Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Danny Brabham, a linebacker from 1963 to 1968 for the AFL’s Houston Oilers and Cincinnati Bengals, passed away on January 23. He played college football at Arkansas. Brabham’s obituary at arkansasonline.com includes a summary of his college and pro football career.

Brabham appeared on two football cards, both with the Oilers. His 1966 Topps card is pictured here; he also appeared on a 1967 Topps card.

• See Danny Brabham’s AFL stats at pro-football-reference.com.

Buzz Guy, a lineman from 1958 to 1961 for the New York Giants, Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos, and Houston Oilers, passed away on November 25. While with the Giants, Guy played in the 1958 NFL Championship game, “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” The Giants lost that game to the Baltimore Colts, 23-17, in overtime.

To my knowledge, Guy had only one football card, the 1961 Topps card pictured here. He also appeared on five New York Giants team cards and three Dallas Cowboys team cards. This happened because Topps used a photo of the 1958 Giants team on all of the Giants team cards from 1959 to 1963, and they used a photo of the 1960 Cowboys team on all of the Cowboys team cards from 1961 to 1963. (See my interactive 1959 Topps Giants team card and 1963 Topps Cowboys team card. Guy is number 60 on both of them.)

Guy also appeared on a Cowboys team issue photo in 1960, the team’s first year in the NFL. You can see that photo at thecowboysguide.com.

Most NFL fans have heard by now that George Blanda passed away today. The first notice I read was on the San Francisco Chronicle web site. The news is sad for me: I was a Raiders fan in the late 60s and 70s, so I watched Blanda play on many Sunday afternoons. I remember well his heroics in 1970, especially the game against the Browns, which I watched with my grandmother. She jumped out of her seat when he kicked a 52-yarder in the waning seconds to win the game.

The sports pages and TV shows will undoubtedly cover Blanda’s career in detail over the next few days, so I won’t attempt to do that here. Instead I’ll just show you his cards. He played for 26 years, so he appeared on a lot of them. I have most of them, but I am missing a couple from the end of his career. Pick any thumbnail image to see a larger version.

Billy Parks, who played five years for the Chargers, Cowboys, and Oilers, died on July 22. Shown here is Parks’s rookie card, a 1973 Topps. Though the card says Parks was still with the Cowboys in 1973, he actually played for the Oilers that year.

According to his page on the Long Beach State Hall of Fame site, as a rookie with the Chargers, Parks led the league in catches for the first ten games of the year, before breaking his arm.

A recent cover of Sports Collectors Digest, headlined Pretty in Pink, pictured a group of 1959 Topps football cards with pink backgrounds. Great cover, I thought, and it reminded me of the 1961 Topps cards of the Houston Oilers. On all but one of the Oilers cards in that set, the player is shown in a pink jersey.

As far as I know, the Oilers wore only the light blue jerseys shown on their 1961 Fleer cards. Topps evidently airbrushed the blue jerseys pink, but why? Topps headquarters is in New York City, and the New York Titans finished second to the Oilers in the AFL East in 1960. Might a Topps employee have colored the Oilers pink to exact a bit of revenge for his team?