Before the two leagues of professional football merged in 1970 to become the National Football League, comprised of the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference, the first of a championship game was played on January 15, 1967. That game pitted the NFL champion, Green Bay Packers, in a 35-10 win over the AFL champion, Kansas City Chiefs. That game took place in Los Angeles at the Coliseum.
On January 14, 1968, the second AFL-NFL Championship Game was played in the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida between the Green Bay Packers and the Oakland Raiders. Green Bay also won that game 33-14. That same year, the NFL All Star Game was played at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida. During the pre Pro Bowl years, the AFL and NFL would play all star games featuring the best players in each league. On January 21, 1968 the West All Stars beat the East All Stars, 38-20. I believe the MVPs of that game featured running back Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears and Dave Robinson, a lineman, for the Green Bay Packers.
Now that I’ve dispensed with this history lesson and you are thoroughly wondering why I am telling you this, let’s get on to the good stuff.
My wife, a school teacher by trade, dabbles in antiques and collectibles. What does that mean? Well generally it means she spends hours of time searching for valuable stuff and spends far more money than she ever gets back in return – but she has fun. On occasion she finds something of value and pays little for it. It then ends up filling up more space in my house than turning a profit because it’s, well…..”too good to sell!”
About a month ago, she stumbled onto a really cool item. One night she came dragging home a framed poster. In all honesty she didn’t know what she had but she thought it “looked interesting”. I took a peek at it and discovered there was some memorabilia within this framed poster for the two events I described above.
This is a picture of the framed poster. In the lower left-hand corner are two tickets/stubs for the games mentioned above.
I’ll spare you all the details of what transpired from day one until the present but through my wife’s process of gathering information and trying to find someone local who could help us out with trying to authenticate the tickets, etc., we got hooked up with Brad Wells, CEO of Historic Auctions.
Having never done anything like this before, my wife and I were both quite skeptical and nervous, to say the least, fearing we might be taken advantage of. Through doing some research, we had confidence the items had some value. Being inexperienced we didn’t know about condition and whether the tickets displayed with this poster was a good thing or a bad thing.
We were immediately put at ease the moment we began talking with Brad. He was extremely professional, cool and calm, never once making us feel like we were being double talked to like a snake oil salesman.
His first reaction was that he liked the set up and thought perhaps it might be more valuable displayed the way it was. From there there wasn’t much time wasted with small talk. He explained that he could place our item in their July issue magazine, a high quality publication that goes out to buyers everywhere.
We signed some papers and an agreement and left the poster and tickets with him. Now we wait and see.
If Brad Wells is indicative of the kinds of people you can expect to find in this line of work, what a great industry. All I can tell you is that Brad runs what appears to be a professional and interesting business. And I’m even saying this before I know whether we’ll make any money.
I thought my readers might find this interesting. I’ll keep you posted.
Tom Remington
