Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

The backs of some 1964 Topps CFL cards have puzzle pieces printed on them, and I spent the morning putting the puzzle together for you. I can’t say it’s a pretty picture. I believe it was the first puzzle to appear on the backs of football cards, however, so the Canadians do get some innovation points. I also did some consolidation and put the puzzles from the 1968 Topps and 1969 Topps NFL/AFL sets on the same page. Check out the full set of 1960s puzzles.

Here’s a trivia question for you: what legendary NFL running back appeared on the 1964 Topps CFL Saskatchewan Roughriders team card? Here is a picture of the card. The player is in the middle row, fourth from the left, wearing number 32.

Give up? The answer is Jim Brown. What, you say, Jim Brown never played in the CFL? Well, it’s a trick question, because the team pictured on the card is not the 1964 Saskatchewan Roughriders. It is actually the 1959 Cleveland Browns. I learned this bit of trivia earlier this week from a post on a Roughriders forum.

But that’s not the extent of the error. Topps routinely used the same team photos for years at a time, and all of the Roughrider team cards in the 1961-1963 Topps CFL sets have the same mistake. Ironically, though Topps used the 1959 Browns photo on several CFL cards, this photo never appeared on an NFL card. Topps used a picture of the 1958 Browns team on all of its Browns team cards from 1959 to 1963.

For many more football cards that picture the wrong players, see the Mistaken Identities page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

This week I added 1964 Topps CFL cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 88 cards in the set: nine or ten cards for each of the CFL teams, plus two nearly identical checklists. The card pictured here is Sherman Lewis, who placed third in Heisman voting in 1963 (see my page of Heisman candidates), played in the CFL in 1964 and 1965, played for the New York Jets in 1966 and 1967, and went on to a long coaching career in college and the NFL. Sherman was an assistant coach with four Super Bowl championship teams: three with San Francisco and one with Green Bay.

I filed the 1964 set under–what else?–Canadian football cards. Watch for four more CFL sets in the next few weeks.