Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Ever notice that John Unitas’s 1974 Topps card pictures him still in his Colts uniform, but with the jersey numbers colored yellow to look more like a Chargers uniform? Yesterday was the first time I noticed this. Here are his 1973 and 1974 Topps cards, side by side.

Though he appeared on a card in 1974, Unitas did not play that year. He retired on July 23.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, I bought a set of 1972 Sunoco Stamps, and I started adding them to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I said at the time that it would take me months to take pictures of all the stamps, and it did: 30 months, to be precise. I finally scanned and uploaded the last of them yesterday–all but one, that is. I discovered yesterday that I have two Verlon Biggs stamps, but no Ron McDole stamp. Anyone have a picture of a McDole they can send me?

As I was scanning the stamps yesterday, I noted one thing I like about them: the images on them aren’t airbrushed. In 1972, Topps was still airbrushing logos off helmets and airbrushing new uniforms onto players–badly–but the Sunoco stamps show the players in the uniforms of their current teams, logos intact. I especially like seeing old helmets, and for most teams there’s at least one stamp with a good picture of the team’s helmet. Below are a few examples.

Now, on to the 82-stamp update set!

Last week, looking at Frank Ryan’s football cards, I noticed that his 1962 Kahn’s Wieners card, his 1963 Topps card, and his 1969 Topps card all picture him wearing number 18 for the Browns. According to his page at pro-football-reference.com, however, Ryan never wore number 18 for any team. I thought maybe he had worn number 18 for his first season with the Browns, and that pro-football-reference had not picked it up. But no, Ryan’s first season with the Browns was 1962, and he is wearing number 13 in the Browns 1962 team photo. See him in the upper right?

So I did a little digging, and I came up with a guess. My guess is that when he was photographed in number 18, Ryan was wearing Len Dawson’s old jersey. Dawson wore number 18 for the Browns in 1960 and 1961 (see his 1961 National City Bank card), and the Browns released him around June 1, 1962. The Browns then acquired Ryan from the Rams on July 12, 1962. Until he got his own jersey, Ryan wore Dawson’s, at least for pictures.

That would explain the number 18 on Ryan’s 1962 Kahn’s card, but what about his 1963 and 1969 Topps cards? My guess is that Topps just used old images for those cards, as they often did. Another old image that jumps to mind is the one on the Len Dawson puzzle on the backs of 1969 Topps cards. Though by 1969 Dawson had quarterbacked the Chiefs for six seasons and taken them to a Super Bowl, Topps chose an image of him with the Browns–wearing number 18!

A friend of mine bought a copy of this card recently; it’s a 1952 Bowman Large card of Bob Waterfield. When I saw his card, I noticed something that I hadn’t before: Waterfield’s helmet has “bone style,” or serrated, ram horns on it. My first thought was that the artist had taken liberties with the image and changed the Rams’ smooth horns to serrated ones. I did a little searching, though, and I found that the Rams actually did wear serrated horns for one season, 1949. I also found a replica of the 1949 Rams helmet.

The L.A. Rams weren’t the only Rams to wear bone style horns: the Colorado State Rams wore them for a few years, too. You can see CSU’s version in a previous blog article. It’s interesting that, though people seem to prefer the bone style horns, both the St. Louis (formerly Los Angeles) and CSU Rams persist with the smooth ones.

I recently put some 1969 Topps football cards up for sale, including this one, Tom Vaughn of the Lions. The Lions logo that Topps used in this set has always looked familiar to me, so yesterday I did some searching. I believe I found what I was thinking of: a Ford Mustang logo from around that time. This might be obvious to Detroit fans, but it appears to me that the designer of the Lions logo gave a nod to the city’s main industry. (The image of the Mustang logo is from motortopia.com.)

This card happens to show Vaughn in my favorite football card pose, where the player is about to put on his helmet. For more examples, see My Favorite Pose, More of My Favorite Pose, and Still More of My Favorite Post.

Here is one last group of players in my favorite pose, about to put on their helmets. (For more of these, see My Favorite Pose and More of My Favorite Pose.)

