Hopefully, football season is about to begin.
I began collecting baseball cards back in 1971 and it’s turned into a lifetime passion.
As a fan of the Green Bays Packers, pieces of cardboard with the future legends of football soon followed.
My first year for football cards was 1972. However, because there was a store on a corner just a block away from my house where I was able to purchase several packs of the 1971 cards. Those have always been my favorites.
At the age of nine, I was just learning about the game and the players. One of the first cards I remember pulling out of the box from the 1971 set was some guy named Johnny Uni-tas.
Obviously, I had no idea who Johnny Unitas was or how to pronounce his name, but the card has always been one of the more important ones in my collection.
A trip to my grandparents house led to reading the encyclopedia about Unitas. What a story. He was a true underdog in many ways, who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1979.
Cut by the Pittsburgh Steelers, Unitas eventually led the Baltimore Colts to a victory in what is known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played” for the 1958 National Football League championship. The Colts beat the New York Giants 23-17 in sudden death overtime to claim the title.
This Unitas guy was great and I had his football card. It was pretty important to a nine-year old.
More to the Story
As I learned more about Unitas, there would be more to his story. The coach of the 1958 league champion Colts was some guy named Weeb. His name as just as funny as Uni-tas.
However, that’s just the beginning. Reading about Weeb Ewbank, I discovered that he played football at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Oxford was just a short drive from my house in Indiana, which I thought was neat.
Wow, wait a minute. Really? Further reading led me to discover that Weeb from actually from my hometown of Richmond, Indiana. Imagine how stunned I was at the age of nine. I’m looking at my Unitas card and thinking how cool it was he knew someone from my hometown.
Even More
Turns out that Weeb also coached the New York Jets when they won Super Bowl III. It was quite an overwhelming discovery for a young football fan to find out how much my hometown was a part of the sport’s history. By the time Ewbank joined the Hall of Fame in 1978, I was in high school and knew the legacy he provided for our football program.
Years later When Ewbank passed away in 1998, I was working as a sportswriter for my hometown newspaper. My boss, Jan Clark, covered the funeral and there was a photo of Unitas in the next day’s paper.
There were many national and local football legends who attended the service including Joe Namath, who led the Jets to their Super Bowl victory.
Although, I never had the honor of meeting Weeb, the funeral was such a statement about my hometown hero.
One thing is certain, there are a lot of memories created by a small piece of cardboard that still has me feeling like a nine-year old whenever I see that Uni-tas card.