Almost nothing survives from when he was famous

This is the widest gap on this index between when somebody was famous and when they did their signing, and it changes what you are buying.

What PSA says about the supply

Their account of his signature is blunt about it. Signatures from Thorpe's athletic days are very scarce, and most of the material available dates to the 1940s and 1950s.

The explanation is in the same paragraph. He was a frequent guest on the banquet circuit in the 1940s, and he signed numerous programmes, papers and ticket stubs while he was there.

So the population is not built from his career. It is built from the speaking engagements of a man in his fifties and early sixties, thirty years after Stockholm.

Our own results say the same thing

Look at the dates on the sales this index records for him.

A 1936 cut signature. A 1952 photograph. And the dearest item by a distance, a 1933 Goudey Sport Kings card, is inscribed with the year he signed it: 1946, thirteen years after the card was printed.

Not one of them dates from his playing days. The earliest is from three years after he had finished with professional football altogether.

Why the early signatures are not there

Three reasons, and none of them is about him.

Nobody was collecting autographs as a hobby in 1912. The practice existed, but the organised market that produces surviving paper did not. A signature written in 1912 had to survive forty years before anybody thought it was worth keeping deliberately.

There was almost nothing to sign. No trading card industry to speak of, no signed photographs sold as product, no shows. The 1933 Goudey Sport Kings is one of the first cards to carry him at all, and it appeared five years after his last professional game.

And he had no reason to be asked. The banquet circuit that produced most of what exists was a 1940s phenomenon, by which time he was a legend being honoured rather than an athlete being watched.

What this means for what you are buying

Three consequences, and the first is the one people get wrong.

A Thorpe signature is almost certainly not contemporary with what it depicts. A signed photograph of him in a Canton Bulldogs uniform was, in all probability, signed three decades after the photograph was taken. That is not a defect and it is not deception. It is simply what the market is made of.

The handwriting you are comparing against is late handwriting. Authenticators work from exemplars, and if the exemplar pool is overwhelmingly 1940s and 1950s material, then a genuine 1915 signature has thin comparison material behind it. That cuts both ways, and it is worth knowing before paying a premium for an early date.

And an early example is a genuinely different object. If something can be documented to his playing years, it sits in a far smaller population than the rest of his market, and the price should reflect that rather than following the general rate.

The pattern this belongs to

This index keeps finding that a signature market is shaped by circumstances rather than by the person.

Honus Wagner signed for eighteen years as a Pirates coach because the Depression took his sporting goods business. Joe Louis stood in a casino lobby for eleven years because of a tax bill. Pete Maravich's supply closed at forty and has been shut for longer than it was open.

Thorpe's version is that the demand arrived thirty years after the achievement. He was signing as a celebrated figure from the past, which is a different activity from signing as the man everyone is watching, and it produced a different population of objects.

And the official record was against him the whole time

One more thing sits behind every one of those banquet signatures.

His Olympic medals were stripped in 1913 for having played semi-professional baseball before the Games. They were not restored until 1983, thirty years after he died. And the International Olympic Committee listed him only as co-champion until 2022, when he was finally recorded as sole winner of both events.

So every signature in this market was written by a man whose best-known achievement had been formally taken away from him and would not be given back in his lifetime.

He signed the programmes anyway, for years, at dinners held in his honour.

The thing worth sitting with

The greatest all-round athlete of the twentieth century left almost no trace of his own signature from the years that made him famous.

What survives is the decade when he was no longer playing, when the people who wanted his name on something were finally organised enough to ask, and when the record books still had an asterisk beside the reason they wanted it.

This index records documented sales of his signed material, all of it paper. You can read how we work the numbers out.

Sources