Gary Cypres’ mom probably wouldn’t have approved of the Sports Museum of Los Angeles.
It’s way too messy.
“My mother threw all my stuff out, including the Mickey (Mantle) rookie cards … hundreds of thousands of dollars, gone,” the 65-year-old Cypres, born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, said while managing a laugh.
“Cleanliness … it’s overrated.”
But not the museum that Cypres has finally pulled together from his best “stuff” – some of it, priceless. It’s been the most anticipated for Southern California sports history buffs since the eventual disappearance the Helms Athletic Hall of Fame some 30 years ago.
In a sprawling warehouse-type space on the corner of Main and Washington near downtown L.A., on the site of an old furniture store he bought years ago and renovated into a travel and finance agency that catered to the Hispanic community, Cypres has cut through L.A. City planning red-tape battles to stage what some call the greatest private sports collection ever assembled. It opens to the public Friday.
There are about 10,000 artifacts, both historic and eclectic, mostly bought through auctions, not all of it able to be put out on display because of the space limitations.
If forced to put a value on it all, all Cypres says is that it’s north of $30 million.
“If you get hung up (on the value of things) … it’s like a house, what’s it worth until you sell it?” said the Brentwood
resident and father of five. “Six months ago people thought their houses were more than they are today. I never try to get too much into what something’s worth. It’s all relative.”
A former basketball player at Hofstra who made his fortunes from investment banking, Cypres has become the accidental museum curator because of his zeal of art and history. The philanthropic side of him wants to make sure the next generation of sports fans know why things are as they are in this world.
“Really, what we’ve tried to do here is create more than a history museum,” he said. “It’s a way to show how things progressed and how technology affected the evolution of sports from the equipment to the balls to the uniforms.
“Too often I think today kids don’t have a sense of history or understand the importance of Jackie Robinson or Bill Russell. I hope it spurs interest in going back to what sports has meant to America, to see how sports has mirrored what happened in society.”
To achieve that means, Cypres not only owns a lot of the collectables that you’ve read about in recent years, such as the T206 Honus Wagner baseball card or Barry Bonds’ 755 th home run ball. He also has turn-of-the-other- century bicycles, tennis rackets, golf clubs and equipment from almost every sport back to their beginnings.
Much of Cypres’ sports pioneer pursuit has been of things from his New York upbringing, which might seem out of place in a museum planted in Los Angeles. But fans of the Dodgers, both Brooklyn and L.A., as well as the NFL’s Rams, have their own rooms to sit and flash back.
“This place reminds me of visiting the treasures of King Tut’s tomb on a middle-school field trip in 1977, because after five minutes, you forget about the potential dollar value inside the room and become in awe of the magnitude of the collection,” said Mark Langill, the Dodgers’ team historian who’s in the process of assembling things from the organization’s collection that has been in storage for years to be displayed with the new phase of renovations at Dodger Stadium.
“Any historian could spend countless hours savoring all there is to offer.”
Bob Miller, the Kings’ Hall of Fame broadcaster who also toured the place recently, said he was most impressed by “how well the displays were arranged and presented. It’s a magnificent collection and he has done an amazing job tracing the evolution of various sports.”
Taking the spin around the 30-gallery amazing maze of memorabilia with Cypres as a guide is like following Willy Wonka. At any turn, another room reveals another magical thing about sports with him to give context to it with a story.
A six-foot high banner in a plastic case on the wall is the Dodgers’ 1956 National League championship banner. Cypres notes the stitching around the last “6.”
“It was the same banner they used in 1953 and 1955, they just put a patch over the last number to save money on a new one,” Cypres said. “That’s just what they did back then.”
In the college football room, the old Harold Lloyd movie “The Freshman” plays on a monitor, catching Cypres’ focus. He stops to watch.
“Oh, and over there is a Heisman Trophy,” he says modestly, motioning toward the 1941 statue that once belonged to Minnesota’s Bruce Smith. Cypres got it from the family during an auction.
A big sports-film buff, Cypres’ next phase of the museum is to expand it by another 14,000 feet and put out all his sports movie trailers and films. Most of the walls now are donned with posters of sports-related movies – check out the one with John Wayne as a hockey player in “Idol of the Crowds” from 1937.
Cypres also has so many things upstairs that relate to other sports, it’s only a matter of time before they’re all put out.
“I’m already thinking ahead,” he said. “My appetite now is in other areas.”
Does it mean he may have his eye on something that he hasn’t been able to buy to add to his stuff?
“Not really,” he said, without boasting. “I usually end up getting it if I really want it.”
Source:http://www.dailynews.com/sports/ci_11054304