Vintage Sports Cards – Baseball – Basketball – Football – Hockey
The February 1993 issue of Baseball Cards feature called Readers’ Choice not only had a reader call (incorrectly, IMHO) the 1951 Bowman Paul Richards card the worst baseball card of all time, but it also featured this gem from Dan Tisdale about a pair of 1974 Topps football cards.
Here’s each card in full color. What do you think? Are these the worst football cards? Lineman didn’t get the love from Topps in the ’70s!
A lot of people remember the April 2004 Mastro auction for the incredible unopened material they sold from, I believe, OPC’s archives. Perhaps overlooked a bit were all the empty vintage Bowman and Topps football display boxes they sold a few years later in 2008.
It’s tough to put prices on items like these today in 2024, given the run-up in vintage unopened/display items, but here are a few sales:
In the fall of 1990, Topps Magazine did a ‘Focus on Football’ listing the 100 most valuable Topps football cards on the market.
Prices aside, how do you like the order? One thing I like is that three checklists made the top 10!
Here’s the magazine cover in case you want to pick one up.
Here’s the original picture used for Jim Thorpe’s 1955 Topps All-American card.
The April 2002 auction that featured the item described the original wire photo as 8’’ by 10’’ and taken between 1919 and 1920, capturing Thorpe posing as a member of the Canton Bulldogs. The reverse has the original paper caption and two stamps: “Central Press Association September 21, 1935 Reference” and “National News Photos, Inc.”
This photo was enhanced for newspaper use, including details added to his leg pads, helmet, and hands.
Over my years studying the post-war hobby, I can’t recall ever reading about the 1961 National City Bank Cleveland Browns set. The priciest card to sell from it is this PSA 9 Jim Brown, which sold for just over $20k in Memory Lane’s Summer 2022 Auction.
National City Bank released the 36-card set in sheets of six to depositors in the bank’s Quarterback Club.
Besides the Jim Brown, the set’s most desirable cards include the Quarterback Club Membership Card, Len Dawson, Lou Groza, and Bobby Mitchell.
Naturally, since drafting this post, I’ve been seeing these cards everywhere!
I’d love to know if a complete (18 + 1 variation) 1959 Bazooka Football Box set run exists in the hobby. Larry Fritsch always said the Chuck Connerly variations were the toughest to track down, but there can only be a few of this Frank Gifford copy that was auctioned off in April 2003.
From a printing perspective, these Bazooka gum boxes first had baseball players on them; football players came later in the fall. The belief is that the Conerly’s, Groza, and Tracy are short prints. That’s mostly a conclusion related to the baseball cards and then football card availability. A forum user wrote, “In early 1959 Topps released a nine card Bazooka baseball card set on the bottom of 25 piece Bazooka gum boxes. The promotion was so popular that they added 14 additional baseball players to the set later in the season. These 14 are short prints. Late in the year, Topps replaced the baseball players on Bazooka boxes with football players. The SP’s are likely ones added later just like the SP’s in the baseball set.”
UPDATE: August 2024. I snapped a photo of a case of football cards while exploring the 2024 National in Cleveland. While perusing the photos in detail while on a business trip, I noticed the following Bazooka Gifford card in one of them!
Here’s the original artwork used as the foundation for the 1957 Topps Football Paul Hornung rookie #151.
The flexichrome, a full-color painting on a black-and-white photograph, is 3-3/8” x 4-3/4”, larger than the finished card. The back of the art piece has working pencil marks and adhesive residue.
The item came from the 1989 Guernsey’s Auction, where Topps sold a large portion of their archives.
