Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

One day, while scanning cards, I noticed that the cartoon on the back of Homer Jones’s 1968 Topps card said that “Homer defeated the Russians in the 1960 Olympics.” Hmm, I thought, that’s a good idea for a blog article. There was a problem, though: I couldn’t find a reference saying that Jones had ever competed in the Olympics. He was a star sprinter at Texas Southern, and he might have defeated the Russians in some competition, but it doesn’t appear to have been in the Olympic Games. (According to his Wikipedia page, however, Jones did invent the touchdown spike, which is “said to be the origin of post-touchdown celebrations.” While not quite beating the Russians, that’s still quite a legacy.)

In my research for Jones, I found a list of other pro football players who had competed in the Olympics. It’s a long list, so I narrowed it down to those who had won medals, and then to those who appeared on vintage football cards. That left six players, a suitable number for a blog article.

Jim Thorpe

Jim Thorpe won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon in the Stockholm Olympics in 1912. In 1913, the International Olympic Committee took the medals away when they learned that Thorpe had played minor league baseball (and thus had been a professional athlete) before participating in the Olympics. In 1982, Thorpe’s family succeeded in having his medals restored.

Thorpe played professional football from 1915 to 1928, for six different teams. He was a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s inaugural class in 1963. Thorpe also played professional baseball–including seven seasons in the major leagues–from 1909 to 1922. Pictured here is his rookie card, from the 1933 Sport Kings multi-sport set.

Clyde Scott

Clyde Scott won a silver medal in the 110 meter hurdles in the 1948 Olympics in London. He played four seasons in the NFL, as a running back and defensive back for the Eagles and Lions. He appeared on the 1950 Bowman card pictured here, and on a 1951 Bowman card. According to Scott’s profile on the Encyclopedia of Arkansas web site, the readers of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette named Scott the state’s Athlete of the Century in 2000.

Ollie Matson

Ollie Matson won a bronze medal in the 400 meters and a silver in the 1600 meter relay in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. He then had a fourteen-year, Hall of Fame career in the NFL. Matson appeared on a lot of cards. Pictured here is his 1962 Topps card.

Bo Roberson

Bo Roberson took silver in the long jump in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, missing the gold medal by a centimeter. He then played six seasons in the AFL, for four different teams. His 1966 Topps card is pictured here. According to a his profile at ivy50.com, after football, Roberson attended law school, earned a master’s degree at Whitworth College, and earned his doctorate degree at age 58. Wow.

Bob Hayes

“Bullet” Bob Hayes won two gold medals in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, in the 100 meter sprint and 400 meter relay. Hayes then played wide receiver for eleven years for the Cowboys and 49ers, and he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2009. Hayes appeared on many football cards; the one pictured here is a 1971 Topps Game card.

Henry Carr

Henry Carr also won two gold medals in the 1964 Tokyo Games, in the 200 meter sprint and 1600 meter relay. The New York Giants, according to an article at pe.com, then signed Carr primarily to cover Bob Hayes. Carr spent three years with the Giants, the highlight of his career being a 101-yard interception return for a touchdown in 1966. His 1966 Philadelphia card is pictured here.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: Jim Thorpe, Clyde Scott, Ollie Matson, Bo Roberson, Bob Hayes, Henry Carr.

There is a great thread going in the Collectors Universe forums about favorite “combo” cards. I had not heard the term before, but it appears that combo cards are simply cards that feature more than one player. (Team cards don’t count, because they’re, you know, team cards.) Some of the cards posted in the CU thread have been autographed by all of the players–very cool.

Most of the cards posted in the CU thread are baseball cards, which isn’t surprising, since the card companies printed far more baseball cards than cards from other sports. What does strike me, though, is how few combo vintage football cards there are. The 1968 KDKA Steelers set is composed entirely of combo cards, but that is a minor regional set. Beyond that, I can think of only a few combos: the 1955 Topps All-American Four Horsemen card, the 1966 Philadelphia Morrall/Scholtz and Gabriel/Bass cards, League Leader and All-Pro cards in some of the 1970s Topps sets, and 1969 Topps 4-in-1 cards, which were actually meant to be separated into four stamps. Of these, only the Four Horsemen, Morrall/Scholtz, and Gabriel/Bass–a grand total of three cards–picture multiple players in the same image.

