Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

In a previous post, I said that John Brockington’s 1972 Topps card pictured him in what looked like his College All-Star jersey with the stars airbrushed away. Browsing through the rest of my 1972 Topps football cards, I found four other players, all rookies, in the same jersey: Jim Plunkett, Lyle Alzado, Ron Hornsby, and Julius Adams. Here are pictures of them.

I checked Marc Bolding’s College All-Star Game site and found that the five players indeed appeared on the roster for the 1971 game. Adams and Brockington also appear in photos on the game summary page. I assume that the jerseys Adams and Brockington are wearing in the game photos are the very same ones they are wearing on their cards.

At least two more players on the 1971 All-Star roster have rookie cards in the 1972 Topps set: John Riggins and Dan Pastorini. These two appear in their new pro uniforms, Riggins with the Jets and Pastorini with the Oilers.

In 1977, Topps tried translating their football cards to Spanish and producing and selling them in Mexico. The composition of the 1977 Topps Mexican set was the same as the 1977 Topps football set released in the U.S., but the Mexican cards were printed, packaged, and distributed differently, and they are much scarcer than their U.S. counterparts.

Scott Alpaugh, who collects the 1977 Mexicans, has put together a terrific web site that describes the set in detail. I don’t have anything to add to what Scott says, so I’ll just point you to his site: 1977 Topps Mexican Football Cards.

Pictured here is the 1977 Topps Mexican Golden Richards card. Around the edges you can see the perforations that Scott discussed in his article. Oddly, Topps translated Cowboys to Vaqueros on the front, but not on the back. (Click on the scans to see larger images.)

You can see the composition of the set on PSA’s set registry, and you can find more pictures of 1977 Topps Mexicans on eBay.

Alas, the experiment evidently didn’t work, since there’s no 1978 Topps Mexican set.

I recently added a couple of small enhancements to my eBay Sports Card Finder. First, there’s now a link, labeled “th,” from each eBay listing to Toolhaus.org. Toolhaus filters out all of the positive feedback for a seller, and shows you just the seller’s negative and neutral feedback.

For the sake of speed, picking a “th” link in the Sports Card Finder brings up a Toolhaus page showing three months of feedback for the seller. You can see older feedback by picking links on the Toolhaus page. Try it out.

The second enhancement is that you can now create an RSS feed for any auction search. When you register the feed with an RSS reader, it will notify you of new auctions that match your search. You will need an RSS reader, but there are plenty of free ones out there. I use Google Reader, but Yahoo, MSN, Windows Live, and other portals provide them, as well.

To create an RSS feed and register it with an RSS reader, first do your search in the Sports Card Finder, then pick the Subscribe button on the bottom of the page. It will bring up a long list of RSS readers. Choose the reader you use, and follow the instructions it presents.

One problem with collecting rookie cards is that it locks you in to the cards that you will include in your collection. Whether you collect rookie cards of Hall of Famers, Heisman winners, or players from your favorite college or team, there’s not much wiggle room: if you want to complete your collection, you’ll probably have to purchase some cards that aren’t very attractive. Check out Bobby Mitchell’s rookie card, for example. He looks like he’s ordering a five dollar footlong while falling over backward.

One way to avoid this is to choose your own “best card” for each player you want in your collection. A great example of such a personalized collection is RustyWilly’s HOF Portrait Gallery. Rather than collecting whatever happens to be the rookie card of each Hall of Famer, RustyWilly chose a nice head shot of each player. He didn’t limit himself to major sets, either, so he has cards from Kelloggs, Swell, Stop N Go, 7 Eleven, and Wonder Bread. Not only did this give him a wider selection of images to choose from, it allowed him to include Hall of Famers who didn’t appear on cards in major issues, and hence didn’t have rookie cards. (See R is for Rookie Cards for the definition of “rookie card.”)

Clicking on an image in RustyWilly’s gallery brings up large scans of both the front and back of the card. The card backs are a nice feature, since they provide little bios of the Hall of Famers. They’re also a ton of work, which is why I haven’t included them in my own gallery.

RustyWilly also has a Baseball HOF Portrait Gallery. I don’t know much about baseball cards, though, so I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Here’s an interesting item: a 1966 American Oil Game Sheet. The object of the game was to complete a row of stamps–which I assume you got from American Oil gas stations–to win a prize. One stamp in each row, of course, was rare.

