Joe Theismann Teaches Autograph Theory And Development 101
Posted by Matt Terl on July 27, 2010 – 11:16 am
About a year ago, people started asking for my autograph. Not a lot of people, and not (for the most part) random people on the street. But when I would walk around Redskins Training Camp 2009, fans would ask me to sign things.
I’ve never been much of an autograph collector myself, although I do remember waiting in the parking lot outside of RFK after a game against the Falcons back in 1991 and having a great time getting players to sign my seat cushion. So I understand where people are coming from when they ask; I’d mumble something awkward and sign self-consciously and continue on.
Of all the strange things that have happened to me since I started this job, that was the strangest. Still is, every time it happens.
But here’s something that managed to make it even stranger: one person who noticed my uncertainty when signing autographs was Joe Theismann, and — when I ran into him at Redskins Park the day after one of last year’s preseason games — he took it upon himself to instruct me in the proper thinking behind signing an autograph.
I recorded Theismann with an eye toward writing up the whole surreal experience, had one of the other people in the office take some photos … and then the audio and images got dumped into a folder on my computer and forgotten about over the course of the miserable 2009 season. I found them when I was getting my hard drive straightened up (gotta start the new season off right!), and thought that — even a year later — it might make an appropriate post for these last slow days before training camp kicks off.
So here’s Joe Theismann, explaining that the biggest concern with an autograph was its recognizability.
“If people are asking for your autograph, you want them to be able to know who you are. You don’t want them to look at some scribble and — when someone says, ‘who is that?’ — they go, ‘I don’t know.’ So what young autograph[-seeking] kids do now is when they go up to a player and can’t read their signature, they print the name right underneath it.”
Theismann grabbed a sheet of paper off the desk to demonstrate his next point. (I scanned the sheet, stored it in the same folder as the pics and the audio, and promptly forgot about it along with everything else.)
“So what you want to do,” he said, “is you want to create something. The most important part of signing autographs is to have something that is yours, like my ‘J’ is mine.”
On the paper, he looped a J that looked something like an offset figure 8:
“Whenever anybody sees my ‘J’,” he said, “that’s mine. Nobody else has that ‘J’, nobody else has that signature. So you wanna create an ‘M.’ Whether it’s flowing or however it is, you wanna create it so that when people look at it and say, ‘Oh that’s Matt, I know who that it’. So if you go like this –”
He looked at that for a second and shrugged. “Well, you can play with the lines on the second part of the name, but the thing you have to be able to do is that people have to look at that first letter and say, ‘Okay that’s Matt’. What you wanna do is you wanna make your autograph memorable.”
And Theismann was very clear: this is not the sort of thing that happens by accident. You don’t just sign an autograph like you sign a credit card receipt. You don’t just hope your signature makes for a cool autograph. No, you have to develop this thing.
“In my second year in the Canadian Football League,” he said, “I had a very very blocky kind of autograph. It was like this:
“I didn’t like it. It was all lines and stuff. So what I did is I sat there-I broke my leg in 1972-and I’m sitting there in my living room with about 12 footballs sitting next to me, watching the Argonauts, my football team, play while they were on the road. And I picked up each ball and I said to myself ‘Someday I wanna be good enough so that some company will ask me to put my signature on a football,’ so I started practicing my autographs on footballs. That’s how I came up with my signature.”
Someone half-joked that I should write BLOGGER under my autograph, the way players incorporate their numbers. Theismann thought that this was a terrible, terrible idea.
“No,” he said. “No, no, no, no, no, nope. What associates you with the blog will be the way you write your first initial. The first letter that you write in your name will become the identity. When people look at that they’ll say, ‘That’s Matt, he’s the blogger for the Redskins’.”
Theismann also demonstrated how to sign a jersey — on the shoulder, with a hand underneath the fabric stretching it taut and providing a writing surface — and how to avoid being inappropriate when signing a jersey that someone is wearing. All valuable tips.
But what nagged at me wasn’t the mechanics of autographing something, or even the nuts and bolts of developing an autograph. It was the whole fact of being asked for my autograph at all, which was completely foreign to anything I had experienced before, and which seemed vastly out of line my actual role in the universe.
Theismann had no such existential crisis.
“It’s flattering,” he said, shrugging. “I always look at it at people saying I appreciate your work, can I have your autograph. You ask yourself some questions sometimes, like ‘What do people do with this?’ I’ve had people come up to me, pull out a wallet, and show me an autograph I had signed for them 35 or 40 years ago when I was at the University of Notre Dame. And that makes you feel good. You know, if someone wants your autograph, what they’re basically saying to you is, ‘I think so much of you that I want something to remember you by’ and I always look at it as a great compliment.”
That part was easy. I still haven’t come up with a memorable autograph, though. If you ever asked me to sign something, just know that the random scribble that looks like a Space Invader crossed with a barcode, that’s me — and for my role, that’s fine. You really need to have quarterbacked a team to a Super Bowl to warrant something like this:
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