1972 Topps Airbrushing Fun
January 23rd, 2009 | Published in Football Card Trivia | 3 Comments
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
July 11th, 2009 at 3:17 PM (#)
[…] Sometimes you get to a topic in a roundabout way. Last night I came across this terrific 1954 Bowman Jim Dooley card, and I thought I’d look for other cards that picture players in their College All-Star uniforms. I found only John Brockington’s 1972 Topps rookie card, which I believe shows him in an All-Star jersey with the stars airbrushed off. It’s not an Ohio State jersey, and it’s not a Packers jersey, but it has the style of an All-Star jersey, and Brockington played in the All-Star game in 1971. (Topps also used this image of Brockington on his 1972 All-Pro card, where they airbrushed his jersey Packer green.) […]
August 25th, 2010 at 5:50 AM (#)
[…] 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 […]
May 15th, 2012 at 7:55 AM (#)
[…] 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. […]