Auctions scheduled

Here are the latest sports memorabilia auctions and their closing dates. (I'll change these as they become available)

• Lelands: June 24, 2011, lelands.com CLOSED
• Heritage: every Sunday sports.ha.com. Also next big live auction November 10. Bidding has begun online.

STOLEN AUTOGRAPH
If any collector has been offered or seen a Joe Louis signature on a newspaper page (the newspaper is in Spanish) contact me. One was stolen from the family of a boxer.

What can you learn about boxing memorabilia from eBay?

Like most collectibles, boxing items abound on eBay and by checking what sells for what you can learn a great deal about prices in the hobby – if you have the time. BCN tries to point out the surprises and trends as we see them on eBay. Here's one tip you can take to the bank right now: watch those "Buy it Now" ads. If you sort all the boxing items on eBay by price with the highest first, you will find that pages upon pages are devoted to vastly overpriced "Buy it Now" items. Several times I have gone carefully through the list and it was not until somewhere around the 1000th item before any item remotely came near what that item would bring even in a well-managed sports collectible auction. Things that should have been $100-200 were yours for a paltry $10,000 plus. No, you are better served by doing your homework and bidding on items you have confidence in.

Buying Ali signatures

It is safe to assume that, at any one time, a person could purchase literally hundreds of items signed or supposedly signed by Muhammad Ali. Just put the search criteria in eBay or Google right now and you will see. Me? I wouldn't buy any that I couldn't pinpoint to a date and time and circumstance of the signing and from a source I trust. And I place no significance in so-called letters of authentication. All of these are careful to state that theirs is just an opinion and a learned opinion can be valuable but it is difficult to know who to trust. Perfect example. I have seen a PSA-certified signed photo of the old lightweight, Battling Nelson. PSA is a generally respected LOA source. I have maybe 8 other Nelson signatures to compare it to and they do not compare in my view but then it doesn't stop there. You see the photo itself is of Terry McGovern, not Nelson. So here's what you can't count on – that if you sell the piece later, the buyer will readily accept your LOA as authentic. For no signature is this truer than Muhammad Ali's. Start with the assumption that anyone can be fooled by a clever forgery and then look at how simple Ali's small signature is these days and you may stop collecting them altogether.