Derek Jeter And The Perversey Jersey

Ah, the remembrance of things past that I can’t show you, not that I would want to.

For instance, one semi-prospective client wanted us to promote their book, Arnold Palmer and the Golfin’ Dolphin. It was a legitimate book in that it had covers and pages and an assortment of nice words and illustrations after a fashion, and it ostensibly had Arnold Palmer’s permission, because him suing them was not the reason they went out of business. No, the reason they went out of business was that as a work of existentialist children’s fiction involving the world’s most highly evolved mammal and a golf legend, it stunk. It was the Watch The Throne of dolphin-golfer children’s-fiction mashups, and still it blew huge literature chunks.

As a sometime children’s author and songwriter, I understand the seductiveness of the golfin’/dolphin rhyme. It took the influence of an Indian holy man to keep Lennon and McCartney from going completely golfin’/dolphin crazy. One can only imagine the different path “Let It Be” would have trod had the two lads not restrained themselves. (Fortunately, I have no such restraint issues: “When I find myself in trouble golfin’/Arnold Palmer comes to me/He says, ‘Ignore the dolphin/It’s a par-three.’”)

I can’t show you the book, because my partner Dean and I found it in the course of cleaning out our offices, dropped it on the doorstep of the nearest elementary school, rang the doorbell, and ran. So I’m guessing it’s somewhere in the greater New London school system, where it’s probably celebrated as art.

Let us move from Arnold Palmer and the Golfin’ Dolphin to the leather mini-replica-jersey equivalent of Arnold Palmer and the Golfin’ Dolphin. I thought I knew everything that went down during the Handful O’Landfill era, card-wise; I even knew of the Classic Winnebagos set, though I pretended not to, and in fact went into the kitchen for a drink every time they entered the room. I especially thought I knew everything that a major manufacturer had ever thought of, including NBA Hoops folders and Donruss Red Zone football, the John Carter[1] of football CCGs. But I had never, ever heard of Topps Jersey Topps until I saw the press release.

You know you’re in for a spin in the dunk tank when you see the name: Topps Jersey Topps. It’s a palindrome. No, no, not a palindrome. It’s that thing where it sounds the same backwards and forwards. A pun – that’s it! A pun. No, it’s not a pun.

See what Topps Jersey Topps did? It made me screw up the Dead Parrot Sketch.

No other manufacturer felt compelled to work its name into a product this way. There was no SkyBox Basketball SkyBox set, no Pro Set Football Pro Set, no Fleer Baseball Fleer, though Fleer Flair came a little too close for comfort. Only Topps felt the second Topps was necessary, though pretty much by definition a jersey is, you know, a top.

As alluded to earlier, Topps Jersey Topps (I can’t get used to the name; it reminds me too much of Canadian postage stamps) is a set of miniature leather replica jerseys.

That word combination seems random, so let’s break it down.

The jerseys are miniature because you can’t J-hook a Mark McGwire uni in the notions aisle of a Kum ‘n’ Go.

They’re replicas (I’m saving the leather for later) because the MSRP on even a Sammy Sosa game-worn is liable to be out of the financial reach of the Kum ‘n’ Go night manager who is the demographic target of this particular set.

They’re jerseys because stirrup socks aren’t sexy enough, at least not on Cal Ripken Jr.

And they’re leather because … because. Because cloth is too downscale. Because Topps confused a set of baseball cards with a Bentley Flying Spur.

Well, let’s go to the press release. Maybe it has some guidance.

Here we are: “Each Jersey is designed to simulate the feel of cloth and crafted from genuine flexible leather, rather than a hard, molded plastic.”

That’s it. Make the jerseys out of leather to simulate cloth because it’s easier to make leather feel like cloth as opposed to plastic.

While this happens to be true, it’s also meaningless. Of course leather is a more cloth-like material than plastic. It’s also a more cloth-like material than lead or molybdenum. And let’s deal with the elephant in the room right now: the most cloth-like material of all is cloth.

Later in the press release we find, “Each one is also painted to scaled specifications of the original, authentic jersey and includes all team logos and player names.”

Again we say: that’s it. Paint the leather jersey instead of screen-printing a cloth one – or better yet, making it out of wool and shrinking it like a Tom and Jerry zoot suit.

As for the raison d’etre of this particular product, Topps must have suspected there would be questions, because it came prepared with an answer: “Fans and collectors now have the perfect item to attain autographs.”

Not even dealing with the fact that it’s way easier to obtain an autograph than attain one, if I were an official league baseball or an 8x10 glossy, I would be royally pissed right now. In fact, I’d be hiring a game-used home plate to ram Topps Jersey Topps’ teeth down its palindromic throat.

The best thing about Topps Jersey Topps is not the price, though we all can agree that $9.99 is a small price to pay for painted leather meant to feel like cloth, the perfect item to attain autographs. Nope, the best thing about Topps Jersey Topps is there are only six of them in the set (I can’t believe you want to know this, but anyway: McGwire, Sosa, Ripken, Chipper Jones, Ken Griffey Jr., and Derek Jeter).

While I’m sure there are other HOL-era collectibles from the major manufacturers that I’ve missed, I don’t know whether anything else will offer the combination of ham-handed concept and bone-headed execution to match Topps Jersey Topps.

Though I’m guessing the golfin’ dolphin folks would be up to the challenge.

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[1] Or Ishtar or The Postman or Waterworld or Heaven’s Gate or the last decade-and-a-half of Adam Sandler movies.

