Sunday, November 16, 2014

1920 W516 and W529 Boxing #5, Lou (Lew) Tendler

Despite the low-grade condition of most strip cards, a repeated appearance of Babe Ruth in the #5 slot made those type acquisitions more costly than most.

1920 W519 #5 (correct image)
1921 W521 #5 (image reversed)

With those big hitters out of the way, you can imagine I'm happy to find lower-cost sluggers like slim Mr. Tendler, even if it means stepping off the diamond and into the ring.

1920 W529 #5, "Lou" (Lew) Tendler

Quickly-issued (some might say slapdash) strip card sets like W516 generated several variations and I compared some Ty Cobbs and Tris Speakers several years ago in the post 1920 W516-1-1 & W516-2-1.

The variations continued for their boxers, as W516s are just flipped versions of my W529.

1920 W516 Boxers (uncut strip, #5 Tendler at center)

The properly-named Lew Tendler received enshrinement in several sports Hall of Fames and boxing experts have called him "one of the best boxers to never have won a world title."

UPDATE: In a Net54 post on W516 variations, the well-named boxingcardman identified six designs collectors can find in this W516/W529 set.

Type 1: IFC symbol correct, numbered starting at 1, handwritten legend
Type 2: IFC symbol reversed (i.e., image flipped), numbered same as Type 1, handwritten legend
Type 3: IFC symbol reversed, numbers reversed (i.e, card #1 is now card #10), handwritten legend
Type 4: IFC Symbol correct, numbered starting at 50, typeset legend
Type 5: IFC symbol reversed, numbering same, typset legend
Type 6: IFC Symbol reversed, numbering reversed, typset legend

There are also a ton of color variations, shading variations, etc. It is by far the most complex set of boxing strips and I have no reason to believe that the baseball cards aren't just as confusing and complex.

It's like Pokemon!

Value: Mr. Tendler cost me just $2 at a 2014 card show, a fair sight better than $100+ for Babe Ruth!

Fakes / reprints: Haven't seen any in the marketplace, but they'd be cheap to fake, so know your dealer when purchasing any big names.

4 comments:

Mark Hoyle said...

Very cool card. Don't envy you for having to pick up the Ruth cards. Especially with the condition the strip cards are usually found in.

Matthew Glidden said...

It's satisfying to find the intact ones, when they do turn up, but there are plenty of mangy versions out there. At least they do come cheap-ish!

MikeAwesome said...

I can only imagine what those would have gone for in the height of my collecting in the 90's. Who knew there would be a baseball card bubble?

Matthew Glidden said...

Not me, for sure, I bought plenty of overprinted Donruss and Fleer in 1992!