Who Puts The 'Cyan' In 'Cyanide'?

I loathe sports art. I am not an art-loather by nature; I have a great deal of loatheable art on display in my home, and I loathe none of it – even the stuff my kids didn’t create. However, my kids know better than to create sports art.

And I ought to be clear here: I do not loathe all sports art. I do not loathe Robert Riggs’ depiction of the Max Baer-Primo Carnera fight. I'm also good with Aztec-ball-game art. All other sports art I loathe.

I say that counting at least one sports artist among my friends. Dan does fantastic sports art. If you’re looking for sports art, his is the sports art to have. I have a picture of Bob Wills he painted, and another that served as the cover for a rock-‘n’-roll book I wrote, but I have none of his sports art. Why? Because I loathe sports art.

I loathed my old boss, and naturally, he had sports art in his office. And not only did he have sports art in his office, but he had large sports art. Of golf. Done by LeRoy Neiman.

Of all the loathsome subjects painted by loathsome artists in a loathsome genre owned by a loathsome individual. It would be like Miley Cyrus covering the Plasmatics in an exclusive pressing for Alex Rodriguez.

There is nothing even remotely artistic about Neiman's quasi-impressionistic depictions of the gallery at the Masters, rendered with trowel-like delicacy in the same colors used to create fishing baits.

After my boss graced his wall with this insult to Monet, Picasso, Seurat, and God, he asked me what I thought. “I hate it,” I told him.

“But it’s LeRoy Neiman,” he replied.

“I hate LeRoy Neiman,” I answered.

He gave me the same fish-mouthed look he gave me when I told him I don’t drink coffee and don’t really play golf. And then he put me on double-secret probation for another year and a half.

The main reason I hate sports art is it lets hacks like Neiman thrive by exploiting the exploits of genuine artists – golfing artists, boxing artists, baseball artists, Olympian artists. And also Joe Namath.

At this point, I have to admit I was guilty of stretching the truth when I said the only semi-modern sports art I don’t hate is Riggs’ depiction of Baer-Carnera. I do not hate the 1953 Topps Baseball set because the artist was anonymous (at the time, anyway; the artist, Gerry Dvorak, later became famous for his work, and rightly so). It was an art set because it was more convenient, and likely cheaper, to hire an advertising artist to paint 280 portraits of baseball players than it was to take that many color pictures. It was the antithesis of art for art's sake; no shame in that.

For the same reason I might be convinced that the 1976 Topps Traded card of Tom House with the blob of cranberry mold where his hat should be is also sports art. Maybe. I don’t loathe it, but I’m guessing House disagrees.)

So you can guess my reaction when I was cleaning out a file drawer and a small yellow envelope fell out. Nope; sorry. It wasn’t that kind of small yellow envelope.

Perhaps it would help if I told you that inside the envelope was a series of 1953 Topps ripoff art cards I had never seen before.

Yep. That’s pretty much what I said. And I said it double after I noticed the web address on the back: GoodSportsArt.com.

As a disinformative URL, GoodSportsArt.com ranks only slightly behind NiceSerialKiller.com. It’s also interesting that the company behind GSA, Bill Goff Inc., felt it necessary to describe its sports art as “good” for site visitors who may not be acquainted with sports art, or who might have stumbled upon BadSportsArt.com and seen what appears to be the same thing.

Now, let me drop the snark for a minute and say that the guys who did these portraits, Bill Purdom and James Fiorentino, are 150,000 times the artist I am. In fact, Topps commissioned Purdom and Fiorentino to do these paintings as part of its proprietary ’53 ripoff set, and Topps don’t hire junk as far as sports artists are concerned.

Still, a set of cards done by semi-famous contemporary sports artists pretending to be advertising artists doing cards of modern players in an old-fashioned way simply doesn’t work. It could work in 1953 because there was HD nothing. As a baseball fan, your mental image of a ballplayer was based on grainy black-and-white newspaper photos, snowy black-and-white TV images, the occasional color spread in Sport, and baseball cards. You weren’t exposed and exposed to a player’s face until you felt you could trace every blackhead and tobacco stain.

The reference point is just too fixed for modern players. In 1953 you could look at a painted portrait of Satchel Paige and say,“Yeah; that’s him, I guess.” In this mini-set, you look at the dark, pinched face of Nomar Garciaparra and say,“Man, his ears stick out way too much, and that thing on his nose doesn’t belong, and what’s with the enormous ‘B’ on the cap? Is that like the modern-day scarlet letter?” And so forth.

The typeface is also wrong, which irks me. When we did replica trading cards at Baseball Cards magazine, we basically had a rock and stick, and we still nailed the type styles of everything from 1970 Topps Baseball to Parkhurst hockey. The type faces on these aren’t even close. That’s just plain lazy, and inexcusable.

Finally, it comes down to this: I’m not sure the world needs a set of cards based on a different set of cards based on a different set of cards that consisted not of photographs but of paintings. It’s sports art of sports art of sports art, and have I told you lately how I feel about sports art? I guess I have.

The good news is that these cards, and the contemporary ’53 Topps ripoff set that spawned them, are essentially worthless. They made no one forget, or remember, the originals.

I often acknowledge that this or that collectible is worthless. I don’t often root for something to be worthless. But in the case of sports art, I’m always willing to make an exception. 

