Couture in Great Company in Topps Allen & Ginter
Published by on November 27th, 2007 in Memorabilia

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Trading cards with athletes on them had their origin most likely in the 1860’s, when various companies would put the pictures of baseball players on cards. The logic of these origins was relatively simple – players posed for individual and group photos, like one would put into a wallet. In 1868, Peck and Snyder, a sporting goods company, put pictures of baseball teams on cards for its own promotional purposes. This was before even the advent of professional baseball (marked in 1869 with the Cincinnati Red Stockings). They were, one supposes, glorified business cards.

The Limited Edition Autograph Card. 200 Printed.
 
The concept of the common baseball trading card originated with the cigarette card, which was first issued in 1887 (the date was given as 1885 or 1886 as well by some historical reports) by Allen & Ginter, a Virginia-based tobacco company. The cards came in packs of Richmond Gems, Perfection, Dandies and Virginia Brights – brands Allen & Ginter made and distributed. The cards were full-color, using a process called “chromolithography” that was quite revolutionary for its time. They served a couple of different purposes at once – as a promotional tool, of course, but also, as unusual as it may seem, as a way to protect the product inside (the cigarettes). Apparently it was a forerunner to the flip-top box.
 
The first set – Allen & Ginter’s World’s Champions – included ten major league baseball players, but also celebrities from other fields, namely show business personalities and also fighters. This started a trend, as more companies jumped into the fray. In 1890 Allen & Ginter was integrated into the American Tobacco Company, which continued to release cards. One of those sets, known as the “T-206″ set, connected to the company’s Sweet Caporal brand, featured a card with Honus Wagner, the star shortstop of the Pittsburgh Pirates. As the story goes, Wagner, for the sake of its influence on children, objected to the idea of being associated with tobacco (even though he was a smoker) and did not want a card of that type issued with his likeness on it (another story says he just wasn’t getting paid). As a result, it was later pulled. But it couldn’t be pulled completely from circulation, so there are a few dozen original Honus Wagner cards still in existence, and they are generally considered to be the most valuable of baseball cards, partly because Wagner is one of the five original Hall of Fame inductees. One of his cards, for example, has sold for as high as $2.35 million.
 
Citing the historical importance of the Allen & Ginter cards, the Topps Trading Card Company decided to re-introduce them to the marketplace. The 2006 Topps Allen & Ginter Baseball set, released in July of that year, mimicked the original Allen & Ginter design. It featured 300 baseball players, and, like the original Allen & Ginter set, many notables from outside of baseball. Topps went to great lengths to put together an eclectic group of individuals to populate its collection. Among this assemblage were Mike Tyson, Leon Spinks, race car driver Danica Patrick, track and field star Carl Lewis, surfing pioneer Duke Kahanamoku and legendary UCLA coach John Wooden, along with some lesser lights.
 
One of the more interesting inclusions was that of mixed martial arts superstar Randy Couture, who at the time of the issue was in retirement from the UFC. When Topps put the Allen & Ginter set out in July, Couture had just been inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame, which buttressed his credentials as the official “representative” of Ultimate Fighting. And he had yet to make even more history by coming out of retirement and regaining the heavyweight title. In a way, Couture’s appearance in the set was carrying forward a tradition Allen & Ginter had started with its “World’s Champions” set in 1887, which highlighted people like bare knuckle boxing champ Jem Smith.
 
Couture’s inclusion in this set is considered the first in the mainstream trading card milieu for mixed martial arts, and is certainly ground-breaking in that it marked the sport as something that was here to stay for collectors throughout the memorabilia world. In 2007 Topps took its involvement with MMA a step further when it announced that it had made a deal to produce trading cards with the International Fight League (IFL).