Vintage baseball cards, on the other hand, feature plenty of multi-player images. Some of the baseball cards posted in the CU thread are batting duos and trios from the same team: Aaron and Matthews; Brock and Flood; Schmidt, Rose, and Bowa. Where are all the football cards like this? Where are Unitas and Berry, Hornung and Taylor, Morris and Csonka, the Million Dollar Backfield, the Fearsome Foursome, and the Purple People Eaters? The football card folks had no imagination.

Some combo baseball cards even picture players from different teams in the same image. There’s Aaron and Mays; Banks and Aaron; Brett and Carew; Killebrew, Mays, and Mantle; on and on. I imagine that some of the multi-player baseball images were pieced together from multiple photos, but how many football cards picture players from different teams standing next to one another? Zero that I can think of. There have been Pro Bowls every year since 1951, but where are the cards of dream backfields, the league’s meanest linebackers, or even dueling punters? Someone must have taken photos–why didn’t the photos make it onto cards?

Oh well, I guess I have a little baseball card envy today. If you can think of more combo football cards, let me know.

• Search eBay for: Four Horsemen, Mays and Mantle, Banks and Aaron
• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: 1955 Topps All-Americans, 1966 Philadelphia

Last fall, when I wrote in the Collectors Universe forums that I was starting the ABCs, I said that I hadn’t yet thought of a topic for Z. One of the participants there (thanks, nam812!) suggested “Z is for Zebras.” Great idea, I thought, but only a few vintage cards of officials came to mind, and all of them were in the 1966 and 1967 Philadelphia sets. If I had only those to write about, “Z is for Zebras” would be a short article.

I learned last week, though, that Bruce Alford was a longtime NFL official who had appeared on a card as a player. I wondered if other officials had appeared on cards as players, too. Wikipedia happens to have an all-time list of NFL officials, so I perused the list, looking for names I recognized from cards. Including Alford, I found four. That was better, now I could include them in this article, as well.

First, the Philadelphia cards. The 1966 and 1967 Philadelphia sets each include a Referee Signals card and a few cards that have referee signals on the back. In the 1966 set, the referee signals appear on the backs of the “play” cards; in the 1967 set, they appear on the backs of the team cards. The Referee Signals cards and the back of the 1966 Philadelphia Vikings Play card are shown here.

Except for an occasional official in the background (thanks, revmoran!) or random striped shirt in an action photo, that’s really about it for officials on vintage cards. But then we have the zebras who appeared on cards in their pre-zebra days:

Bruce Alford, who recently passed away, spent six years as a player in the AAFC and NFL, then officiated in the NFL for twenty years. He officiated Super Bowls II, VII, and IX. Alford appeared as a player on a 1951 Bowman card.

Al Conway was the Eagles’ first-round draft pick in 1953, and he appeared on a 1953 Bowman card. According to pro-football-reference.com, he never played a league game, but he went on to officiate for 28 years in the AFL and NFL.

Pat Harder played eight years for the Cardinals and Lions, and he appeared on four cards in that span: 1948 Bowman, 1948 Leaf, 1950 Bowman, and 1953 Bowman. His 1948 Bowman card is pictured here. After retiring as a player, Harder was an official for seventeen years. One game he officiated was the Raiders-Steelers playoff game in which Franco Harris made his Immaculate Reception.

Finally, Frank Sinkovitz was a center and linebacker for the Steelers for six years. He appeared on the 1950 Bowman card pictured here, and a 1951 Bowman card. After his playing days, he officiated for 26 years. One game he officiated was Super Bowl XV.

So there you have it, the NFL officials rookie card collection. If you can think of additions, let me know.

Now I know my ABCs…

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• All of the ABCs

• Search eBay for: Bruce Alford, Al Conway, Pat Harder, Frank Sinkovitz
• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: 1948 Bowman, 1950 Bowman, 1951 Bowman, 1953 Bowman

As I’ve written before, my favorite pose on a football card pictures the player about to put on his helmet. It’s fun seeing old helmets on cards, but if the players are wearing them, you can’t see their faces. Here are a few examples; for more, see an old post, My Favorite Pose.

1963 Topps Ernie McMillan and 1966 Philadelphia Don Chandler:

1967 Philadelphia Gail Cogdill and 1968 Topps Junior Coffey:

1968 Topps Dan Reeves and 1969 Topps J.R. Wilburn:

Back when kickers still kicked “conventionally,” some of them wore special square-toed kicking shoes. A few of the shoes showed up on cards: here we have a 1964 Philadelphia Sam Baker, a 1966 Philadelphia Bruce Gossett, and a 1974 Topps Curt Knight.

