Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Vic Janowicz is another player who played both NFL football and major league baseball. (See last week’s article on Carroll Hardy.) Janowicz won the Heisman Trophy for Ohio State in 1950, then opted for baseball rather than football after graduating in 1951. He made the Pittsburgh Pirates team in 1953, and he played in 83 games over two seasons. In that period he batted just .214, and he returned to football in 1954, joining the Washington Redskins late in the season. He fared much better in the NFL, finishing second in the league in scoring in 1955. In 1956 he was seriously injured in a car accident, and he did not play again.

Despite an unremarkable career in the major leagues, Janowicz appeared on several baseball cards. Both Topps and Bowman were producing baseball cards at the time, and I’m guessing that they printed cards of Janowicz mostly because he was famous for winning the Heisman. I don’t have his baseball cards, but you can see all of them on eBay.

Janowicz’s football rookie card is in the 1951 Topps Magic set, which pictures college players. Rookie cards of Heisman winners are popular with collectors, and the Janowicz card is the key card in the set. He also appeared on 1955 Bowman and 1956 Topps football cards. You can see all of Janowicz’s early football cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

The cards pictured here are Janowicz’s 1955 Bowman baseball card and his 1955 Bowman football card.

There is a great thread going in the Collectors Universe forums about favorite “combo” cards. I had not heard the term before, but it appears that combo cards are simply cards that feature more than one player. (Team cards don’t count, because they’re, you know, team cards.) Some of the cards posted in the CU thread have been autographed by all of the players–very cool.

Most of the cards posted in the CU thread are baseball cards, which isn’t surprising, since the card companies printed far more baseball cards than cards from other sports. What does strike me, though, is how few combo vintage football cards there are. The 1968 KDKA Steelers set is composed entirely of combo cards, but that is a minor regional set. Beyond that, I can think of only a few combos: the 1955 Topps All-American Four Horsemen card, the 1966 Philadelphia Morrall/Scholtz and Gabriel/Bass cards, League Leader and All-Pro cards in some of the 1970s Topps sets, and 1969 Topps 4-in-1 cards, which were actually meant to be separated into four stamps. Of these, only the Four Horsemen, Morrall/Scholtz, and Gabriel/Bass–a grand total of three cards–picture multiple players in the same image.

Vintage baseball cards, on the other hand, feature plenty of multi-player images. Some of the baseball cards posted in the CU thread are batting duos and trios from the same team: Aaron and Matthews; Brock and Flood; Schmidt, Rose, and Bowa. Where are all the football cards like this? Where are Unitas and Berry, Hornung and Taylor, Morris and Csonka, the Million Dollar Backfield, the Fearsome Foursome, and the Purple People Eaters? The football card folks had no imagination.

Some combo baseball cards even picture players from different teams in the same image. There’s Aaron and Mays; Banks and Aaron; Brett and Carew; Killebrew, Mays, and Mantle; on and on. I imagine that some of the multi-player baseball images were pieced together from multiple photos, but how many football cards picture players from different teams standing next to one another? Zero that I can think of. There have been Pro Bowls every year since 1951, but where are the cards of dream backfields, the league’s meanest linebackers, or even dueling punters? Someone must have taken photos–why didn’t the photos make it onto cards?

Oh well, I guess I have a little baseball card envy today. If you can think of more combo football cards, let me know.

• Search eBay for: Four Horsemen, Mays and Mantle, Banks and Aaron
• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: 1955 Topps All-Americans, 1966 Philadelphia

I was putting some 1967 Topps cards up for sale the other day, and I noticed that one of them, the Tom Day card shown here, had a bit of brown along the top border. I remembered that 1967 Topps football cards had been included in a board game with 1968 Topps baseball cards, so I did a little web searching to refresh my memory. Here’s what I found:

According to an auction on the Heritage Auctions web site, the board game was called “Win-A-Card,” from Milton Bradley. The auction says that there were 132 cards in the game: 76 1968 Topps baseball cards, 33 1967 Topps football cards, 22 1965 Topps Hot Rod cards, and an instruction card. The 132 cards were printed on a single sheet created specially for the game. The bit of brown on the top of my Tom Day football card is part of a 1968 Topps baseball card. The baseball cards included a Nolan Ryan rookie card, Brooks Robinson, Tom Seaver, Ed Mathews, Rod Carew, Gaylord Perry, Bob Gibson, and Hank Aaron. You can usually find a few of them on eBay.

BoardGameGeek.com has a picture of the game box and a photo of some of the baseball and Hot Rod cards. BoardGameGeek says that the game included a total of 50-70 cards, but that has to be incorrect. If each game contained a partial sheet of cards, and if there were only one instruction card per sheet, not all games would have gotten an instruction card. I believe Heritage’s statement that the game included all 132 cards.

Joe Namath is one of the football cards in the game. You can see the full list of football cards in the Win-A-Card game in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.