Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

As anyone following the Super Bowl coverage now knows, the last time the Cardinals won the NFL championship was 1947, while they were still playing in Chicago. One of the stars of the 1947 team was Charley Trippi, pictured here on one of his rookie cards, a 1948 Bowman. (Charley’s other rookie card is a 1948 Leaf. Both Bowman and Leaf printed football cards in 1948.)

Reading about Trippi and the rest of the Cardinals’ “Million Dollar Backfield” (also Paul Christman, Elmer Angsman, and Pat Harder) led me to look at Charley’s stats. I knew he had played halfback, but on his stats page I noticed that in 1951 and 1952 he also had a lot of passing statistics. Cool, I thought, he played quarterback for awhile, too. Then I noticed he had punting stats. And kick and punt return stats. And interception stats. The guy played five positions!

I have recently been listing a lot of ungraded 1972 Topps cards for sale, and it’s given me a chance to admire some of Topps’s airbrushing work. As I wrote in this entry, the company often used airbrushing to put a player in the right colors for his new team. Here are a couple of fine examples.

The first is John Brockington, who appears on two cards in the set: his rookie card, which shows him in his college all-star jersey, and his All-Pro card, which shows the same photo with the jersey airbrushed green. The second is MacArthur Lane, who was traded from the Cardinals to the Packers and needed his jersey changed to Packer green. They even airbrushed poor MacArthur’s ear!

Find 1972 Topps cards on: eBay, Nearmint’s Cards

Last Saturday evening I was drinking beer and cruising the web, and I saw this autographed 1963 Fleer Billy Shaw card on eBay. That’s cool, I thought, and the price seemed right, so I hit the Buy-it-Now button. So now I have the beginning of an autograph collection.

This is Billy’s second card, his first being his 1962 Fleer rookie card, a tough one to find in high grade. Billy is the only pro football hall-of-famer to have played only in the AFL. Other AFL players have made it to the hall-of-fame, of course, but each of them also played in the NFL at some time, mostly after the AFL-NFL merger.

My new Shaw card happens to be the version with the red stripe on the bottom on the reverse. 1963 Fleer cards with numbers divisible by four were printed both with and without the stripe, and Shaw is card #28. I don’t have a Shaw without the stripe, unfortunately, but I do have one of each of card #40, Jim Norton, pictured below. Like the purple and blue variations of 1963 Topps cards, the striped vs. non-striped variations of 1963 Fleers are not recognized by Beckett, PSA, or any other football card authority that I am aware of.

Yesterday I added the full set of 1970 Topps Super cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Not to be confused with 1970 Topps Super Glossy insert cards, these are large cards that were sold separately from the regular 1970 Topps cards. The cards are colorful and attractive, and because they are elongated, most show a good portion of the player’s uniform. Some of the players’ pictures are the same as on the regular 1970 Topps cards, some are the same as on the Super Glossies, and some are completely different from the other 1970 Topps issues. The Joe Namath card, thankfully, doesn’t show him with a Band-Aid on his head.

The backs show the same information as the regular 1970 Topps cards, but the large amounts of white space make the backs look like an afterthought. On the set I have, a few of the backs have paper wrinkles from the factory. It’s best just to enjoy the fronts of these cards and not turn them over.

You learn something every day. I’ve looked at these cards a hundred times, and I never knew they were the same person. According to Remember the AFL, the player on both cards is Ed Rutkowski.

The bottom picture shows an older Ed Rutkowski on a Living Prime Time cover. It’s pretty clear that this is the guy on the Abruzzese card. For more photos of Rutkowski, see the full Living Prime Time article.

I’ve compiled a list of football cards showing the wrong players on a page in my gallery. Know of more? Send me an email!

I put some nice PSA-graded 1940s and 1950s cards up for sale today, mostly 1955 Bowmans, but a few other beauties as well.
Pictured here is a gorgeous 1952 Bowman Small Sammy Baugh card. After Sammy died in December, I learned about all his records: most seasons leading the league in passing (6), highest average punting average for a season (51.4 yards), first player to intercept four passes in a game, and so on. It reminded me to re-read an article I had found on ColdHardFootballFacts.com, The All-Time 11. In the article, the ColdHard guys named the 11 players from NFL history that they would choose if they could have only 11 players on the team. Each player would have to play every down: on offense, defense, and special teams. Check out the article, but before you do, can you guess the player they chose who played in this millennium?

I’ve settled on a few eBay sellers for sports card and mailing supplies, and I thought I’d pass them on. Columbia Sports Card has all the card holders, pages, cases, and bags you can imagine, and their prices on Card Saver 1′s and Card Saver 2′s are the best I’ve found.

ShopFamilyFun has great deals on bubble envelopes–they’re way cheaper than Office Max and the like. Some other places on eBay sell thin envelopes that seal poorly, but those that ShopFamilyFun sells are high quality.

Finally, since postage keeps going up, it’s nice to save a buck here and there on stamps. For this I sometimes buy discount postage and use that on my bubble envelopes. Discount postage is just old stamps in denominations that are no longer commonly used. (I am not a stamp collector, but I assume discount postage is to stamp collectors what “modern crap” is to card collectors.) Since postage for bubble envelopes typically adds up to odd amounts, anyway, a few of the old stamps will work just fine. And they’re fun to look at, just like old cards.