Reading about these kickers, I discovered that each of the three attempted at least one “fair catch kick” in his career. Knight attempted two of them. According to Wikipedia, in the history of the NFL, only 21 such kicks have been attempted in regular season and playoff games. Alas, our three square-toed kickers all missed their kicks.

As I wrote on my pre-rookie cards page, “rookie card” is an unfortunate term. Years ago, most players’ “rookie” cards were not printed in their rookie years, but sometime later, after they were established as pros. Many players, even Hall of Famers, didn’t appear on cards until well into their careers. Some didn’t appear on cards until long after their playing days were over. Dick Lane, for example, had 14 interceptions–still a league record–as a rookie for the Rams in 1952, but he didn’t appear on a card until 1957. Don Hutson played for the Packers from 1935 to 1945, but no one printed football cards from 1936 to 1947, so Hutson’s rookie card is a 1955 Topps All-American.

So “first card” would be a more accurate term than “rookie card.” Even that isn’t quite right, though, since players sometimes appeared on cards in minor sets before their rookie cards were issued. To be a rookie card, it is understood that a card has to have been printed by a major card company, such as Topps or Bowman. And it has to be a regular issue card, not an insert. So “first regular issue card printed by a major card company” is more precise, though it would make for a long abbreviation. And there’s even some contention about that: PSA’s Pro Football Hall of Fame Rookie Players registry set accepts either 1950 Topps Felt Backs or 1951 Bowmans for the rookie cards of Lou Creekmur and Ernie Stautner. Why? Perhaps because the 1950 Topps Felt Backs are small and ugly. So the registry’s definition of rookie card is “first regular issue card printed by a major card company, unless it’s small and ugly, in which case you can substitute a different one.”

There are other slight hitches. One is that sometimes cards picture the wrong player. Packer fullback Jim Taylor’s rookie card, a 1959 Topps, actually pictures Jim Taylor of the Cardinals. So does his 1960 Topps card. The 1959 Topps card is generally known as Taylor’s rookie card, but his picture doesn’t actually appear on a card until 1961. Some collectors consider his 1961 Topps and 1961 Fleer cards to be his real rookie cards, and Taylor himself reportedly won’t sign his 1959 Topps card.

Also, how about the 1964 Philadelphia Packers’ Play of the Year and Colts’ Play of the Year cards, which have small images of Vince Lombardi and Don Shula? Are they Lombardi and Shula’s rookie cards? I would say so, but my Beckett doesn’t have them marked as such. It does have them priced like rookie cards, though.

And why aren’t cards in the 1961 Nu-Card set considered rookie cards? Roman Gabriel, John Hadl, and Ernie Davis all appear in that set, but their Topps cards from later years are considered their rookie cards. The Nu-Card set pictures college players, but so do the 1951 Topps Magic and 1955 Topps All-American sets, and cards in those sets can be rookie cards. Is the 1961 Nu-Card set not considered a major issue? To my knowledge, the cards were distributed nationally, and there are plenty of them around, so they seem to me to be a major issue.

Whether or not a card is a rookie card has a large influence on its price, of course. Rookie cards, especially of Hall of Famers, are popular with collectors, so there is a high demand for them. Why are rookie cards more popular than other cards? Well, honestly, I think that someone with an early influence on the hobby–perhaps someone compiling a price guide–said “rookie cards should be worth more,” collectors said “okay,” and so it was. Intuitively this makes some sense, since older cards are generally scarcer than newer ones, and a player’s first card would tend to be his scarcest. This certainly isn’t true in all cases, though, so declaring rookie cards more valuable than others is largely artificial.

Perhaps rookie cards were declared valuable to help fuel the modern card market. Modern card collectors like to buy new players’ rookie cards, speculating that the players will become stars and their cards will become valuable. Collectors in the vintage card market do some of this, too: since rookie cards of Hall of Fame players are valuable, collectors speculate by buying cards of senior candidates for the Hall of Fame. The Bob Hayes rookie card pictured here is an example of a card whose price jumped recently, when Hayes was elected to the Hall of Fame.

