Dealers, collectors celebrate historic show at National Sports Collectors Convention
ROSEMONT, Ill.—Andre Feliciano wasn’t able to make it to the National Sports Collectors Convention until Sunday, the show’s final day.
But when the collector walked through the doors at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Ill., he was blown away.
“It’s so big I don’t even know how to walk through everything,” Feliciano said. “It’s so big, I’m already lost. I forgot where I came in.”
Prior to heading to the 45th annual National, Feliciano had some reservations. He had seen social media posts earlier in the week that showed extremely long lines entering the venue and jam-packed aisles on the show floor.
“I saw the lines and I’m like, I don’t even know if I want to go if I’ve got to wait an hour and a half to get in,” said Feliciano, who lives just 25 minutes from the convention center.
But Feliciano ended up at the show. Despite being overwhelmed walking through the main entrance, he was happy with his decision. Sunday was a small fraction of what the crowd size reached on the four previous days.
For the third straight year, the attendance record was shattered. Although the show managers at JBJ Corporation opted not to release official numbers, it announced that attendance showed “double-digit growth” from the prior year’s record crowd.
“My guess is that 150,000 people walked through that door,” said dealer Rick Giddings, who owns Gizmo’s Sportscards. “They were literally bringing people 300 at a time across the street to get into the venue. When they come in [the main door], I don’t want them to blow by. I want them to stop, and a lot of them did. But probably the biggest show I’ve ever seen, and I have been going to The National for 30 years. Amazing.”
Giddings, who lives in nearby Rockford, Ill., has always enjoyed setting up at The National in Rosemont, a suburb of Chicago. The Donald E. Stephens Convention Center has now hosted the event 11 times since 2002. The venue can house massive crowds comfortably—which was obvious after this year’s five-day show ran.
“After seeing our progression in Cleveland last year, I figured 40,000 more people attended [this year]. I figured we were roughly at 110,000 in Cleveland,” Giddings said. “This is a bigger building, a nice building. That’s what’s great about Chicago, we’ve got the planes, the trains, the automobiles. Everything’s here.”
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The show managers utilized 30% more space this year with 650,000 square feet of show floor. For the first time in The National’s history a second-floor room was used, adding 75 new dealers to the show.
In all, there were over 700 vendor booths, along with a jam-packed breakers’ pavilion, a hectic autograph pavilion, and a massive corporate presence of all the major players in the space. Remarkably, there are still over 260 dealers on a waiting list to secure a booth at a future National.
“Wow. Phenomenal,” said JBJ’s Joe Drelich when asked about how the show went. “We could do better. And we will. There are ways we can improve traffic flow.
“Upstairs we are testing the waters up there, and that will expand. Aisles are pretty small there. That’s a pretty quick fix.”
Collector John Bereckis attended the show on Thursday with a friend and came back Sunday with his son, who lives in Washington state.
“I told my son, when we came here Thursday you could barely even move in this place,” said Bereckis, a Chicago native who has attended the last three Nationals.
“It was too crowded,” he added. “Me and my buddy came and then I remember all the Cubs were here because it was their day off, so they were all signing autographs. Then Tom Brady was also here. It was crazy. It took us an hour to get out of the parking lot when we left.”
Bereckis wasn’t surprised to find out the show set an attendance record for the third consecutive year. The number of military veterans and young collectors was staggering.
“I just laugh—I look around and you see all these young kids, 10, 12 years old, walking around with their cases and they’ve got thousands of dollars in there,” Bereckis said. “How the hell did they get them cards? They didn’t pull all them things. It’s crazy.”
RESOLVING ISSUES
After running their first NSCC show last year in Cleveland and overcoming some hiccups, the trio from JBJ Corporation addressed the most hampering issues to make sure this year’s show went off without a hitch.
At last year’s venue, the air conditioning didn’t work as well as it should have, Wi-Fi was streaky, and there were major traffic jams due to a bad parking set-up. The dealers SCD talked to said this year the AC worked great—some dealers even wore sweatshirts throughout the show because they had vents above their booth. Wi-Fi didn’t have any glitches for dealers or attendees, and parking—although congested—was orchestrated better than the prior year.
