The first to show up was Y.A. Tittle, a highly appropriate arrival (more on that later) followed by John Unitas with his pal Ray Berry. Showing up alone in his own package — kind of like his slow walk back to the huddle for those who recall — was Jimmy Brown (even though he has been called Jim for more than 50 years, ever since he quit the NFL to shoot The Dirty Dozen).
We live in a world that is upside down, where sports fans are made of cardboard and our neighbors’ expressions are hidden behind masks. For five months, we have all sought different ways to cope with a pandemic none of us were prepared to experience. This isn’t about the serious side of that story, the millions who have lost jobs and millions more who have lost considerable income while still working.
This is simply about trying to remember what life was like before, to recapture a small measure of that joy. It’s an attempt to push back against the isolation and forced loneliness that can overwhelm.
And for that, yes, I turned to 1960 Topps football cards.
I was 5 years old in Tulsa, and I don’t maintain any mental imprint of watching a game there, but I did start buying baseball cards that summer and football cards that fall. I have a dozen or so baseball cards from that year — one of my favorite looks that Topps produced right alongside 1955 which just happened to mark my arrival in Tulsa — but the only one I have actually kept for six decades is the Mickey Mantle card. Others have been purchased, acquired along the way.
But I started thinking recently about the football cards, taking them to my grandmother’s house up the road in Skiatook, Okla., and playing with them there. I don’t really know what you do with cards when you’re a kid other than look at them and stack them, but whatever it was, I didn’t manage to preserve any in mint condition. There was a time I took my collection to a dealer in Oklahoma City when I lived there in the ’80s. He was looking through some potentially valuable Mantle-Mays cards and asked, “Did you stick pins in these cards?”
I hadn’t really noticed the tiny holes near the tops of cards from a time they used to hang on my bulletin board. Oops. Well, that’s no worse than when Wilt Chamberlain got traded, I crossed out Warriors and wrote 76ers.
In ink. On the front of his rookie card.
Oh, well, it was never about the value. It was about the love.
So recently I decided my small collection of 1960 baseball cards needed to be joined by some of their football pals. Thus, the arrivals of Unitas, Berry and Lenny Moore from the Colts. Brown, of course, is the most famous running back of all time, but he is joined (in my club) by the lesser known Willie Galimore. A two-time all-pro back for the Bears, Galimore has a Freedom Trail marker in St. Augustine, Fla., to acknowledge his civil rights activism. He died in a car accident along with a teammate while driving to Chicago’s training camp in the summer of ’64.
Then there is Tittle.
He needed to arrive first because what I really recall about football from 60 years ago isn’t so much throwing one around in the front yard — those memories start to show up in New Jersey a year or two later — but playing electric football for hours with my brother. In later years, those games would feature the Cowboys and the Steelers or maybe the Bears and the Packers, if you lived in the Midwest. In 1960, they were just two generic-looking teams, but my brother Pat’s Carnegie Elementary classmate Wayne would paint the jerseys and the helmets with the numbers of the offensive starters for any team in the NFL.
Now that I think of it, I’m not sure how he even got the starting lineups in those Neolithic days.
My brother went with the Philadelphia Eagles with Norm Van Brocklin at quarterback. They would win the NFL championship that year, their only one until the recent Super Bowl success. For reasons I cannot explain — who should someone pick in Tulsa anyway, the Cowboys were in their initial season — I went with the 49ers.
Thus, my early focus on Tittle. A year later our family would load up the station wagon for New Jersey. So would Tittle (not actually sure what he drove) where he would lead the New York Giants to two NFL title games.
So it’s good to have Tittle back home. While watching these NBA games in Orlando or the hockey playoff games in Canada, I’m trying to regain a sense of sport’s meaning in all of this, but without the roar of the crowd, it has been obscured. At the very least, the value of winning these games feels muted.
Somehow the arrival of old friends ignites memories of how this journey got started. That reminds me it’s time to go check the mail. I don’t know what’s keeping Frank Gifford.
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