Some players have more than one rookie card; this happened when more than one company printed cards of the same league in the same year. Sammy Baugh has a 1948 Bowman rookie card, for instance, and also a 1948 Leaf rookie card. Jim Otto has both 1961 Topps and 1961 Fleer rookie cards. For most years before 1970, though–the years I think of as vintage–only one company per year printed cards for a given league, if anyone printed football cards at all.

It seems to me that the concept of a rookie card serves as a convenient way to identify a player’s most desirable card. Which card is a player’s rookie card can sometimes be ambiguous, but identifying a player’s rookie card is much less contentious than, say, trying to decide on his most attractive card, or his scarcest. Picking a most desirable card for each player helps collectors narrow their collecting focus: they can collect rookie cards of Hall of Famers, Heisman winners, players from their favorite team, etc.

I have 80-90% of the rookie cards marked in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, including those of players who appear on only a card or two. You can use the Advanced Search page to look for rookie cards in combination with other criteria.

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• All of the ABCs

Today I assembled another virtual uncut sheet, this time for 1966 Philadelphia football cards. Those who collect the set know that some cards are much tougher than others. It appears that the cards in some rows were short printed.

(Click on the image to see the sheet.)

The Philadelphia Gum Company printed football cards from 1964 to 1967. For those four years, Philadelphia had the rights to NFL players, and Topps had the rights to AFL players. The contrast between the companies’ products is striking: the Topps sets of those years are colorful and varied, and the Philadelphia sets are simple and conservative.

All four of the Philadelphia sets are similar. Each of them has 198 cards, grouped by team, and the last two cards in each set are checklists. The teams are ordered alphabetically by city, with Baltimore first in 1964 and 1965 and Atlanta first in 1966 and 1967. Each set contains a team photo card for each team.

I find the 1964 Philadelphia set to be the most attractive of the four, because the colored nameplates with the white borders around them make the cards brighter than the other years. Most of the 1964 cards are easy to find in high grade, though, and that takes some of the fun out of it. A few cards–the checklists come to mind–are challenging because of centering. (See C is for Checklists.)

The Play of the Year cards are the plainest in the 1964 set, and in truth they feature some pretty ordinary plays. They do include photos of the coaches, though, and among the coaches are Vince Lombardi and Don Shula, who had not appeared on cards before. My Beckett catalog does not recognize the Lombardi and Shula cards as their rookie cards, but I don’t know why. The back of each Play of the Year card also lists the offensive players involved in the play. Some of these players never appeared on cards of their own, but at least their names appear here in print.

The 1964 Philly set includes the rookie cards of five Hall of Fame players–Herb Adderley, John Mackey, Willie Davis, Jim Johnson, and Merlin Olsen. Philadelphia misspelled Adderley’s name on his card, and they misspelled it the next three years, too. Other bits of 1964 Philadelphia trivia are that Jim Brown’s Cadillac appears in the background on all of the Browns’ cards, and that the player pictured on Garland Boyette’s card is actually Don Gillis.

1965 Philadelphia is the dullest of the four sets. It has essentially the same composition as the 1964 set–single-player cards, team cards, play cards, and checklists–but it has little color because the nameplates have a black background. Most of the players even look unhappy.

The one bit of innovation in the set is the “Who Am I?” rub-off quiz on the card backs. Oddly, rubbing the card reveals a player’s picture and the answer for a different card, so you have to rub one card to get the question and rub another card to get the answer. Also, my friend Steve from thecowboysguide.com said that not all of the rub-offs work. In Steve’s words, “You’ll get some duds because of age and condition.”

On a positive note, the set holds the rookie cards of five Hall of Fame players: Paul Warfield, Mel Renfro, Paul Krause, Carl Eller, and Charley Taylor. And Renfro is actually smiling!

Perhaps collectors noticed that the 1965 set was dull, because the next year Philadelphia shook things up a bit. The 1966 Philadelphia set returned to colored nameplates, for play cards it had action photos instead of X-and-O diagrams, and it even had two cards–Morrall and Scholtz and Gabriel and Bass–with two players on them. The set also gave the Atlanta Falcons a proper introduction. Since the Falcons were new to the league, the card company could not include an action card for them from the year before, so instead they included a Falcons insignia card. The insignia was big and bold, and it happened to be the first card in the set.

One thing I noticed about the 1966 action photos is that they were all shot in New York and Los Angeles. As a result, the action cards picture a lot of Giants and Rams defensive players. Each of the action cards has a referee signal on the back, and card #196 is dedicated to referee signals. Compared to Topps’s cards, which had cartoons and fun facts on the back, Philadelphia’s cards were all business.