The So-Called Collectible of My So-Called Life

In the late 1800s, when horsecars were giving way to streetcars and horses were yielding to horseless carriages, New York City took to putting horses’ heads on trolleys in an attempt to dupe the horses into thinking these new contraptions were actually horse-related and not the robotic vacuums of another day.

 

The horses would have none of it, and good for the horses. But it wasn’t exactly unraveling the genome for a horse to determine that a 16-wheeled, wooden-bodied, anticlimbered thing with windows, seats, a uniformed attendant, and a big, clangy bell was not a fellow traveler.

 

The point for this column is that new technology doth make fools of us all, and because none of us are able to fully discern the extent to which a new technology might break us out of our habit box, we clothe the new stuff in the old stuff to make it less threatening at the same time we dress up the old stuff to make it look more like new technology despite its absence of, you know, new technology.

 

I had this conversation today with the head of marketing for a small quasi-tech company that plays in the same space as Apple, Microsoft, Verizon, and other howitzers, only with people instead of microchips and algorithms. “We’re doing the same thing that the phone company did 30 years ago,” he said, “and we’re trying to pass it off as groundbreaking.”

 

It is in that spirit of half-truthiness that we present the 1995 Super Slam this is my life™ series.

 

 

The coming of computers and the rise of the internet prompted all sorts of horse-on-the-streetcar moments in the Handful O’Landfill omniverse. Upper Deck and Topps experimented with “virtual cards” that included perhaps a scrap of video and some pseudo-collectibility. Topps created a “stock exchange” for its eTopps cards, and if you find it ludicrous that people would pay real money for a computer image of a nonexistent card that could in theory be sold in its nonexistent computer-image form to someone else at a real-money profit to you, you’re among friends.

 

The interesting thing about these virtual cards of Midre Cummings was that for the most part they were designed to do exactly what a real card of Midre Cummings would do, which is lay there inert. If you interacted with paper cards by reading their stats, putting them in alphabetical order by team, and checking them off the checklist, you had far more up-close-and-personal contact with them than you could possibly have with one of the online models.[1]

 

Online cards have largely passed from the firmament, leaving behind only slivers of RAM, but other cards from the low-tech-dressed-up-as-high-tech side of the street were not so lucky. We’ve touched on some of these cards and their pathetic attempts to show demi-realistic action or create the impression of perspective or depth. Sportflics, Upper Deck holograms, Donruss Die-Cuts, SkyBox E-Motion, and the Pro Set Young Indiana Jones 3-D cards all failed to one degree or another. To the extent that any of these products are collectible, it’s not because they created the sensation of reality or movement out of pictures on cardboard; it’s because they were so poorly received in the marketplace that they’re nearly (but not nearly enough) nonexistent.

 

In that hierarchy, the Super Slam this is my life™ series might be the nearly nonexistentest of the bunch. I have not seen any of these outside of the samples you see here, not that I go looking for them. As the quite late Steve Goodman astutely observed, “Don’t go lookin’ for trouble/Trouble will find you.” And in my world, trouble takes the shape of a die-cut Jack McDowell set on top of a picture of Jack McDowell.

 

Members of our department had to assemble custom boxes the other day for a promotional mailing, and I was amazed at the ingenuity in design that can turn a flat piece of cardboard into a tight, solid box with a parcel shelf, a goodie well, and a cutout for a USB drive. I do not have the same sort of admiration for the Super Slam this is my life™ series.

 

I suppose my feeling has to do with the relentless low-tech approach followed in creating these. As mentioned before, the Super Slam this is my life™ series overlays a player photo with the same photo only die-cut, and then encases the Piazza sandwich in a heavy silver checkerboard border. The McDowell "variant" (if you can call it that, since it has just as much claim to being the original deal as the Piazza card) features two heavy black borders surrounding a heavier silver checkerboard border. Regardless of your choice of variant (and as far as variants go, I prefer Hasil Adkins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nz9jR_AuLM), these are what Action Packed cards would have looked like if they had been designed by A-Ha and not some grumpy dude from Chicago.

 

The card back is scarcely larger than a normal card, but is packed to the gunwales with unreadable answers to unreal semi-questions, including “Earned Money As a Kid.” In Piazza’s case, he earned money as a kid driving truck, which if it wasn’t one of those battery-powered John Deere kiddie trucks is plumb full of interesting legal implications.

 

Is there more? Of course there is. Once you whip out the 10x loupe you learn that among Jack McDowell’s notable ancestors is Eddie Keane, a one-armed minor-league second baseman, and that his favorite song is his own composition called “Reinvent.”[2]

 

Obviously the Super Slam this is my life™ series did nothing to stop the computer/internet/eBay onslaught. In that regard, it wasn’t someone holding a flower standing in front of a tank in Tienamen Square. It was an ant clutching a grain of pollen perched on a flower held by someone standing in front of a tank in Tienamen Square. It got squished beyond recognition, but the tank? The tank rolled on.

 

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[1] This relationship between hard and vapor copy is virtually identical to most print magazines and their on-pad counterparts. While the on-pad magazine offers the most potential for interaction, most actual interaction takes place between the reader of a print magazine and the printed piece itself. And call me a fuddy-duddy, but I have yet to see the virtual magazine that can be rolled up and used in a pinch to cudgel a trespassing wasp.

[2] This revelation, along with the facts that McDowell’s favorite color is magenta and his favorite place to eat is Chicago’s Taco & Burrito Palace, is tempered by McDowell’s statements that his favorite athlete is Roger Clemens and his favorite show is American Gladiators. A complex one, that Black Jack.