Bringing Henderson's goal home to the HHOF

Pat Stapleton recently finally admitted he has the puck from Paul Henderson's famous 1972 Summit Series goal. Of course, people are now going nuts about what Stapleton should do with it -- donate it to the Hockey Hall of Fame, selling it at auction, keep it.

I made a similar suggestion to the following for the Barry Bonds home run ball, and I'll suggest it now for Labatt's, Research In Motion or some similar Canadian company:

1) Determine a fair market price for the puck.
2) Labatt's writes a cheque in that amount to Pat Stapleton. They also write another cheque for the same amount in the name of every single player on the '72 team and give it to Stapleton's favourite charity.
3) Labatt's, Stapleton and whichever team members want to attend then hold a press conference and donate the puck to the HHOF.

Whatever Labatt's (or whomever) pays for the puck, the company will get 10 times the amount of positive publicity for the gesture, the puck ends up in the Hall of Fame where it belongs and everyone goes home happy.

Oh, and I'll promote the card show/autograph signing surrounding the '72 players being in town. :D

The Scourge of Pack Searching

Adam McFarland over at The Sports Lizard has an interesting article on pack searching where he used calipers to find the thick packs in a football box.

Adam actually picked a product that is a little weird in this respect, as Donruss tends to seed its autographs in packs that don't have a memorabilia card. Other possibilities for search were raised by readers, including weighing the packs.

And it's not even that tough. There are any number of products that come out every year that can easily be searched. 2007-08 Upper Deck SPx, for example, generally contains four jersey cards per 18-pack box. It's very easy to feel which packs have the jerseys in them because UD doesn't put decoys in the other packs.

There are tons of other examples, and they are the reason we don't allow customers to pick their own packs.

The more insidious problem, however, is store owners searching the boxes. I pledge to you that we don't, and here's why -- we have a reputation to maintain. We have a large enough number of regular customers that even if we decided to go the dishonest route, they would quickly ascertain that we were searching our boxes and stop frequenting us.

We also regularly tell our customers to be careful purchasing from retail outlets because no one at Wal-Mart is watching for searchers. Of course, there's already so few good cards in most retail products, it's tough to pull anything great even if you aren't cheating.

As for eBay, caveat emptor is the best policy. It's possible the best boxes have been pulled from cases, or boxes have been opened and resealed -- and I would never purchase a single pack on line, period.

If you have concerns, ask us, whether you're buying from us or anyone else. We're here to help. But as for us and pack searching -- never have, and never will.

There are also a couple of other blogs linked in Adam's article -- be sure to jump over and read those also.