls.

I don’t know if you know this, but girls of any age do not make up a sizable percentage of the card-collecting population, here or abroad, ever. Girls and women have never shown an affinity for trading cards[6].

There are many theories as to why, but it’s simple to me. It usually only takes one 10-minute spin around the floor at any card show for a woman to be disabused of the trading-card habit for life.

Disney and Impel thought they had the power and the property to reverse this behavior. However, they were going up against the immutable power of fat, stinky guys in Keith Hernandez doubleknits scarfing longjohns with sprinkles.

So instead of doubling the size of the potential market for trading cards, with Minnie ‘N’ Me Impel and Disney actually cut the market for their product by somewhere north of 90 percent. And even the Mighty Disney couldn’t bust that dam. Not with Minnie ‘N’ Me.

Minnie ‘N’ Me’s failure takes me down another road. I can think of about a jillion for-girls products, and they almost all tanked – “tanking” meaning not doing nearly as well as a comparable “boy” product. Josie and the Pussycats: animated spies for girls. The Runaways: punk rock for girls. The Bangles: pop-rock for girls. Virginia Slims: Cigarettes for girls. Marvel’s Girl Comics: ‘nuff said. Tomboy Tools: Power tools for girls. Pink LEGOs. Romeo y Julieta cigars. The Pontiac Sunfire. Professional women’s softball. Professional women’s boxing. Professional women’s soccer. The WNBA.

Now think about “women’s” or “girls’” products made for men. I can think of two: GI Joe (in his original incarnation) and Just For Men. They’re fewer in number, but they have staying power. You might not take the Touch of Gray concession over the L’Oreal franchise, but GI Joe spawned action figures, and all the action figures in the world versus Barbie is a fair fight[7].

The fact that marketers (mostly men) keep feeling compelled to make “female” versions of “their” products to appeal to women says something rotten and sexist and unfair about our society. And I feel a little twinge of satisfaction each time one of those products bites the large Bratwurst of Death.

One of my favorite lines is that I was a very successful sports marketer even though all my clients went bankrupt. It’s not my fault, I claim. I never told them putting cards in cans was okay.

In the interest of full disclosure, you should know I was wrong occasionally. Especially when it came to stickers.

I was absolutely, dead-solid convinced that over time stickers would supplant trading cards as a hot, valuable collectible. My logic was okay: Older trading cards derived much of their value from the fact that they were designed not as a collectible but as a commodity, to be used up and disposed of. Stickers are designed to be stuck on something. Once stuck, they lose their value as collectibles. They have the permanence of magnesium exposed to air. They drip production-for-use.

I envisioned a world where sports stickers were stuck on everything from Louis XIV highboys to “Expos Fan Parking Only” signs to Mayim Bialik. What I wasn’t counting on was collectors giving stickers the same open-armed welcome Axl Rose extended to the other members of Guns ‘n’ Roses, and sticker companies like Panini responding by printing 12.69 billion of each sticker.

There’s hope for stickers, but only if the government gets involved and encourages sticker-based vandalism – but positive sticker-based vandalism, with stickers being applied to unobtrusive places, like inside the lids of dumpsters.

I see a spate of public-service announcements with a tagline guaranteed to hang on people’s lips for eons: “Stick it where the sun don’t shine.”

Don’t tell me you didn’t see that coming.

The best that can be said about the Star Company Gregg Jefferies set was that it’s better than the Star Company Sam Horn set. The Horn set represents the nadir of A) relatively good-looking cards of B) a major-league baseball player because it took 13 cards to say what Topps could have said in one, with space left over to show a cartoon fish with a bat in his fins trying to hit a curveball. And because it’s Sam Horn.

You know how far society has come? When basketball cards really took off and the NBA got into the act personally with NBA Hoops, the league issued an edict to cardmakers: If a player has a tattoo you can’t show it. Get rid of it. Airbrush it.

This was not a big deal to Upper Deck, the company that considered card photos merely a muted suggestion of what might be. But in the case of Dennis Rodman, the result was semi-otherworldly. On TV he looked like an escapee from a Tad Browning movie; on cards he looked as clean as a No. 2 pencil in a singlet.

The disparity did not go unnoticed, but the NBA managed to plead ignorance (“It’s just the flash they use – yeah, that’s it”) for several years until the number of NBA limbs bearing Bible verses, gang symbols and ex-wives’ names reached critical mass. And Shaq put the Superman logo on his bicep.

These days, when players have entire encyclopedias inked on their person[8], by the time all the tats were airbrushed from all the photos in all the sets LeBron James would be 58, and looking like Redd Foxx with a wingspan.

The NBA admitting that it has a body-art issue is progress of a sort. I’m just not sure what sort.

I’m still wrestling with the notion that a picture of a truck that hauls a car that is driven by a driver in one direction around a track can be collectible, but a sticker of an actual player actually playing an actual sport can’t. Maybe I’ll figure out why by next time. But don’t bet on it.



[1]Though it does score the Twins 25 points in the Take Care of the Homeboy No. 1 Draft Pick Sweepstakes, placing them 1,893 points ahead of the San Diego Padres. Also, no matter how bad Jake Mauer is, he’s gotta be better than Ozzie Canseco, Pete Rose Jr., and John Henry Williams. Combined. 
[2]Further information on the Mauers was supplied by erstwhile Twin Citian John B. Seals, who points out that “Joe's brother Billy now sells Chevrolets.” To which I reply, “Well, of course he does.”
[3]Or more to the point, Looney Tunes: Back In Action.
[4]Thank you, Wall-E.
[5]Talkin’ mental age here.
[6]And yet they call them the weaker sex.
[7] Until they come out with MMA Barbie.
[8] You want to know the real reason Encyclopedia Brittanica quit printing? It wasn’t because the Internet wrecked their business. It’s because you could read it all on Marquis Daniels.