The 1966 Philadelphia set is much tougher than its predecessors to complete in high grade. While some cards are plentiful, others are scarce, and I suspect that a lot of them are undocumented short prints. I found a picture of an uncut sheet that suggests why. For a 198-card set, I would expect there to be three 132-card sheets, with each sheet containing two-thirds of the set. Between the three sheets, there would then be two of each card. The sheet I found, though, contains 110 of the 198 cards, and the top two rows are repeated. There had to be at least another sheet that held the remaining 88 cards, but I can’t think of how a small number of additional sheets could have been configured to even out the distribution of cards. Rows 3 through 6 on the sheet I found contain some of the tough cards in the set, so I’ll wager that those rows did not appear on another sheet.

Like the two earlier Philadelphia sets, the 1966 set contains the rookie cards of five Hall of Fame players. Six years ago it contained only two, Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus. The other three–Bob Brown, Gene Hickerson, and Bob Hayes, have all been inducted in the past five years.

For more details on the 1966 Philadelphia set, you can read Jim Churilla’s article on the PSA web site.

In 1967, Philadelphia printed their last set of football cards. Like the 1966 set, it has a funky distribution: some cards are plentiful in high grades, and some are downright scarce. The company got a bit less conservative in 1967, coloring the borders yellow and adding colorful cards of the team insignias. 1967 was the year that New Orleans joined the NFL, so a bit more color was fitting.

Two bits of trivia are worth mentioning: Raymond Berry’s 1967 Philadelphia card actually pictures Bob Boyd, and Paul Hornung appears on a Saints card, but he retired before the start of the season. The 1967 Philly set contains three rookie cards of Hall of Fame players: Leroy Kelly, Jackie Smith, and Dave Wilcox.

Though I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, it seems that in the Philadelphia years, the Philadelphia and Topps issues reflected the images of the leagues they represented. The Philly sets were conservative, consistent, and unadorned. The 1964-1967 Topps sets were colorful and innovative, with stars and tall boys and TVs. Philadelphia had the talent, and Topps had the flash. Philadelphia’s run was too short to draw conclusions, but by 1967 it seems as though Topps was prompting Philadelphia to lighten up, just as the AFL was pressuring the NFL to enliven its game.

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• All of the ABCs

A common error on vintage football cards was spelling a player’s name Charlie when he spelled it Charley, or spelling it Charley when he spelled it Charlie. I don’t know how the guys named Charles chose which spelling to use, but it appears that the card companies just flipped a coin. And as you can see on the back of the 1966 Philadelphia Charley Taylor card shown here, sometimes they used both!

My Beckett catalog identifies most cards with errors, including Charlie/Charley errors. Unfortunately, it appears that Beckett got some wrong, too. (My catalog is from 2005, but I’ll bet this hasn’t changed.) Charley Johnson’s name, it says, is spelled Charlie, and Charlie King’s name, it says, is spelled Charley. The players’ own signatures, though, show that my Beckett is wrong. Shown here is Charley Johnson’s autograph on a 1967 Philadelphia card and Charlie King’s fascimile signature on his 1969 Tresler Comet Bengals card.

With my Beckett proving unreliable, I turned instead to pro-football-reference.com to help with the Charlie/Charley discrepancies. That site had both Johnson and King correct, and I have found it reliable for all other information, as well.

Following are links to the Charlie/Charley misspellings I have identified in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. It is possible that I missed some, so if you find another, leave a comment or drop me a line.

• Charlies misspelled Charley
• Charleys (and a Charle) misspelled Charlie

Misspelled names are common on vintage football cards, but Philadelphia Gum Co. takes the prize: they misspelled Herb Adderley‘s name on all four cards they printed of him. His name is spelled Adderly on his 1964 Philadelphia rookie card and all of his cards for the next three years.

From 1964 to 1967, Philadelphia had the rights to print cards of NFL players, and Topps had the rights to the AFL. When Topps obtained the rights to the NFL in 1968, Adderley finally got his name spelled correctly. But Topps later slipped up, too, and got it wrong on Adderley’s 1972 card.

Adderley also had a pre-rookie card, a 1961 Lake to Lake Packers card distributed regionally in Wisconsin. The locals got it right: on this card his name was spelled correctly.

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: Herb Adderley
• Search eBay for: Herb Adderley, Herb Adderly