Ok, so I recently attended a training camp session for the New York Giants and a certain starting quarterback (who shall remain nameless) was kind enough to sign a football for me, but the signature was really more like scribbled initials. My own signature is abbreviated and completely illegible as well, so I didn’t think anything of it. However, a friend told me that he has read that many athletes have both (i) a real signature which they use to sign licensed memorabila per separate agreement or on those rare occassions that they really want to give a valuable gift or something and (ii) an abbreviated signature that they sign for everybody else and which, therefore, is much less valuable.
My take is that as long as the autograph is real and can be authenticated, what different does it make how the person signs? Isn’t the “signor” the only relevant factor in an autograph??
Just curious…
I know nothing about autographs, but for all kind of collections, value is always related to rarity(*). An item might have the same sentimental value for you regardless of how rare it is, but if you try to sell it, your football with an abbreviated signature is going to be worth much less than the less common football with a “real” signature.
(*) Someone is probably going to say that it’s true for everything, not only for collectable items, but regarding collections, it often becomes utterly ludicrous from the point of view of 99,999% of the population, making it much more obvious than say, the fact that a natural sapphire will arbitrarily be given a worth much higher than an exactly identical artificial sapphire.
the most important thing is the quality of the signature(bold) and whether it is on an NFL football. If he signed a pee wee football, it’s worth less.
BTW, I have no idea whether his signature changes depending on who he’s signed for, but I tend to doubt that story. He proably has signed thousands of “licensed, etc.” footballs, but many many less of signed at practice, after game, etc.