During one of my meetings with the GREAT Jean Beliveau he asked me if I would like his autograph. I nodded and said "Yes, thank you sir"! (DUH!)
During our brief meeting, he told me a few things about people signing autographs: never pay a grown man for scribbling his name, and if he scribbles, why even bother getting the scribble if it is illegible? It made me laugh, and is a classic story, but rings true.
Most athletes/celebrities have very poor signatures, while Mr. Beliveau wrote letter for letter, incredible penmanship.
I think you can definitely attribute some of it to all the electronic devices and lack of cursive taught in school these days? But a good portion of it falls on the player themselves, they should look at what they write and ask themselves if someone will be able to read that crap 20 years from now and discern who wrote it?
Another factor? The in-person sig culture. The autograph game is not what it once was as far as value. There was time as recently as 15-20 years ago when people were hawking sigs from in-person encounters for fairly decent money. But with Topps NOW, Fanatics, and all the other memorabilia companies in the game now getting these guys to ink truckloads of stuff in real time when they get hot or achieve a big accomplishment, it's killed that segment. People are all about now, now, now with the sigs (like social media) and these companies are burning these guys out HARD. And the other issue is there are 20 times more hounds than there were 20 years ago because of the social media sharing and bragging among each other.
So because of that, when an athlete does encounter a person here and there in person, they just lay down the tee time slop and move on to the next item.
It's sad but true.
Good article, but Nolan Gorman is an anomaly, not the standard.
