For a Longtime Jets Fan, This Custom Card Was 50 Years Overdue

I  think it's safe to assume that most folks who read blogs about trading cards are also sports fans to some degree. It's probably also safe to say that many of those folks have a favorite team they not only root for every year, but also collect. It's a little bit easier if that team is successful, of course. Winning games is fun. It makes collecting more fun.

 

But if your favorite team has had a long run of unsuccessful seasons, missing the playoffs by inches or miles or anything in between, then you might sympathize with a particular collector who reached out to me a few months ago, asking if I would design a specific trading card for him.

You see, he's a fan of the New York Jets football team. A longtime fan. Long enough to have young memories of "Broadway Joe" Namath leading his 1969 team to victory in Superbowl III. After that? Well, the Jets still haven't won another Super Bowl. Or even made it into the Super Bowl. In fact, they've only made the playoffs about a dozen times in all those years leading up to the current day.

And as if that weren't bad enough for a Jets fan, the 1970 Topps football set didn't even commemorate the team's Super Bowl Championship with a card. Nothing.

Well, this particular Jets fan and card collector wanted to right that wrong. So he asked me if I'd create a card in the style of the 1970 football set to document the team's big victory. After all, other football sets of the 1970s and 1980s did issue a few cards to commemorate the AFC champs, NFC champs, and Super Bowl champs.

Well, I did some research on the game, and got to work. Here's the result:

If you didn't immediately connect the year of 1970 with its football card design a few paragraphs ago, that ought to do it. Iconic, for sure. And once I found that specific photograph, I knew it was the one. You've got Emerson Boozer, Joe Namath, Pete Lammons, and Matt Snell, all battered, dirtied, and catching their breath with the offensive line as a full crowd in the background awaits the next play. It's a great team photo for a card like this one. There are no horizontal cards in the original 1970 set, so I had to create one, but the effort was well worth it.

Now here's the back:

I tried to model the design after many of the Super Bowl cards featured in Topps sets of the '70s and '80s. One half of the card features individual player stats, while the other half tells the scoring story. (Kicker Jim Turner had quite a game for the Jets.) As for the card number at top left, there are 263 cards in the 1970 Topps set, so this one became 264 in that "what if" sort of way.

Although I'm not a football fan and haven't watched a game in years, I'm happy to have helped create a card that documents such a memorable Super Bowl. I did grow up in New York, and I did grow up around a fair number of Jets fans, so I felt this collector's pain. He was overjoyed with the result when I sent him a digital proof, and even happier when he had a copy of the actual card in hand, and was able to slide it into the final page of his 1970 Topps football card binder. Since then, a few other collectors have picked up a copy, which is gratifying.

How about you readers? Does this custom card evoke any nostalgic feelings for you? Any Jets fans out there? Let me know what you think, and thanks for reading, as always!