The 1966-68 American Oil Sweepstakes Stamps page on thecowboysguide.com shows some of the stamps and has another view of the game sheet. If you hold your cursor over the game sheet, you can see that most of the stamps are pasted on it. The missing stamps are the key stamps needed for prizes. I can’t tell who is on the missing stamp in the Mustang row. I wonder if any examples of that stamp exist?

You can usually find examples of other American Oil game pieces on eBay.

The first set of football cards was the 1894 Mayo Cut Plug tobacco card series. The 35-card set, which was distributed in tins of chewing tobacco, includes only college players from Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. There is a nice article about the Mayo cards on The Harvard-Yale Football Gallery, a site dedicated to the Harvard-Yale rivalry. According to the article, one of the Princeton players in the set, “Poe,” was related to Edgar Allan Poe. Another card in the set pictures an unnamed Yale player, initially listed as “Anonymous,” but later identified as John Dunlop. The Dunlop card is the rarest card in the set.

You can see the entire set of 1894 Mayo Cut Plug cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. A big thanks to Goodwin and Co. Auctions for allowing me to use their scans.

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Here’s an easy one.

Question #5: What do the three players pictured on these football cards have in common?

Scroll down slowly; the answer is after the sponsored links. For more information on a card, click on it or hold your cursor over it.

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Answer: Each of them once held the NFL record for longest field goal. For a nice article on the record, see The Longest Field Goal in NFL History: Evolution of the Record.

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Today’s article in the Uni Watch blog bemoans the disappearance of “shoulder loops” on NFL jerseys. (Scroll down to Getting Loopy On You.) The article prompted me to look through my old cards to find which teams’ uniforms had the loops. As I did that, I realized that my favorite uniforms were the ones with the loops, and the loops were the reason I liked them. Here they are, both on 1964 Topps cards: the Patriots uniform, modeled by Ron Burton, and the Chargers uniform, modeled by Earl Faison.

I believe these 1964 cards show the players in their 1963 uniforms, so these are also the uniforms that the Patriots and Chargers are using as throwbacks this year. The eight original AFL teams are wearing throwback uniforms in several games in 2009 to commemorate their 50th year of play. The Patriots chose their 1963 uniform because they won the AFL East Division that year, and the Chargers chose 1963 because it was the year they won the AFL championship.

According to the Oldest Living Pro Football Players web site, Ralph Kerchival is the oldest living pro player, at nearly 98 years old. He was a back and kicker with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the NFL from 1934 to 1940. In a 1993 interview, Kercheval said that he played on both offense and defense for the Dodgers, and in his rookie year he played for all but five minutes of the entire season. (Don’t miss the cartoon clipping from the Additional Photos section of the interview page.)

Pictured here is Kercheval’s 1935 National Chicle rookie card. He also appeared on a 1955 Topps All-American card.

• Search eBay for Ralph Kercheval cards.

A few weeks ago I posted an entry about the impressive Ed Meador Hall of Fame Nomination site. Other people have their own favorite Hall of Fame candidates, of course, and some of them have built web sites, too. One such site is Crazy Canton Cuts, which at last count made a case for 39 players! In particular, the site owner would like to see Chris Hanburger inducted, and he has started a petition in Hanburger’s behalf.

Another site, Remember the AFL is dedicated to the American Football League, and it makes the case for 42 ex-AFL players. This list of candidates overlaps only a little with that of Crazy Canton Cuts, so the two sites together promote over 60 candidates.

Finally, a Google search for “pro football hall of fame petition” turns up a raft of petitions for individual players. A few not included in the sites above are L. C. Greenwood, John Brodie, Andre Tippett, Rickey Jackson, and Glenn Presnell.

So, in total, what is that, 65 or 70 candidates? Plenty of good reading, for sure. But wait a minute, then there’s Jerry Kramer, Alex Karras, Ken Stabler, Ken Anderson…

• Search eBay for: Future HOF

Sometimes you get to a topic in a roundabout way. Last night I came across this terrific 1954 Bowman Jim Dooley card, and I thought I’d look for other cards that picture players in their College All-Star uniforms. I found John Brockington’s 1972 Topps rookie card, which I believe shows him in an All-Star jersey with the stars airbrushed off. It’s not an Ohio State jersey, and it’s not a Packers jersey, but it has the style of an All-Star jersey, and Brockington played in the All-Star game in 1971. (Topps also used this image of Brockington on his 1972 All-Pro card, where they airbrushed his jersey Packer green.)

