It's January, so it's time for a football-centric post.
Football these days is full of fret and consternation. There's a big Bills game today that will have me all uptight (I'm writing this beforehand so either "Go Bills" or "the Jaguars have ugly uniforms"). And that's the way it's been for decades, lots of good vs. evil and plenty of disappointment.
But it wasn't always that way. For example, I picked up this 1976 Topps football card of Patriots quarterback Jim Plunkett recently while ordering a Dodger card and looking for something else to help out with shipping. This jumped right out at me, I love that set and Plunkett brings up good vibes despite my view of the Patriots these days. In fact, I don't remember him with the Patriots at all, nor with the 49ers --just with the Raiders when he led them to a Super Bowl title and all the talk was about this "old guy" that Oakland picked up off the scrap heap (Plunkett was 33).
Back in the '70s, I didn't follow football closely at all. Most of what I knew was the guys on the football cards and which ones looked cool. The quarterbacks always did and I had my favorites. It was a magical world then when there were cool players on the Cowboys and Seahawks and teams like the Chiefs, Packers and Bears didn't even have a quarterback! It's true, name their QB in the late 1970s!
I had favorite quarterbacks back then, not based on their performance but on their cards (and a little bit on what team they played for). Here were my 10 favorites in reverse order, with a favorite card of them in most cases.
10. BRIAN SIPE, BROWNS
I'm not going to have a lot to say about many of these guys. Like I said, I was a kid in the '70s and didn't put a lot of thought into football. Brian Sipe was a young guy who looked cool. That's it.
9. STEVE GROGAN
Simpler times. The Patriots wore red and were proud of it and the best they could be was mediocre. Steve Grogan was their quarterback. He wore red. Good enough for me.
8. JIM ZORN, SEAHAWKS
Jim Zorn once was the youngest of the young playing for a young team. That was awesome. The Seahawks were never as cool as the Buccaneers but it was long before they started plastering electric green all over everything so I liked him and them.
7. JOE FERGUSON, BILLS
To give you another idea about how different the '70s were: I didn't care about the Bills at all. My '70s teams -- if you could call them that -- were the Cowboys and then the Oilers, with the Broncos and Chargers close behind. But we'd visit my grandmother in Buffalo and the newspapers would be filled with a guy named Joe Ferguson -- and after I got over my disappointment that they weren't writing about the Dodgers catcher -- I kind of got attached.
I need to do a better job of getting Ferguson's '70s Bills cards. It's shocking how many I'm missing.
6. ROGER STAUBACH, COWBOYS
I liked the Cowboys totally because their 1977 Topps cards were great. That bright red and yellow. Fire. (Though we would never say that in the '70s). Roger Staubach was such a titan at the time that it was like he floated above even the best NFL players of the time.
5. RON JAWORSKI, EAGLES
I admit my interest in Ron Jaworski came at the beginning of the '80s during the Eagles' big 1980 season. But I knew about him in the '70s. He's from the Buffalo area (Lackawanna) and I'd read about him in the papers, too.
4. DOUG WILLIAMS, BUCCANEERS
Long before Doug Williams was famous as the QB for the Redskins, he was my favorite thing about the expansion Buccaneers, who were my favorite expansion team.
3. STEVE BARTKOWSKI, FALCONS
Good gosh I loved Steve Bartkowski's cards. I wanted him to be a star, he seemed so active on all his cards and of course he was young and he wore red.
2. KEN STABLER, RAIDERS
Ken Stabler always seemed like the gunslinger type and this card reinforced it. It's one of my favorites out of the whole set. Stabler was in the news a lot and that probably helped. I didn't care about "overcoverage" as a kid.
1. DAN FOUTS, CHARGERS
Easily my favorite quarterback from this time period. The Chargers' offense was wide-open and fun to watch, exciting, and Dan Fouts made it all happen. I liked the bearded look -- I've written before about how my favorite ballplayers in the '70s were not clean-cut. Fouts fit right in with that and I sure did like to watch him pass.
There were others, too, Ken Anderson of the Bengals, Dan Pastorini of the Oilers, all based on what I saw on the cards.
Soon the '80s would take over, my allegiances would be formed. I'd learn the game and become a Bills fan and other teams and players become unlikable. Rooting meant booing Dan Marino on the screen at the college bar and hoping the Jets would be penalized all the way to another loss. That would lead to rooting against the Bengals and the Raiders and Oilers, then the Giants and Cowboys in the '90s, then the Patriots, then the Chiefs and so many others.
But in the '70s it was just a QB on a card, the team didn't matter if the card was cool.
Comments
Brian Sipe, and all the comebacks with the Kardiac Kids is what turned me into a Browns fan. I still wonder if that was a good thing.