Great Basketball Pieces

This plaque serves as an excellent example of a great antique basketball display piece. It's very rare, I've never seen another.  I first saw this hanging in Steve Freedland's home in Southern California. I was in L.A. for a show back in about 2000 I think it it was. Steve invited me to stop by, and he showed me his collection. Part of it anyway...as it was big. He had many things in boxes. Anyway, I spotted this and asked if he was selling it. He said not then, but maybe sometime. So over the next couple years I'd occasionally mention "that Basketball plaque you've got". One day he asked me what I wanted to pay...then I blew it by low balling him with something weak, like $300.00 I think it was. Next thing I knew he listed it on eBay. It's hard to explain, but in collecting, sometimes you just get burnt out on chasing every great thing that comes along. The financial and emotional  pressure; always scrambling for money gets to you. I think that period was one of those times, and I recall I had a hard time making up my mind if I was going to swing hard at this. I decided to bite the bullet, and loaded a snipe bid of $727.00, and got it for $685.00 on June 30, 2002. 

The plaque is cast in galvano. Galvano was used in the 1920-30's to cast statues and bookends. Galvano is a process in which a plaster cast is electroplated with copper and given a patina. Since bronze is made up of mostly copper, with small amounts of tin, zinc, and lead, the resulting appearance can be nearly identical to a real bronze. You see galvano pieces in the antiques world occasionally.  I guess because it's all copper without the other metals, Galvano has kind of a strange, soft feel that most people don't know what to make of. Actually I have Amos Alonzo Stagg's personal bookends that are galvano casts. 

Back around 1995, my friend John Bounaguidi found the best trophy catalog I've ever seen in an antiques store in some central coast California town. He paid a whopping $10.00 or so for it. It's for Josten's Jewelers of Owatonna Minnesota. I've never seen so much antique sports sculpture in one book. This plaque is pictured in that catalog. The featured sculptor that the catalog touted, and that sculpted this plaque was Jack Lincoln Lambert....Jack and I were old friends figuratively speaking. It's a story for another time, but Jack Lincoln Lambert sculpted the Amos Alonzo Stagg bookends I'd acquired at the very beginning of my collecting back in 1988. The bookends weren't in the catalog though. John B. knew sports sculpture was my hot button so he eventually gave me the catalog where it remains in my reference library. I've also seen two or three pieces on eBay that were in the catalog. As well as being a sculptor, Jack Lincoln Lambert was a cartoonist, at the Chicago Sun Times, and the Baltimore Sun newspapers. It's been a long time since I researched him but I recall he has a heroic size statue in front of a stadium somewhere, Baltimore maybe.  Anyway, over the years I've also seen two sports caricature plaster ashtrays that he did. One I saw at Mickey Himsel's house, an Indian mascot for a baseball team I can't recall. The other was a goofy golfer motif that I came across at an antiques fair, and took a shot of. Creating caricature ashtrays like these, seems like a natural extension of the cartooning he did at the newspapers. He seems to have been very creative.

Like I mentioned, the plaque serves as a good example of a great basketball display piece, but it's not the greatest basketball piece I've ever seen. That distiction goes to a piece I heard about and tracked down a number of years ago.

One day I was at the Long Beach Antique Flea Market, in Long Beach California. (Don't miss Martha's Donuts nearby on Carson Ave.) I ran into John Kanuit and he told me the most facinating story about a bronze statue of two basketball players he got at the Atlantique City antiques show in Atlantic City.  He said it was incredible, and that the guy selling it wouldn't budge off $10,000. He called a collector he knew and told him about it, and the collector told him to get it. John said it was so heavy, it took two people to carry it. 

Since antique sports sculpture is my hot button, I was riveted by the story.  After I got home the story stuck with me a couple weeks. Naturally I wondered who the collector was that got it, and more importantly I wanted to see it! John didn't say and I didn't impose the question. 

It was sort of a long shot, but I went on eBay looking for serious basketball collectors that may have gotten it. I came across one guy that looked pretty serious, and took a stab at it. I emailed him and asked if by any chance he got an incredible basketball statue at the Atlantique City show. He emailed me back and said no, but that he had heard about it. I struck out, but thought it was interesting word of the piece had gotten around.  Next I thought of a Los Angeles collector that I knew had the ability to drop 10 g's. It's been a while, but as I recall I emailed him, and bingo, he said yes he'd gotten it. I recall, I talked to him on the phone about it at some point, and he was a little amused when I mentioned I heard it took two people to carry it.  He said to the extent, it wasn't quite that heavy. I asked if it would be possible he could send me a photo. He said he would send a hard photo by snail mail. I was hoping he would send a digital photo by email, but I wasn't about to complain. Shortly I got the photo in the mail. When I opened it I had to laugh and shake my head. He sent me a Polaroid! Here I'd been tracking this thing down, and dying to see the most incredible basketball piece I've ever heard of, and I get a  Polaroid...worst photos on the planet! I couldn't complain though.  He was nice enough to send it, and he's probably just very busy and a Polaroid was the fastest and easiest for him. It may be a lousy photo, but at least I got a basic idea of what it looks like! Check it out for yourself below.