Airbrushing the Chargers
August 25th, 2010 | Published in Uniforms
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.
