The king of the collectors
Angelo Savelli, one of this city’s true characters, spent his life assembling a massive menagerie of sports memorabilia
It was early in the 1990s when police brought them to the station and told them someone had spilled the beans about a home invasion plot targeting their house.
Wanting no part of this, Angelo and Ann Savelli moved to a hotel for a few nights. Meanwhile, police staked out their east Hamilton home.
“Sure enough, a cube van backed up into the driveway, two guys got out and were in the process of entering the house and the police arrested them,” says their son, Jason. “They were armed.”
What was so special in the home that they were after? Cash? Fine art? Jewelry? Revenge? Sports memorabilia.
Over several decades, Angelo Savelli — who died March 16, a few days before he was to turn 87 — amassed one of the most fantastic collections anywhere. A magnificent menagerie of incredible items that lived in his basement.
Foster Hewitt’s fedora was part of it, as were Lionel Conacher’s football cleats, Bronko Nagurski’s Hall of Fame ring, Syl Apps’s hockey gloves and a key to the city of Grand Rapids presented to heavyweight champ Rocky Marciano.
There was one of Bill Barilko’s hockey sticks that long predated his mention in the Tragically Hip’s “Fifty-Mission Cap,” a bat from Babe Ruth, one of fastball legend Eddie Feigner’s (the King and his Court) jerseys and Teeder Kennedy’s Leafs cardigan.
“No doubt, Angelo definitely amassed one of the best sports memorabilia collections in Canada,” says Marc Juteau, president and founder of Classic Auctions.
It began in the late ’40s when Savelli was 11 or 12 and the family
headed to the U.S. for a wedding. When an uncle gave him a $10 bill, he went into a store and saw packs of baseball cards. He spent it all hoping to find a Babe Ruth.
Did he get one?
“Not at that point,” Jason says. But in an instant, a hobby — some might say an obsession — was born.
He started collecting all he could get his hands on. Slowly at first. Then when he became an adult and landed a job at Stelco, a chunk of each paycheque went into his passion. The family wasn’t rich — Ann was working as a hairdresser to help pay the bills — but he was shrewd with his money and found ways to make it work.
By the late ’80s, he had thousands of cards. Probably tens of thousands. Along with numerous items of fantastic memorabilia he’d been gathering.
That’s when he decided to open a store on Barton Street. Canada’s Number One King of Sports Cards, his business card read. Which leads us to one of his most-famous — or notorious — claims to fame.
It involves a sweater from the 1925 Hamilton Tigers, this city’s NHL team that went on strike and was moved to New York. Years ago, Sports Illustrated declared it one of the rarest and most sought-after items in sports collecting. If you could find one, it would be worth a fortune.
He had one. So what happened to it?
Savelli’s account goes like this: He had the sweater in the store. One day, he received a call threatening that he’d be shot if he didn’t sell it for $500 to someone who’d soon be arriving at the store. So when the guy arrived, he did.
That could well be true. On the other hand, is there a chance he simply sold it and was embarrassed when he later realized what he’d let slip through his fingers? The king’s one boo boo?
“It’s possible,” Jason chuckles. “It could be.”
Either way, he kept collecting and finding amazing things through the network of other collectors and sources he’d built over the years.
He eventually landed the uniform of Chicago Cubs’ second baseman Johnny Evers (part of the famous double-play combo, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance), Garney Henley’s Ticats jersey, hockey sticks from Bobby Orr, Howie Morenz and Jean Beliveau, and baseballs autographed by Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Roger Maris, Willie Mays and others.
And on and on and on.
It was a remarkable assortment of items that would make true sports fans giggle with glee. Yet it sat in his basement for years without much security. He’d always wanted to show it in a museum, but the attempted robbery made him skittish about displaying it publicly or even talking about it much. So it remained underfoot where he could keep an eye on it.
Jason learned just how expansive the collection was when his dad’s health turned a couple years ago. With Savelli in longterm care and unable to look after it all, his son began documenting it and moving it to a secure storage space.
The process took six months. The house is now cleared out and sold. But figuring out what to do with the stuff remains an ongoing process. Thousands of items have already been moved at auction. More will be.
“To date, it’s over $2 million in sales,” Jason says.
Does this mean it’ll all be gone soon? That this collection will be liquidated and there will be nothing left of it?
Not exactly.
A few of the items that were signed personally to Savelli will be kept by the family. A few other things will be held onto as well.
Then, as he was cataloguing everything, Jason started wondering whether there was some record for largest private sports memorabilia collection. A little digging determined there was. The biggest ever had roughly 40,000 pieces.
Wait a second, he thought. Dad’s collection exceeded 100,000 pieces if you count each card. He quickly reached out to the authorities to see if his get his father memorialized forever.
“Maybe,” he says, “I’ll get him into the Guinness Book of World Records.”
Pretty sure that would be as cool as finding a Babe Ruth card.