This time we have a 1969 Topps Joe Scarpati and a 1967 Topps Johnny Robinson:

A 1968 Topps Andy Russell rookie and a 1966 Philadelphia Roger LeClerc:

A 1965 Philadelphia Dick Schafrath and a 1967 Philadelphia Willie Davis:

Unfortunately, the photographers from many teams–notably the AFL teams–never used this pose, so in this series I could feature cards from only about half the teams. That’s a pity: I love Pat Patriot and Denver’s drunk Bronco, and it would have been nice to include them.

This morning I added the ability to search the Vintage Football Card Gallery for members of the Dallas Cowboys Ring of Honor. Just go to the Advanced Search page, choose Cowboys Ring of Honor in one of the “Honor” menus, and hit the Search button.

Pictured here is one member of the Ring, Don Perkins, on his 1962 Topps rookie card. He’s wearing the Cowboys’ first home jersey, my all-time favorite over all the NFL teams. He doesn’t appear to be wearing it in the black-and-white inset photo, though, so I wonder if that is a college photo. Or maybe it’s not even him: on some 1962 cards, Topps pictured a different player in the inset photo, sometimes altering the image to look like the player on the card. For examples of that, see my earlier blog article on the subject.

Looking through the cards I have of members of the Cowboys Ring of Honor, it’s striking that there are no cards of players who had moved on to different teams. It is possible that I don’t have all of the players’ cards, but the impression I get is that the Cowboys’ best players stayed with the Cowboys.

The 1972 Topps football card set is full of bad airbrushing. (See my earlier posts on John Brockington and MacArthur Lane and on College All-Star jerseys in the 1972 Topps set.) Here’s another example: Deacon Jones in red. The Rams traded Jones to the Chargers in 1972, and Topps apparently didn’t want to show him in his old Rams jersey. But the Rams wore blue, and the Chargers wore blue, so how did Jones end up in red? Did the artist see “Chargers” and think it said “Cardinals”? Did he just finish Randy Vataha and not want to put his pen down? Who knows, maybe he just thought Jones would look good in red. And he does, doesn’t he?

Speaking of the Chargers, the two 1972 Chargers cards below, Dennis Partee and Jerry LeVias, also caught my eye the other day. I thought that the players’ helmets, with just numbers on them, looked strange. So I visited the Helmet Project web site and found that the Chargers helmets of the time had both lightning bolts and the players’ numbers on them. Topps airbrushed the trademarked lightning bolts away, but left the numbers behind.

So you think you know your vintage football cards? Give this a try: for each jersey number below, see if you can guess:

1. The player who is wearing the jersey, and
2. The card (year and company, e.g., 1962 Fleer) on which the jersey appears.

After guessing, click on the picture to see the whole card.

Ever wonder why all of the Baltimore Colts in the 1950 Bowman set are wearing green? Did Bowman take liberties with the team’s colors, as Topps did with the Houston Oilers in 1961? (See Houston Oilers: Pretty in Pink.) Did the team change colors from green to blue sometime after 1950?

No, the 1950 Colts were actually a different franchise than today’s Colts. The original Colts were members of the AAFC, and they were one of three teams to join the NFL when the AAFC folded after the 1949 season. This Colts team lasted just one year in the NFL before disbanding, and in 1951 the Colts players were made available to the remaining teams via the draft.

In 1953, the NFL awarded a Baltimore group a new franchise and gave it the remnants of the original Dallas Texans, a franchise that had lasted just one year in Dallas. The new Colts wore blue, and they’ve worn blue ever since. A nice article by Bob Carroll on the profootballresearchers.com web site traces the lineage of the two Colts franchises and the other AAFC teams.

Pictured here are cards of two of the Colts cards in the 1950 Bowman set, Y.A. Tittle and Chet Mutryn. You can see the entire 1950 Bowman Baltimore Colts team set in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Here’s a bit of trivia: Besides Y.A. Tittle, what Hall of Fame quarterback played for the Colts in 1950?

Answer: George Blanda. The Bears traded Blanda and four other players to the Colts on September 5. Blanda played in one game for the Colts, and the Bears bought him back on September 20.