Beautifully engraved Scarce Specimen Certificate from
World Wrestling Entertainment. This historic document was printed by the Security-Columbian United States Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of the company logo. This item has the printed signatures of the Company’s President, Chief Evecutive Officer and Secretary, Linda McMahon and Chairman of the Board of Directors, Vincent McMahon.
Certificate Vignette
The company (formerly Titan Sports) produces and promotes wrestling matches for TV, pay-per-view, and live audiences. Its WWF Raw (broadcast on the USA Network) is a top US cable program. The firm also produces 12 pay-per-view programs and some 200 live events each year. In addition, it licenses characters for merchandise such as toys, sells videos and CDs, publishes wrestling magazines, and is launching its own pro football league in partnership with NBC. Chairman Vince McMahon controls 97% of WWF's voting power.
About SpecimensSpecimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".
Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.
These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.