Anyway, looking around the internet for pictures of players in their All-Star uniforms, I found a site called The Chicago Charities College All-Star Game 1934-1976. What a great site! It provides the background and history of the game, scores from each year, a summary of each year’s game, game records, the MVPs, and yearly attendance. Some of the early games drew over 100,000 fans!

The MVP awards were given only to the college players, and the positions that the MVPs played show how the game evolved. In the 30′s and 40′s, nearly all of the MVPs were running backs, and there was even an offensive lineman, Bill Fischer. In the 50′s and 60′s, as the passing game became more prevalent, the award went mainly to quarterbacks. In the late 60′s and 70′s, when the NFL dominated the game and stuffed the All-Star offenses, many of the awards went to the All-Stars’ defensive players. The college MVP in the final game, in 1973? The punter, Ray Guy!

Find Jim Dooley cards on: eBay, Nearmint’s Cards.

Bob Lemke, editor of the vintage card sections of the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, makes a hobby of creating custom vintage sports cards. Pictured is one of his latest creations, a 1968 Topps Brian Piccolo card. Though Piccolo started with the Bears in 1965, the card companies did not print a card of him until 1969, when Topps issued his rookie card and included him on a 4-in-1 stamp card. (Unfortunately, on both cards Topps misspelled Piccolo’s name “Bryon.”)

I like the image Bob chose for this card; it’s the helmet-in-hands pose I described earlier this week. Bob has also created a 1966 Philadelphia Piccolo card using a different image.

For more of Bob’s creations, all in the style of 1955 Topps All-Americans, check out his PhotoBucket gallery. There’s even one of Bluto Blutarsky!

Earlier this week, via the Remember the Rams blog, I came across the Eddie Meador Hall of Fame Nomination site. The site is well-done and thorough–did you know that he worked in an Arkansas pickle plant during college?–and it’s clear that his friends and family are very devoted to him.

Meador played mostly before my time, and until I read his Awards and Statistics page, I didn’t know how good he had been. Meador’s rookie card, a 1963 Topps, is relatively easy to find, and it is inexpensive for a rookie card of a hall-of-fame candidate. Meador also had three cards issued before his rookie card: 1959 Bell Brand, 1960 Bell Brand, and 1962 Post Cereal, all of which are challenging to find. I can’t think of another other player with three “pre-rookie” cards, so if he does make the hall-of-fame, I’ll have to add a new section to my pre-rookie card page.

Altogether, Meador appeared on at least eleven cards, a large number for a defensive player in the 1960′s. The card pictured here is his 1960 Bell Brand Potato Chips card.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: Ed Meador cards, 1960 Bell Brand Rams
• Search eBay for: Ed Meador cards, 1960 Bell Brand Rams

On the topic of uncut sheets, I never realized that there were multiple 1962 Post football cards on each cereal box. Yesterday I came across a full back panel on the Vintage Classics page of TheCowboysGuide.com. It makes sense that each box had several cards on it: with 200 cards in the set, one card per box would have required a kid to eat an awful lot of cereal!

Steve Liskey, the owner of the site, points out that some cards could be less common because they were on unpopular cereal. That makes sense: maybe the short prints, like Jim Johnson’s pre-rookie card, were on the back of Grape Nuts boxes?

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: 1962 Post Cereal
• Search eBay for: 1962 Post Cereal

You know a collector loves his cards when he takes the time to scan each card and comment on it. The PSA Set Registry allows collectors to attach scans and comments to the cards they register, but not many collectors take advantage of this feature.

A couple of collectors’ vintage football sets are worth a look: Wolfbear’s 1962 Fleer set and Frank Evanov’s retired 1964 Philadelphia set. Each collector has provided a description of the set, scans of each card, and comments for each card. (If a comment appears truncated, hold your cursor over it to see the whole thing.) Did you know that Robert Brooks was a “a mahjong enthusiast and an accomplished bassoonist”? I didn’t, either!