Two names on the back of one cheque

It sold at Heritage in 2020, and it sits among the dearer items this index records for him.

The fight

Marciano met Lee Savold on 13 February 1952 at Convention Hall in Philadelphia. He was unbeaten, the leading contender, and seven months away from taking the heavyweight title from Jersey Joe Walcott. Savold retired on his stool after six rounds.

The day after that fight, Joe Louis formally announced his retirement. He said he had made up his mind when Marciano knocked him out the previous October. The fight that produced this cheque came just as one era of heavyweights was closing and Marciano's was about to begin.

The cheque

Heritage described it as a cheque from 1952 written to complete payment for the Savold fight. That wording suggests the balance of what he was owed rather than necessarily the whole purse. The lot description does not give the amount, and we will not guess it.

On the back, Marciano signed twice: his given name, Rocco Marchegiano, and his ring name. PSA/DNA encapsulated it as authentic, and it was mounted in a large display with a colour copy of the signatures at its centre.

Heritage's own note on the lot puts his signature in context: he "has proved to be a tough autograph to obtain."

Three names, one man

He was born Rocco Francis Marchegiano in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1923. When he had his first professional fight, in Holyoke, he did it under the name Rocky Mack, to protect his amateur status, and was paid thirty-five dollars. The world came to know him as Rocky Marciano.

A bank, on the other hand, knew Rocco Marchegiano. That is why the name is there.

Why the second name makes it better

Two reasons, and the second is the stronger.

A cheque is a document that had to pass through a bank. It is dated, it is tied to a specific event, and it was handled by people whose job was to check signatures against an account. We have set out that argument in why a cancelled cheque is the most reliable autograph you can buy, and this is a textbook case.

And almost nobody forges the name he signed at the bank. A forger practises the signature collectors want: Rocky Marciano, the one on photographs and gloves. Rocco Marchegiano was a private signature for paperwork, and there was never a market worth faking it for. A banking document carrying both, side by side, gives an authenticator the famous hand and the everyday one together, which is about as good as evidence gets.

What his purses were doing at the time

The cheque sits in the steepest part of his earnings.

That first fight as Rocky Mack paid $35. Against Roland La Starza in 1950 his purse was reported as $8,000. For knocking out Joe Louis in October 1951 it was reported as $44,000, a third of what Louis took from the same fight. By his last fight, against Archie Moore in 1955, his reported purse was $482,374.

The Savold cheque was written in the middle of that climb, four months after Louis and seven before the title.

What it sold for, against the rest of his market

It made $1,500. A signed photograph postcard from the same year, 1952, made $776.75, and a signed index card $720. Of the results this index records for him, only six have made more: two pairs of gloves, two of the finest signed photographs, a handwritten 1949 letter and a signed 1955 document.

Roughly twice the price of an ordinary signature, for a document that carries two, is tied to a dated fight, and passed through a bank.

It is also worth noticing what kind of object it is. There are no cards in Marciano's market at all: he was champion after boxing had largely left card sets, unlike Joe Louis, whose recorded market is entirely cards. For a signer like that, the paperwork of his career is where much of his signature survives.

What to check if you find one

Check that the names agree. The payee on the front and the endorsement on the back should belong together. A cheque endorsed in a name its bank would not have recognised is worth a question.

Look for the bank's marks. Cancellation stamps, perforations and processing marks are what make a cheque a cheque rather than a piece of signed paper.

And buy it certified. A document signature is only as good as the person who compared it against known examples, and certification records that somebody did.

The thing worth sitting with

The famous name went on the posters, the photographs and the gloves. The other one went on the back of a cheque, because that was the name the bank knew.

Seventy years later the everyday signature is what makes the famous one next to it easy to believe.

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

Sources