Sign of the times
The autograph has become a lost art in age of computers
Today’s hockey stars leaving an illegible mark,
Marcel Dionne was giving a visitor a tour of his sports memorabilia shop.
The place is called Marcel Dionne Inc., and it also includes the occasional flourish of Marcel Dionne ink. Hanging among the racks and shelves stocked with officially licenced NHL jerseys and foam fingers are autographed photos of a who’s who of Hockey Hall of Famers, the 64-year-old Dionne among them.
But as for the autographed wares of current NHLers, Dionne, one of the great goal scorers in NHL history, said he doesn’t often deal in such merchandise. He laughed a little as he explained the reason.
“Athletes today, it’s impossible to read what they write,” said Dionne. “I mean, it’s absolutely asinine that people pay that kind of money and you can’t even tell who signed it.”
It wasn’t always so, of course. There was a time when the game’s greats signed their names as gracefully as they skated, in swoops and loops and curls crafted with care.
“Everyone had their own style, but they were all pretty nice. Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Rocket Richard — the Rocket didn’t go too far in school, but he had a very nice signature,” said Dionne. “And the best, Johnny Bower. Very nice autograph.”
But somewhere along the way, the cursive keepsakes of yesteryear have devolved, in Dionne’s eyes, to curse-worthy squiggles.
“Some guys — Ovechkin — it’s a frickin’ joke. You can’t read it,” Dionne said. “Connor McDavid — I think there’s a C and an M somewhere in there . . . It’s a zip code. I call it a zip code.”
As in, somewhere in the neighbourhood of a legible signature, but not precisely. Dionne isn’t the only one who has observed this trend. Hersh Borenstein, a GTA-based memorabilia dealer who has appraised autographs for the Hockey Hall of Fame, said most of the prominent NHLers with legible signatures have retired.
“Mike Modano and Ed Belfour were probably the last ones whose names you could read,” Borenstein said. “Now they’re just scribbles. Today’s players don’t care. They make enough money. They’re not bred to be fan-friendly in that way. Just the fact that they’re signing autographs is enough. They’re taking the time. Why do they have to take the time to do a nice autograph? They can do a scribble. Look at (Maple Leafs forward) James van Riemsdyk. His autograph is horrendous.”
Van Riemsdyk, Toronto’s leading scorer this season, pleads guilty to the charge of messy penmanship.
“I’ve always had terrible handwriting,” van Riemsdyk said with a shrug.
But he is among many players who blame the sloppiness of his script, not on a lack of concern, but on the continuing de-emphasis of penmanship in our society. Morgan Rielly, the Maple Leafs’ 21-year-old defenceman, said he only briefly studied handwriting in elementary school in Vancouver.
“My mom writes in all cursive and I can’t even read half of it,” Rielly said.
Paul Marner, the father of Maple Leafs draft pick Mitch Marner, chuckled knowingly when he was asked about his son’s experience with autographing.
When Mitch first began playing in London, where the rabid OHL fan base demands that teenaged players sign for the masses, he and his parents sat down to labour over a fanfriendly signature.
“We spent a few hours designing an autograph for him and had him spend a couple of hours practising it,” Paul Marner said. “Even though he did take cursive in school, he was not like we were when we were kids. We’d write assignments. And these kids today, everything’s on the iPad or on the computer. Mitch would be hard-pressed right now if you asked him to write an assignment on paper. I don’t think he could do it. He’d print it. I don’t think he could write it.”
As van Riemsdyk was saying recently, such is the reality of a digital world.
“You’re either typing on a keyboard or you’re on your phone. So you’re not practising your writing as much,” van Riemsdyk said.
“(In previous eras) guys were writing more in general. Our writing’s not going to look quite as good as someone who was writing on a day-to-day basis. I don’t think I sign or write anything on pen and paper very often — except for an autograph.”
Some fans are less and less likely to be concerned with the quality of a celebrity’s pencraft. It was just last year that Taylor Swift, the worldfamous pop star, proclaimed the autograph “obsolete.”
“The only memento ‘kids these days’ want is a selfie,” Swift wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
Maple Leafs players interviewed for this article acknowledged that selfies are becoming more and more popular. Still, team captain Dion Phaneuf said demand for autographs is as strong as he has ever seen it, and more than a few Leafs echoed that observation. Said goaltender James Reimer: “Most people would like an autograph and a photo, both.”
Given van Riemsdyk’s 11-character surname, and given the high volume of requests members of the Maple Leafs get at public events, van Riemsdyk said he has done what a lot of athletes do — perfect a style of signing that can be done quickly.
“JVR is pretty much what I sign,” he said.
Ditto Reimer: “For me, it’s more of a ‘J’ scribble, ‘R’ scribble. I just try to make the ‘J’ and the ‘R’ legible.”
Just to be sure, Reimer adds his number 34 for the helpful purpose of post-autograph-session identification.
Said Reimer: “I’ve never been told to make it readable.”
Even if today’s autographs aren’t readable, that doesn’t mean they aren’t saleable. Borenstein said that many of the top players still sign exclusive deals with companies whose prices suggest the business of inky squiggles remains lucrative. The company that markets McDavid-touched products, AJ Sportsworld, is currently selling pucks signed by the Edmonton Oilers rookie phenom for $199 apiece; authentic jerseys bearing his signature go for $899.
Mind you, a signed Oilers Wayne Gretzky jersey from Gretzky’s official merchandise partner goes for a crisp $1,799. And those are hockey prices. The baseball autograph business, says Borenstein, is “10 to 100 times bigger.” Insiders say Jose Bautista, the 35-year-old Blue Jays slugger with a throwback autograph that is easily identifiable, has been seeking an exclusive deal to sign and sell photos of his beloved bat flip. Selfies may still be free. But Sharpie-touched memorabilia will come with a price for the foreseeable future.
“One day there’s going to be a menu. Mike Trout autographed photo: $250. Personalization: $50. Legible personalization: $100. Looking at you while he talks to you: $200,” said Borenstein. “It’s going to come to that eventually.”
Such talk raises the ire of Dionne, the son of a steelworker from Drummondville, Que., who played before the era of mega-millions and has been an entrepreneur since his 1989 retirement from the game. Dionne has been running his eponymous memorabilia shop with the help of his wife, Carol, and his daughter, Lisa, since 2006. The family has owned and operated the adjacent Blue Line Diner — open for breakfast and lunch and ranked best American-style restaurant in Niagara Falls, Ont., according to customer reviews at the website Trip Advisor — since 2012. With the smell of bacon and eggs wafting through the space, Dionne turned up his nose at the vagaries of the autograph business.
“I try to convince people not to buy the autograph. You’re paying for what? It’s a lot of money,” said Dionne.
Not always. If you come to Dionne’s store and ask for his autograph, he sticks to a firm price: It’s free.