Back Off!

The time-honored image of the professional athlete patiently signing his name for adoring fans at the ballpark has been perverted into a never-ending chase—the hounds after the harried. And while athletes' obligations to fans properly include signing autographs, the current frenzy for such keepsakes, fueled by commerce as much as by sentiment, has gone far beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior. Athletes have the same right to walk unmolested through a hotel lobby, a restaurant or a parking lot as anyone else. And, above all, no celebrity should have to tolerate the invasion of his home.

Yet such invasions routinely occur. Mario Lemieux of the Pittsburgh Penguins has had a vanload of squealing 15-and 16-year-old girls arrive uninvited at his home in Mount Lebanon, Pa. The Chicago Cubs ' Andre Dawson , who lives in Miami during the offseason, was sitting on his porch last winter with a friend when, around midnight, a late-model luxury car veered into his driveway. Out popped an adult and two boys, who strode up to Dawson and stuck some baseball cards in his face. Dawson , hardly blinking, signed them. Happens all the time, he said softly to his friend. Dawson could have been forgiven if he had called the police.

At baseball's annual Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cooperstown, N.Y. , hundreds of collectors began camping overnight outside the Otesaga Hotel over the past few years in order to be in line before dawn for the official autograph sessions. The number of autograph seekers making the journey to the remote little town has gotten so out of hand—residents have complained bitterly—that for the ceremonies held this year, the signings were discontinued.

And it's not just a problem in baseball. All sports figures have increasingly been subjected to autograph hounding. During his practice rounds at the British Open golf tournament in July, Seve Ballesteros kept having to shoo away fans of all ages who were racing across the fairways with their pens. Boomer Esiason of the Cincinnati Bengals remembers that his worst autograph experience occurred on a commercial flight from Los Angeles to Cincinnati . First class was sold out, so Esiason flew coach. "It was like a four-hour autograph session," says Esiason, who is normally an obliging signer. "I couldn't go anywhere. I was trapped."

There was a time when adults were downright sheepish when they asked for a pro athlete's autograph, knowing that they were acting like children. No longer. "It used to be just kids," says the Philadelphia Eagles ' Randall Cunningham . "Now it's guys 35 to 40 years old. They'll come up to you with a stack of 40 cards and want you to sign them all."

"One guy came up to me with a hundred cards," says Ron Hextall of the Philadelphia Flyers . "Obviously they are not keeping them. I have never refused an autograph, but it's getting out of hand."

No one knows that better than Michael Jordan , probably the most hounded athlete in all of sport. At a recent charity auction conducted by the Chicago Bulls , an All-Star jersey signed by Jordan sold for $6,400. His autographed shoes went for $1,600. Bulls publicist Tim Hallam estimates that Jordan signs an average of more than 100 requests a day, which have come from as far away as West Germany . Even so, Jordan cannot begin to keep up with the demands. Another NBA star, Larry Bird , a reluctant signer, copes with the avalanche of mail he receives by enlisting the assistance of a ghost signer, a veteran clubhouse attendant with the Boston Celtics who can duplicate Bird's signature almost perfectly.

Clearly there has been a fundamental change in the way we treat our sports heroes. Perhaps it is the result of their astronomical salaries, or their increased exposure on television. Today a large segment of society seems to feel that a big-name athlete is public property 24 hours a day, like a beach or a city park, there for everyone's use and enjoyment. It is as if, by some Mephistophelian bargain, the modern athlete must pay for his talents and fame with his signature, over and over again.

Long ago, autograph collecting was an innocent hobby. There were no card shows where collectors paid an admission price and preset fees to have athletes sign their names on baseballs, 3" x 5" index cards and photographs. Autographs were privately treasured keepsakes that were pasted into a scrapbook or thumbtacked to a bedroom wall, alongside pennants, clippings, photos and the sundry knick-knacks of youth. These days, such treatment of a signature would be akin to defacing the Mona Lisa. Glue an autograph into a scrapbook? Poke a thumbtack through it? You fool, you just destroyed its resale value!

In the past decade the autograph business has launched a half dozen cottage industries. Magazines like Sports Collectors Digest and Tuff Stuff report on which athletes are obliging with their signatures and which are not. The ads in these publications give autograph hounds an idea of how much they can expect to get for Don Mattingly 's single-signature autographed baseball—$60, at the moment, in New York . Flea markets nationwide do a steady trade in athletes' autographs, and sports memorabilia stores are opening faster than S&Ls are shutting down. In fact, many stamp and coin dealers are expanding into the autograph business, and card show promoters can literally keep collectors and Hall of Famers trotting around the country 365 days a year.