“I think the show’s been awesome,” said Kevin Savage Cards owner Kevin Savage, who set up for his 44th straight National. “Super big crowds, a lot of activity, selling a lot of stuff, and we bought a few really great things. We’ve seen a lot of our customers, which is the best thing. You get all the auction customers. I swear half of them came to the show from around the country. So, you get a little one-on-one, facetime with guys, and it’s a really good use of a week of the year for sure.”
Jay Moore of Jay’s Sportscards in Youngstown, Ohio was one of the dealers who set up on the second floor. The attendees that made their way up the escalator flooded the small area, making it difficult to maneuver in the narrow aisles. But dealers weren’t complaining about the upstairs traffic and their sales.
“It’s been great,” Moore said. “I used to set up with friends in the past, small areas. But now going on my own was a much better situation. It gives me an opportunity to expand my business and do a lot better.”
SALES AT EVERY TURN
Collector Chris Torres attended all five days of the National and certainly got a lot of steps in walking the floor. Torres, who is an extensive T206 collector and even has both his arms covered with tattoos of tobacco cards, enjoyed taking in all of the eye candy of the 100-plus-year-old cards.
“I think the week overall was really, really strong,” said Torres, who lives in Seattle. “I think the T206 market is strong. I don’t think as strong as ever, I haven’t been collecting that long. But it’s becoming very difficult to find off-back T206s. It seems like you find Piedmonts and Sweet Caporals everywhere, but it’s a good sign you can’t find the hard stuff.”
Torres said at every turn walking the show floor there were transactions taking place. Dealers were selling and buyers were more than happy to lay down wads of cash.
“Every dealer I’ve talked to said they’d had a really, really good week,” Torres said. “And a couple said if a dealer had a bad week, it’s because it’s their own fault. There’s money flowing here. I go to every single table and it seems like there’s $10,000 flowing one way or the other. To me, it’s been a very good sign for the hobby overall.”
Savage noted that prices of cards have mostly stayed steady as of late, and the longtime dealer saw that reflected at The National.
“Some items are probably at all-time highs and some items have gone down a little bit,” Savage said. “But everything seems to be steady and there’s no giant dives on prices on anything that I’ve seen.”
Giddings, who deals mostly in vintage cards, said there was a great mix of dealers selling vintage and modern and buyers looking for both eras.
“We had the older guys looking to fill their sets. We had the kids here for the Pokémon—which has been outstanding for them, and that’s a good portion of the market now,” Giddings said. “The oddball collectors, the autograph collectors, the people going to the pavilion for autographs was huge. They had a lot of great athletes. Hats off to Jeff [Rosenberg] at TRISTAR. We knocked it out of the park.
“This was the best show I’ve ever seen.”
HEALTHY HOBBY
After news broke just two weeks before The National that confessed forger Brett Lemieux allegedly flooded the market with four million fake autographed items, some dealers had reservations about how the hobby community would react at the show. But it ended up being all business all the time.
“I really think the hobby has a very short memory and I don’t think that when anything bad happens that it affects much, if anything,” said Paul Lesko, who is a plaintiffs’ attorney but also a collector. “A lot of the hobby, I think, is built on kind of blind trust and what you have and you don’t really want to second-guess it. If a card is graded, if a card is authenticated, you generally just accept that.”
The record-breaking crowds and constant cash flow strongly solidified that the hobby is in a very good place.
“It shows the hobby’s strong,” Giddings said. “It’s going to continue to be strong. I think you’re seeing a little dip in some of the new stuff and the graded new stuff, because they’re doing a lot of it. But we’re always going to stay strong if we keep the kids interested. We’ll always be strong and it will never go away.”
Added Savage: “The hobby’s very, very healthy right now. There’s certainly a lot of interest out there. It’s good that we’re seeing a lot of younger people. It got to the point about 10 years ago, I was kind of worried that our collecting population was getting older and older and now we’ve got a big influx of younger 20s, 30s, 40s, guys that are buying and selling and collecting things, and it’s really good.”
Torres attended his first National six years ago, prior to the massive pandemic boom in the hobby. He feels like that first show was a completely different experience than this year’s event.
“It was a more intimate feeling back then,” Torres said. “Now it truly feels commercialized, in a good way.”