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.

Remember those old electric football games, where you lined up all your players, turned on the machine, and watched them all vibrate to the side of the field? Well, people collect those, too. C_A_Panther Electric Football has a history of electric football, descriptions of the different types of players (Bigmen, Hoglegs, Chicken Legs–oh my!), and lots of colorful pictures. One of my favorite pages is the Game of the Week, a feature that apparently lasted just one week. The author evidently had better luck getting his players to move downfield than I did.

The picture is the Bears vs. the Packers–but are they Bigmen or Hoglegs? Sayers scores!

I recently added 1960 Bell Brand Rams cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery–or at least the first half of the set. These cards were distributed in packages of Bell Brand potato chips and corn chips, and they are very tough to find in nice condition.

Looking at PSA’s population report, the cards appear to have been issued in two series–or maybe half were included in potato chips and the other half in corn chips? With two exceptions, PSA has graded more cards numbered 1-18 than cards numbered 19-39. The first exception is card #2, Gene Selawski, which I understand was pulled from production when he left the team early in the year. The second is card #30, Charley Bradshaw, which appears many more times in the population report than any other card from 19-39. Perhaps Bradshaw replaced Selawski in the potato chips?

There are three quarterbacks in the set–Frank Ryan, Bill Wade, and Buddy Humphrey–and they all got playing time in 1960. None of them lasted much longer with the Rams, though: Wade and Humphrey played for other teams in 1961, and Ryan went to the Browns in 1962, making room for Roman Gabriel.

As anyone following the Super Bowl coverage now knows, the last time the Cardinals won the NFL championship was 1947, while they were still playing in Chicago. One of the stars of the 1947 team was Charley Trippi, pictured here on one of his rookie cards, a 1948 Bowman. (Charley’s other rookie card is a 1948 Leaf. Both Bowman and Leaf printed football cards in 1948.)

Reading about Trippi and the rest of the Cardinals’ “Million Dollar Backfield” (also Paul Christman, Elmer Angsman, and Pat Harder) led me to look at Charley’s stats. I knew he had played halfback, but on his stats page I noticed that in 1951 and 1952 he also had a lot of passing statistics. Cool, I thought, he played quarterback for awhile, too. Then I noticed he had punting stats. And kick and punt return stats. And interception stats. The guy played five positions!

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.

Yesterday I added the full set of 1970 Topps Super cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Not to be confused with 1970 Topps Super Glossy insert cards, these are large cards that were sold separately from the regular 1970 Topps cards. The cards are colorful and attractive, and because they are elongated, most show a good portion of the player’s uniform. Some of the players’ pictures are the same as on the regular 1970 Topps cards, some are the same as on the Super Glossies, and some are completely different from the other 1970 Topps issues. The Joe Namath card, thankfully, doesn’t show him with a Band-Aid on his head.

The backs show the same information as the regular 1970 Topps cards, but the large amounts of white space make the backs look like an afterthought. On the set I have, a few of the backs have paper wrinkles from the factory. It’s best just to enjoy the fronts of these cards and not turn them over.

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!

The Helmet Project has hundreds of beautiful illustrations of professional and college football helmets past and present. It includes helmets of teams from defunct professional leagues such as the XFL, USFL, WFL, and WALF. It also includes college helmets down through NCAA Division 3 and NAIA.

Shown here are most of the helmets the Denver Broncos have used since their first season in 1960. Personally, I like the old cartoonish figures more than the current angry horse head, but I suppose cartoon figures aren’t intimidating enough these days.

Not many football cards show the players wearing their helmets, since the facemasks cover the players’ faces. Frank Emanuel’s 1968 Topps card, shown here, is one exception, and as you can see, it turned out badly. Wise photographers who wanted helmets in the pictures asked the players to hold them.

Because Topps did not have the rights to reproduce team logos on its cards, in the 70’s the company airbrushed the logos off the helmets. This made for some ugly cards, this 1972 Topps Ken Willard in Action card being one example. Topps also realized that they could use airbrushing when a player was traded, to change his uniform from one color to another without having to take another picture. This made for some very ugly cards, but that’s a topic for another day.

To see all those missing helmet logos, do check out The Helmet Project!

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.