January 14th, 2011 |
Published in
Player Deaths
Fred Heron, who played defensive tackle for the St. Louis Cardinals from 1966 to 1972, passed away on December 28. The Stockton Record web site has an obituary for Heron (with a recent photo) and an announcement for his upcoming memorial.
Heron’s 1973 Topps card is pictured here. As far as I know, it is his only card, and, ironically, it was issued the season after he retired. (1973 was the first year that Topps issued a 528-card set, and it allowed them to include a lot of players who had not appeared on cards previously.) Heron also appeared on a 1972 Sunoco stamp.
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See Fred Heron’s NFL statistics on pro-football-reference.com.
November 24th, 2010 |
Published in
error cards
Woodley Lewis appeared on three Topps football cards, and Topps spelled his name differently on all three. In 1958, he was Woodly. In 1959, he was Woody. In 1960, Topps finally got it right and spelled his name Woodley. The card companies misspelled plenty of players’ names (see a previous blog article, E is for Error Cards), but I can’t think of another player who had his name spelled three different ways.
As I usually do when I write about a player, I did a little web search for Lewis, and I turned up a couple of nice non-card images. One, on the University of Oregon web site, pictures him in the middle of a broad jump. Another, on flickr, shows him in front of the Sportsman Bowl, a bowling alley that he owned after retiring from football. I also found an old matchbook for Woodley Lewis’s Sportsman Bowl on eBay.
August 30th, 2009 |
Published in
Player Deaths
Sam Etcheverry, a Hall of Fame quarterback for the Canadian Football League’s Montreal Alouettes, died on Saturday. Etcheverry also played for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1961 and 1962. Pictured here are Etcheverry’s 1961 Topps and 1962 Topps cards. He also appeared for the Cardinals on a 1962 Post Cereal card, and he had several CFL cards in the 1950′s. I don’t have pictures of his CFL cards, unfortunately.
Having seen only his NFL cards, I didn’t know about Etcheverry’s accomplishments in the CFL. As a player he appeared in three Grey Cups (CFL championship games), and he was the league’s most outstanding player in 1954. He passed for 586 yards in one game in 1954, and in 1956 he had a 109-yard pass–no, not a typo, because the CFL’s field is 110 yards long. Etcheverry’s CFL Hall of Fame page has a nice summary of his accomplishments and a great photo of him throwing a jump pass. (I love this shot: see my jumping quarterbacks post.)
I don’t yet have CFL cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but one day I hope to add them. It will be interesting to see how players like Etcheverry moved between the CFL and the U.S. leagues in their careers. With the addition of the Cowboys and Vikings to the NFL in 1960 and 1961, and with the creation of the AFL in 1960, the talent pool in the NFL was somewhat diluted, and I imagine that other longtime CFL players also got their shot at the NFL in the early 1960′s.