Seashells and EMTs

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the road to seashells and balloons in the NFL does not involve being a defensive lineman and the No. 1 overall pick.

The first name that springs to mind faster than he ever sprang in real life is Walt Patulski. Walt Patulski; even the name evokes onion farming in the mud flats of central New Jersey. But what can you say? The guy was a Notre Damer, and Notre Dame defensive linemen are famous for translating their college gridiron exploits into professional success. Except for Mike McCoy. And Kevin Hardy. And Paul Grasmanis. And Steve Niehaus. And Jeff Alm and Mike Fanning and Mike Kadish and Chris Zorich. [1]

There were exceptions to the linemen-No.-1-overall thing, namely Lee Roy Selmon and Bruce Smith. And we won’t be too hard on Bubba Smith, who was headed to Canton until his knees got in the way, forcing a career shift that netted him a special sort of fame that can only come from playing a token large black cop in a series of dumb-and-dumber movies.

But for every Lee Roy Selmon there were two Russell Marylands, and for every Bruce Smith there was a Kenneth Sims or a Courtney Brown. And for every Mario Williams (who is not a sure-shot Cantonian by any means) there is a Steve Emtman.

Steve Emtman was neither the guy who composed the music for the Batman movies nor the guy who snatched the foul ball from Moises Alou at Wrigley Field. He was a very active if not Mt. Rainier-sized defensive end from Washington who was chosen No. 1 overall by the Colts in 1992, at the very height of the Handful O’Landfill era.

A big reason why for so many years the Colts were the Colllllllts, just two small vowels away from colitis, was because when the Cowboys had the overall No. 1 they chose Troy Aikman, and when the Colts had the overall No. 1, they chose Steve Emtman. [2]

You can’t fault the Colts for not knowing that Emtman was a ticking time bomb of bodily breakdowns that would blow nine games into his rookie season, when he tore everything tearable in his left knee. The next year he shredded the patellar tendon in his right knee. The year after that he blew out a disc in his neck in a collision with a teammate. [3]

This particular card was the promo card, the high supreme collectible, of Courtside’s 1992 Draft Pix set.

There are a number of incongruities to consider here. The first is that there would be a series of football-draft-pick cards called Courtside. It’s a little like oceanfront property in Nebraska. The other is that something could conceivably be accomplished by shortening “Picks” to “Pix.” How does that make these cards more fun, more youthful, more dynamic, more collectible, or anything other than more dysfunctional? In the end, they kinda deserved Steve Emtman, and he them.

The combination of No. 1 overall and Colts and defensive lineman – and Courtside endorser – was lethal. Steve Emtman should consider himself lucky he got out alive.

The one true golden non-sport franchise regardless of manufacturer, time, date, place, cost, quality of cards, or quantity of cards was Star Trek. This was because the absolute best audience for non-sport trading cards was Trekkies, seeing as they were spending every waking hour, all five-and-a-half of them, hanging out at their local card-cum-comics stores throughout the entire span of the Handful O’Landfill era, Sundays and holidays included, arguing over why there weren’t more Klingons in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and playing marathon sessions of RuneQuest because Dungeons & Dragons just wasn’t hardcore enough.

(Okay, I realize I’m painting with a broad brush here. Many Trekkies overcame their essential gravity and went on to have productive careers as video-store clerks, RPG programmers, and Medieval Languages majors.)

The Star Trek license made many stops along the way, including Topps, SkyBox, Decipher, and the Rittenhouse Archives. All of them made money for the licensee and the licensor. But despite the wealth of material – remembering that you could done screen captures of the original episodes at one-second intervals, so you could have made flip movies with a complete set, and they would have sold like William Shatner hairpieces – SkyBox in particular always gave the impression with its cards that it was scraping the bottom of an extremely large barrel.

Case in point: This card from the 1991 Star Trek set shows cover art from one of the few Star Trek art forms that didn’t crush it at the box office, the Star Trek Pocket Books. The artwork is black-velvet quality – maybe that’s why the Pocket Books didn’t sell, huh? – and couldn’t be any less evocative of Star Trek or unseen enemies if it had featured golfing dolphins. [4]

Because it was Star Trek, this card sold along with all the others. But not on its merits. Because unless you’re naming a star, you can’t sell something you don’t have.

[1] We’ll give you Alan Page, and call it a draw on Justin Tuck, Bryant Young and Renaldo Wynn.
[2] This was not an isolated instance. Two years earlier the Colts had the No. 1 overall and chose Jeff George, just to get the taste of Art Schlichter out of their mouths. And back in 1983 when the Colts had the overall No. 1 they chose John Elway, but were forced to ship him to Denver in a blackmail deal involving Mark Herrmann, Chris Hinton and a couple of mismatched socks. Some people say the Colts should get a get-out-of-jail-free card because Elway wanted to play on the West Coast. I say if the Colts had been something other than the Colllllts Elway would have been happy as a clam in Baltimapolis. Uneasy lies the crown on Andrew Luck’s head.
[3] Having a name that started with “EMT” might have been a giveaway.
[4] Reference: Sometime during the Handful O’Landfill era we received in our office a copy of a kids’ book titled Arnold Palmer and the Golfin’ Dolphin. It wasn’t explicitly stated in the book or the accompanying materials, but I got the very strong impression that a significant quantity of Arnold Palmer Hard Half and Half was involved in the creation of this book. In the end, it was just another high-concept media project that fell flat. Like Cop Rock.