1970 Topps basketball

Slowly but surely I'm building this '70 Topps set. It's an odd set as I've shown in the past. These three cards are pretty normal but the next group I am going to show is dominated by a couple of weird cards for sure.

Wally Jones became 'Wali' Jones a bit later in his career. It was a time when quite a few African-American athletes were changing their names. But going from 'Bobby Moore' to 'Ahmad Rashad' is one thing. Changing your first name from Wally to Wali, well, I'm not sure about the point of that.

 Ed Manning looks like his head was P-shopped onto someone else's body.

The backs of these cards are actually pretty nice. Stats, vitals, a bio blurb and a cartoon....what more could you ask for?

There is a championship series subset and here is the Game 7 entry. This is the famous 'Willis Reed Limping Onto The Madison Square Garden Court' game. 

If you don't know that story check out this three minute SportsCentury piece:

Vintage Connie Hawkins

Floating heads in the house! Awesome card from Mark Hoyle. I posted an internet image some time back and then Mark sent me the real thing. Here are the players on the card, according to Hoyle [insert bad pun induced groan here]:

Top row. C. Hawkins, Goodrich, Riley, Stu Lantz

2nd row. Cazzie Russell, H. Hairston, Zelmo Beaty, Kareem, L. Allen

And a few more for the Connie Hawkins Collection, some from Mark, some from eBay. I scanned them together and kind of lost track. Oops.

First up is the '74-'75 Topps. The Hawk is flipping a pass out towards the left corner while being trapped by John Gianelli (I think) and Henry Bibby.

'75-'76 Topps with a shot of Hawkins in the Garden, probably the same game as the previous card. I think that's Phil Jackson getting a taste of Hawk's elbow. Clyde Frazier is on the right. This card definitely came from Mark because it arrived Monday and I just scanned it.

'73-'74 Topps, a 'studio' shot. No, a hallway shot. As usual Hawkins is rockin' the great sideburns. Walt Frazier had the mink coats and the wild hats and the attention of the media but Connie Hawkins was just so damn cool.

EEEEE-asy Street

Back when Elvin Hayes had retired and come back to Houston he became the paid spokesman for Houston's Yellow Cab company. He did a bunch of recruiting ads that seemed to run every two minutes on late night TV. The tag line was something along the line of' "Driving a Yellow Cab will put you on EEEE-Z Street" with the gimmick being his well known nickname of 'The Big E'.

All that has nothing to do with today's post which contains a bunch of vintage Elvin Hayes cards, many of them from the ever-generous Mark Hoyle.

These first two are from the 1976/77 Topps set. I am  posting them in a large size because they are oversized cards. Mark assures me that these were the regular issue cards that year. I had no idea. I also have no idea why the copyright date at the bottom is 1969. Anyone?

This is the Hayes All Star from the same set. I like this one more I think. Cool picture and the back is kind of neat with the stars containing his highlights.

The 79/80 Hayes card proclaims him to be "perhaps the best big forward in history". You'll get no argument from me.

From '71 through '76 Elvin played for two franchises but his uniform over that time went like this:
San Diego->Houston->Baltimore->Capitol->Washington.

The '74 All Star card from Topps shows a pensive Elvin Hayes. Whenever I've seen him he's smiling or very intense. One of the things I admire about him is how he worked to overcome a serious speech impediment. His speech situation caused him to shy away from interactions and made him come off as either aloof or terribly shy. You'd never know he had that issue if you spoke to him today.

My favorite Elvin Hayes story was one he repeated at the Guy Lewis Hall of Fame Induction ceremony I attended last fall. After he signed to play for Guy at UH the Lewis', that is Guy and his daughter, drove to Rayville, Louisiana  to pick him up and take him to Houston. Hayes sat in the back seat with Guy's daughter praying that they wouldn't be stopped by a Louisiana lawman because he assumed he'd be in a world of hurt for being with a white girl. Elvin's version is much funnier than mine but at the same time it says a lot about the way things have changed in 50 years (or have they?).

Here is the last one for this post. It's his '72-'73 card showing him as a Bullet but he's wearing a Rockets jersey as evidenced by the red and yellow piping. Watching him play back here in Houston was a lot of fun. I wish that era had lasted longer than a season. 

Big E gifts from Mark Hoyle (and a bonus)

Friend of the everyone's blog Mark Hoyle sent along a couple of Elvin Hayes cards from the 1975/76 Topps hoops set. I don't think I had ever encountered cards from this year. Poking around eBay and other sites I found that Topps used color combos for each team that didn't match the teams colors which was pretty much their modus operandi for decades across all their sports issues.

Simple fronts with a pic, plain sans serif block fonts and the two piece stripe adornment. The backs with that green and purple/blue coloring are hard to read. 

That is Elvin's regular card and he shows up on the Bullets Team Leaders card as well. 

Interestingly the backs of the leaders cards list the Bullets' yearly leaders in four categories going back nine seasons to 1966/67.

As I looked at the cards from this set online I was struck by how many of the players were very familiar to me. I probably couldn't name more than 5 current NBA guys and I have no idea who won the championship last year but I remember Kevin Porter and Mike Newlin.

With the addition of these two Big E cards and the handful I've picked up in recent months I guess I am officially making Hayes a PC to chase. I have seven 'career era' cards in my cart at COMC and when I finish checklisting what I have I'll add a few more.

One other thing I found online was the set's team cards. They have the usual photos of the teams sitting and standing on benches. All except the Lakers. Have a look:

Yup, it's a 'floating heads' team card!!

That's Connie Hawkins on the upper left. And some guy named Abdul-Jabbar second from the right on the bottom row. I've heard of him, too.

He is the added gift I mentioned. It's a 1974 Topps Don Baylor stamp! I love oddball O's stuff like this. I have one or two of these from the Orioles team set but the Don Baylor is new to me. Thanks so much, Mark. You make the blogosphere a better place, even without a blog!