Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Yesterday I added the 1959 Bell Brand Rams set to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Like the 1960 Bell Brand Rams, these cards were distributed in packages of Bell Brand potato chips and corn chips, and they are difficult to find. The cards are sturdy and attractive, with a high-gloss finish unlike other issues of the time, but many of them were cut off-center. Each card features a facsimile of the player’s autograph, a nice touch except that some autographs are tiny relative to the size of the cards.

The 1959 set includes a pre-rookie card of hall-of-fame coach Sid Gillman. In 1960 Gillman moved to the Los Angeles Chargers of the new American Football League, and his “official” rookie card, a 1960 Fleer, is with the Chargers. Why is it his official rookie card? That’s debatable, but it is generally accepted that a rookie card must have been printed by a major card company, and cards from regional issues such as Bell Brand are not considered for rookie cardism.

Of course, a player’s rookie card would be more accurately called his first card. I often get emails saying “you say that so-and-so’s rookie card was 19xx, but he was a rookie in 19yy.” And so I have to explain. Oh well, it’s too late to change it now.

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.

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!

Today I added the eight 1951 Berk Ross football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The 1951 Berk Ross set is a 72-card multi-sport set, with baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and several minor sports all represented. You can find a checklist for the entire set at oddlyquirky.com.

Pictured here is the Doak Walker card. Walker was another member of the great Lions teams of the 1950s, and he is one of the few Heisman Trophy winners who have been inducted into the hall of fame. He retired after only six years in the league, hanging it up after the 1955 season.

Well, it appears that the poor Lions will go winless in 2008. Because the team has been so bad recently, whenever I look through 1950s football cards, I marvel at all of the great Lions players from that era. The great players made for great teams: in a span of six seasons, the Lions played in four league championship games, and they won three of them–all against the Browns. The last time the Lions won a championship–51 years ago, in 1957!–there were six future hall-of-famers on the team, and they beat the Browns 59-14 in the championship game.

Five of the future Hall-of-Famers–Bobby Layne, John Henry Johnson, Lou Creekmur, Jack Christiansen, and Yale Lary–appeared on cards in the 1957 Topps set. This page in the Vintage Football Card Gallery shows those cards. The sixth hall-of-famer, Joe Schmidt, whose rookie card is in the 1956 Topps set, did not appear on a card in 1957.

Pictured at the top is John Henry Johnson’s 1957 Topps card, which incorrectly says he played for the Browns. Topps even took the trouble of recoloring the picture to put Johnson in Browns colors. Below the 1957 card is Johnson’s rookie card, a 1955 Bowman, which shows the same picture of Johnson, except in 49ers colors.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: Detroit Lions
• Search eBay for: 1950s Detroit Lions

Yesterday I added 1968 Topps Stand Up cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These were insert cards in 1968 Topps packs, and there are 22 cards in the full set. Each card is perforated around the player’s head and shoulders such that you can punch the player out from the back and stand the card up. Of course, cards that have been punched out are now worth far less that those that remain intact, so it’s best if the cards’ original owners didn’t have any fun with them.

Topps choose a curious group of players for this set. The set contains at most one player per team, and Topps chose Jim Grabowski to represent the Packers over Bart Starr and Ray Nitschke. They also chose Willie Richardson over John Unitas, Jack Concannon over Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus, and Curtis McClinton over Len Dawson. (Topps did feature puzzles of Bart Starr and Len Dawson on the backs of the some of the regular 1968 cards, though.)

There is only one defensive player in the set, Alex Karras. And oddly, Homer Jones appeared in this set but not in the regular set of 1968 Topps cards.