Twenty years ago one teenager made a bet on the stardom of another teen, whose rookie card would become one of a kind. It would also signal the beginning of the end of a once-thriving industry
LUKE WINN
It is mid-July, three weeks to the day before Major League Baseball will announce that, starting in 2010, it is awarding the exclusive rights to produce trading cards with MLB team logos and nicknames to Topps. I am in Carlsbad, Calif., receiving a tour of the headquarters of Upper Deck, which has produced licensed baseball cards for the past 20 years and is Topps's only remaining competitor in a cratering market. We're in a fenced-off area of the warehouse known as the Game-Worn Jersey Room. It is where memorabilia go to slaughter, cut up into hundreds of pieces that will eventually be affixed to insert (or chase) cards, which are placed in random packs in the hopes of enticing collectors.
More than 10,000 chopped-up items are stored in plastic bags on rows of metal shelves. For my visit Mark Shaunessy, the supervisor of this operation, has laid out an assortment of yet-to-be-cut artifacts on a table, including jerseys belonging to LeBron James and Grady Sizemore (with real dirt stains!), a bat of Derek Jeter's and baseballs signed by Joe DiMaggio and Walter Johnson. In the middle of this collection is something that was certainly neither worn nor used in major league baseball, let alone the NBA, NFL or NHL: a sequined, neon-green strip of fabric.
"That," Shaunessy says, "came from Miley Cyrus. It was her headband. We're going to do cuts of that too."
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Sports Illustrated
August 24, 2009