Card Sharp : Ron Futrell Isn’t Satisfied Just Collecting Sports Memorabilia--Sometimes the Savvy Buyer Feels the Need to Compete for It

Suppose your kid wears his nice clean jersey for a muddy game of football, or that what he tosses in the hamper bears every scent of an intense, sweaty basketball tournament. What can you do with such wash-day horrors?

Well, you can sell them to Ron Futrell, as long as your kids have such names as Magic Johnson or Joe Montana.

Last week, Futrell placed the top bid, $10,500 plus tax, at a Costa Mesa charity fund-raiser to become the owner of a jersey worn by Johnson in the 1992 Olympics. It has joined nearly 20 other used jerseys Futrell owns, including some once worn by Montana, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Don Mattingly, Dwight Gooden and Bo Jackson.

The jerseys are just the tip of the iceberg that is Futrell’s collection of sports memorabilia. He has scores of baseballs autographed by Hall-of-Famers, a Gretzky hockey stick, a helmet from the short-lived L.A. Cobras indoor football team, posters and sports art, and a baseball card collection he guesses stacks up to more than 1 million cards, including a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card for which Futrell paid a marriage-rocking $15,000.

Futrell keeps his collection stored in a secure location, but he visits it often. Some of it can only be enjoyed in the most abstract of fashions, though, since he estimates hundreds of thousands of his cards are still sealed in their original corrugated cardboard shipping cartons.

It would make an interesting study in survival if he were ever stuck there after an earthquake: One might live for quite a while off the thousands of stored baseball card packs that still have their original bubble gum, supplemented by his shelf of unopened vintage sports-cover Wheaties boxes.

Futrell, who owns a successful nuts and bolts distribution business headquartered in Santa Fe Springs, can sound a bit blase about his collection at times, dwelling, rather, on how high prices and speculation have leeched the fun out of the hobby. There are moments, though, when all that slips away and he seems like a 10-year-old again.

“When you opened up a pack when you were a kid, do you remember the smell of the gum? On hot summer days when you’d go to the drugstore and pay 5 cents for a pack and race somewhere to go see what you got? I loved that,” he rhapsodized.

That thrill doesn’t come very often for him lately. He has nearly every kind of baseball card made since 1951, and quite a few older than that, including a ‘40s Babe Ruth, a ‘20s Ty Cobb and cards the size of two postage stamps that were the earliest trading cards, given away with cigarette packs near the turn of the century. Over the years many of these cards wound up stuck in bicycle spokes or in the trash. Futrell’s live in a safe. He rates his collection as being “well above average but far from one of the best.”

“I got started on all this because I was one of the few people whose mother didn’t throw away his baseball cards,” he said. “I only wanted Dodger cards then. Mantle and Willie Mays and all the other ones I didn’t care about. I only wanted Gil Hodges, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. Who cared about the Yankees?

“After the early ‘60s I found out about girls and cars and stuff like that, so my money went elsewhere. Then in 1980 I came across them in a box and I couldn’t believe what good shape they were in. I found out how much they were worth and remembered all the fun I’d had collecting them as a kid and got back into the hobby.”

Growing up in Whittier, he was an all-star player in school sports. He has carried a competitive edge into his adult life. He started his company, Industrial Threaded Products, from scratch 14 years ago.

He explained: “I started as a kid in a warehouse as a summer job. I got fired twice for insubordination. I couldn’t work for anybody, so I started my own company. We sell nuts and bolts. That’s all. Whenever I tell people what I do, they think it’s a joke, but we’ve been able to afford our house and all this through it, so it’s been pretty good for us.”

His competitiveness also kicks in when he’s at an auction, like the one where he got the Johnson jersey (his second, actually; he also has one of Johnson’s 1988 Lakers road jerseys). The event was held March 16 at Planet Hollywood to benefit the Magic Johnson Foundation’s program of AIDS education, prevention and care. Much of the money from Futrell’s sports auction purchases has gone to charities.

“I’m all for that, but that’s not my main purpose,” he said. “I like competing for these things. I went to bid on this. You do wind up spending more money at these celebrity auctions. People don’t seem to be so concerned about the value of the things. I normally wouldn’t think this jersey was worth $10,500. I thought it might possibly go as high as $8,000. So yeah, you do get sucked into it. But to get your picture taken with Magic and have a video taken of it and all that, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

Of his cluttered collection, he says: “Some I bought just for the appreciation or the collectibility, but a lot I bought because I love the players. Like these . . . .” He pointed to four framed, autographed lithographs on a wall. “There were only as many made of each as the player’s career batting average, so the Willie Mays is 151 out of 302. Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron: How can you find much better than those four guys? And that $15,000 Mickey Mantle card was not only an investment card (it now lists in books for $60,000, he says), but it was one I needed to complete my Mantle series.”

Like a lot of collectors, Futrell justifies his purchases as investments. When it comes down to it, though, “I’ve never sold a card, ever,” he says.

He seems almost to have reached a point of entropy with the collection. When he sees a piece such as the Johnson jersey, he still goes after it, but there’s nothing these days that sticks out in his mind as anything he really desires.

He holds season tickets to most Orange County and Los Angeles professional sports teams except the Rams. (“I gave up seats on the 50-yard line, 30 rows from the field because I think Georgia Frontiere has ruined the Rams,” he said.) Though he pretty much has the best seats in the stadium, he thinks something may be missing. “We have great seats for every game, and our kids take it for granted. They’ve never gotten to watch a game through a peephole in a fence or anything.”

He’s well enough off that his sports purchases don’t cramp the family finances, but even so Futrell thinks high prices and preordained “collectors’ items” have taken the fun out of collecting.

He said: “When I got back into the hobby in 1980, it was still fairly fun to collect. It has deteriorated so much now. There are so many sets of cards, and gimmicky subsets, and subsets of subsets. And at the prices of new cards, you can sometimes spend $20 or $30 for an unproven rookie player. It used to be players worked for years to earn that kind of status.”

Asked where his collection goes from here, he said, “Probably nowhere.”

His wife, Cindy, has found a use for his collection. “I use it for leverage, like ‘I told you I wanted that new couch, and you spent all that on one card ,’ ” she said. She envisions the collection possibly being used to pay for their two children’s college education.

After he bought the pricey Mantle card, he claimed, “I had to wait three years to have sex, she was so angry. Only kidding. Two years.”

He claims Cindy doesn’t get his jokes. She retorts that they just aren’t funny. They’ve been at this for 15 years of successful marriage, apparently.

Futrell does have a tendency to make light of things, including a bandaged right hand missing a couple of fingers. “I had a car accident, and contrary to rumor, they don’t grow back,” he said, though he couldn’t resist adding: “Actually, I was at Benihana’s.”

One of their two children, a 12-year-old son, has also become a baseball card fan.

“Up till about five years ago, to open a pack and get a good card, I’d get that same feeling I got as a kid with those 5-cent packs. It might not still happen for me. My son collects now, and sometimes when he opens a pack I can see it in his eyes,” he said.