Following their larger sports card and memorabilia show in the David S. Mack Sports and Exhibition Complex on Saturday, Oct. 26, JP Sports and Rock Solid Promotions hosted a smaller show in the Sondra and David S. Mack Student Center Multipurpose Rooms, attracting young and old vendors, investors and collectors alike.
“Being in the dorms, it’s very easy for me to walk across here [and] spend a quiet Sunday and keep up with the hobby, which was a big part of my childhood,” said graduate journalism student Jordan Stoopler. Stoopler started collecting cards when he was around 10 years old with his father in their hometown of Montreal, Canada. “The challenge of it, the treasure hunt – it’s endless; it’s enjoyable,” Stoopler said.
The rooms were open to the public, with tables displaying hundreds of thousands of collectable cards in glass cases and boxes stacked high with valuable and covetable memorabilia. The room was buzzing with deals being made, passions being discussed and the swish of focused collectors flipping through card catalogues. Most people had been involved since their childhood, many keeping their hobby alive for 30 or 40 years.
Jimmy Ryan, the owner of JP Sports, had his son James Ryan, a student at Suffolk Community college, begin working in the business about two years ago. “[JP Sports and Rock Solid Promotions does] shows like this and sells baseball cards, football cards, basketball [cards], hockey [cards] and pretty much anything to do with sports,” James Ryan said. Though not a collector himself, James Ryan says he “definitely [sees] why some people are into it.”
JP Sports does about 12 small shows a year and six bigger shows, typically lasting two to three days, all on Long Island. At larger shows, players often come and sign autographs, and these draw even bigger crowds.
“We don’t go to a lot of shows, but I just started to see that they were local,” said Nancy Hilsenrath of West Hempstead, who attended the card show with her young son, Yosef. “[We try to go], especially if there’s someone famous that you can meet when they’re local.”
Nancy Hilsenrath, like most collectors, has been collecting cards since she was a child and now shares the hobby with her son. “She likes baseball cards a lot,” Yosef Hilsenrath said. “I like [looking at] them because they’re really expensive – it surprises me.”
Among the many male children, teens and adults attending the event, Nancy Hilsenrath is one of the only women.
“This is the market; you’ve got to be either a collector or an investor – it’s very difficult to do both,” said Robert Iraggi of Central Islip, a vendor who had previously spoken to Nancy Hilsenrath. Iraggi has been collecting for over 30 years.
“I’ve been doing [shows] since they were really small to when they got really big in the late ’80s to early ’90s to when they started overproducing cards, which killed a lot of store owners. There used to be card shows every day of the week at one point, all over the island,” Iraggi continued.
Iraggi says that collecting has reached another dip. “Now it’s a dying breed. The prices of cards have gone up for a lot of different reasons and the market is not there for the young person anymore.”
“It’s really hard to know the price range, what’s what,” Nancy Hilsenrath said. “Everyone tells you something, but you have to do your due diligence – even here, looking at the price difference between this guy to that guy.”
Just like the variety of age groups in the room, the reasons for attendance vary, according to Bayside’s Steven David, a collector of 40 years and a vendor for about seven. “Some people buy to resell; some people buy to fill a piece of their heart or they just like a card. I buy when I really like a card. My personal collection cannot be touched; that’s the stuff I collected when I was a kid, that part you can never give away because you can never get it back.”
