They’re favours for fans, not for eBay

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This article was published 21/12/2016 (3257 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

VANCOUVER — They’re everywhere an NHL player goes these days.

They’re at the airport. They’re outside the rink. They’re at the team hotel.

They are the professional autograph seeker, a motley bunch of mostly middle-aged men who hang around places they know professional athletes will be so they can ask those athletes to sign everything from cards to glossy photos to pucks to jerseys, knowing the second an athlete signs his name the value of that item increases considerably.

It’s easy money, and because it is, the autograph professional has become an ever-increasing nuisance that is in danger of ruining the autograph experience for everyone.

“At three in the morning when we get in off the road — they’re there. They’re at the airports. They’re at the hotels. And they’re working for a living, I guess. That’s their job. So they’re everywhere,” Winnipeg Jets head coach Paul Maurice told me here Wednesday when I asked him about it.

“I feel for the players in this. And I also have kids. And so if I have an eight-year-old kid and Paul Wiecek is the greatest player in his mind in the world and you blow by him because you just signed 4,000 autographs that are on eBay, I’m pretty angry at you.

“You know, you’ve got to sign for the kids. And our guys will stop, and they will sign. The kids who come to the Iceplex and they hang over (the glass) — our guys will sign all that stuff. And they should. But it gets to be a bit much for these guys when it’s the same 10 people in every city…

“And now, the repercussion is if you don’t sign something, it’s on a tweet — ‘This guy’s an ass.’ And they’re all good guys, and nobody wants that. It’s too bad that’s the way it is now.”

So a couple things to unpack out of that.

First, in the minds of no eight-year-old anywhere am I the greatest at anything, least of all hockey.

And second, Paul Maurice knows my name!  Seriously, after three years of covering the man, Wednesday was the first time Maurice acknowledged he actually knows who I am.

So I’ve got that going for me. But I digress.

Our topic today is the autograph pros who are monetizing the popularity of NHL players for their own personal gain. It’s an insidious practice, relying as it does on the generosity of those players and, as Maurice says, the ever-present and implicit threat of online blackmail in the form of a critical tweet or, worse, an unflattering YouTube video for any athlete who refuses to play the game.

Now, none of this is anything particularly new — Roger Maris complained decades ago about how tired he’d become of signing baseballs for speculators, rather than fans.

But what has changed in recent years — and led to an increase in the number of autograph pros — is the online marketplaces that these days allow a guy who has convinced Dustin Byfuglien to sign a puck this morning to have that puck sold online for US$57.99 by tonight.

I didn’t make up that price, by the way. That was the actual price for a signed Byfuglien puck I found online Wednesday afternoon.

Want a mini-hockey helmet signed by Patrik Laine? $112.45 on eBay.

A signed Mark Scheifele jersey? $373.88.

Something a little cheaper? Well, how about an autographed Paul Postma hockey card for $3.99?

The result of all this cheap commerce is a once-innocent way players could connect with fans — especially young ones — has become yet another transaction to be viewed with suspicion by players who have grown frustrated by seeing a signature they put down on an item this morning up for sale to the highest bidder by tonight.

“I’ve seen stuff I’ve signed up for sale,” Scheifele told me Wednesday. “It’s always an honour to be asked for your autograph… but it does make you feel used a little bit.”

Scheifele says he will sign for anyone, but as his signature has become more sought-after by collectors in recent seasons, he says he has had to put a rule in place to deal with speculators who sometimes come to him with arms full of various merchandise they want him to sign.

“A little kid asks you to sign, and I will do that all day,” says Scheifele. “But some of these guys have a million things they want you to sign, and I will just say, ‘I’m only signing one.’”

Jets staffers who regularly travel with the team told me this week about 90 per cent of the time they pull up to a team hotel, there are autograph seekers waiting outside — and about 90 per cent of those autograph seekers appear to be professionals, not fans.

Pros such as the man who tracked down Drew Stafford outside the Jets’ hotel in Vancouver Monday and asked him to sign an old hockey card from when Stafford still played with the Sabres. Stafford signed but included his current No. 12 in the signature, instead of the No. 21 he wore with the Sabres.

That ruined the guy’s card — or at least lowered its value — and the man actually had the audacity to grumble to Stafford about it.

“I said, ‘Oops, sorry, I forgot.’ He was kind of a little upset about it,” Stafford recalled.

The last word on all this goes to Maurice, who is — always — a dad before he’s a hockey coach.

“Everybody’s got to make a living, everybody’s got to get by. And if that’s your thing, I get it.

“But you just hate the idea of a kid not getting an autograph signed and having a bad experience. Because it’s certainly not the kid’s fault.”

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek