Sold an Oilers' Khabibulin jersey today to a collector who attended a game on the road in St. Louis where Khabby played. The collector wanted this particular jersey because he attended the game, and when I described the extensive game use, he knew exactly the stick and puck marks to which I was referring.
That's the beauty of this hobby. We can go to games, watch our jerseys, and then own them ... with photo evidence to back the jersey. It reminded me of something I used to wonder about in the late 1990s, when I was a collector, before I started this company, when authenticity and legitimacy was so speculative.
The conventional wisdom back then was teams wore very few jerseys. Another mantra echoed by veteran dealers and collectors 15-20 years ago was that photo-matching "was a needle in the haystack" endeavor. One dealer said that exact thing to me in 1997.
I wondered how these two contradictory theories could both be true. If teams wore very few jerseys, why wasn't it easy to photo-match? It's not like teams did not take pictures of their players then. It's not like video did not exist. When MeiGray acquired the New York Rangers Collection in 1997 and we began pulling jerseys out of boxes to inventory them, we photo-matched them within seconds from the media guide, programs, and videotapes.
The simple truth is, this hobby has made tremendous progress. Today's hobby is so much more professional than it was in the '90s because a guy in St. Louis can watch a Blues-Oilers game, check out the game use on a Khabibulin jersey, order it from MeiGray, and know exactly the jersey he is getting.
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