| Topps Vault |
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| Dallas Cowboys Custom Cards Series |
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Photographers for Topps took many photos of players that never made it to an official football card. The Topps Vault -their online & eBay store -started selling the original color negatives of these photos a some time ago. I started saving the images of every Dallas Cowboys player that showed up on eBay. In some cases, more than one photo of a particular player was taken; I suppose just to have more than one to choose from. About one year ago they started to put the Topps logo watermark over the photos on eBay. It doesn't really detract much from the photos, so I kept collecting the images for my own library. Many obscure players can be found in Cowboys uniforms, as well as the big stars of the team, which begs the question...If photographers were sent out to photograph players, why were so many photos used in the early days showing players in the uniform from the team they came from, either by trade or expansion draft?
I purchased one of these when I first started keeping track of the color negatives. They are a little smaller than a standard football card, and blurry. Based on the images that were used in the listings, I suppose these negatives can be used to produce really sharp color photos.
I thought it would be a fun idea to use these images to create football cards for players that missed out on cardboard imortality. There are also photos of players that pre-date their RC's, so I wanted to provide a card that would be closer to their actual rookie year than when Topps decided to produce a card for them.
I have dozens of images on file and plan to add to this series of cards frequently, so be sure to come back and see the new cards.
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| 1963 Topps Jerry Norton |
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| Purple sky variation |
Color corrected |
| To start this project out, I thought I'd make up for Topps poor decision on choosing the photo for the Jerry Norton card in the 1963 set (one of my least favorite Cowboys cards). Jerry was drafted by the Eagles in 1954, so there were plenty of photos of him in an Eagles uniform. He only played for the Cowboys in 1962, but the Topps people did end up with a photo of him in uniform. Why they chose to go with the one they did is beyond me. |
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| 1970 Topps Reggie Rucker RC |
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| The question was recently posed on the cowboycards.com forum, "Who would you like to see on a football card?". Basically, what player(s) got overlooked in the rather small team sets produced by card compaines dating back to the early Cowboys teams. One of the first responses to this was this Cowboys wide receiver. Rucker played for the Cowboys for two seasons (1970-71), then went on to play for the Giants and Patriots before finding a permanant home with the Cleveland Browns, where he played for seven more seasons. |
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| 1965 Philadelphia Jerry Rhome RC |
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| With Don Meredith locked in as the starting QB for the Cowboys, Jerry Rhome and Craig Morton battled for the back-up job. Rhome would compete for that job his entire career with the Cowboys from 1965-68, before moving on to Cleveland, then two more teams, and finished his football career with the Montreal Alouettes of the CFL in 1972. Jerry, a Dallas Texas native, coached for a number of years in the NFL where he earned a Super Bowl ring as the quarterbacks coach for the Redskins. |
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| 1960 Topps Cowboys Team Set |
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| The 1960 Topps set featured nine players in the Cowboys inaugural season, all of which were pictured in the uniforms of the teams they came from. With the color negatives that surfaced from the Topps Vault, there was obviously an effort made to take photos. Another fact about the Cowboys players chosen for that set is, that four of them ended up not playing for the team that season. Perhaps the Topps set was released too early to do anything about it. These nine custom cards are an example of what could have been. |
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| 1966 Philadelphia Jethro Pugh RC |
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Talk about being looked over by the major card company of the time! Jethro Pugh was drafted in 1965, and was a key piece of Landry’s puzzle that formed one of the most dominant defenses in the NFL. Pugh’s 14 seasons ranks 4th all-time in Cowboys history. His football card debut was in 1973, Pugh’s ninth season. |
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| 1961 Fleer |
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In 1961 Fleer did what Topps failed to do in its first two attempts at Cowboys cards (1960 & 61) –a complete team set with Cowboys in uniform! The only problem was that they chose Yankee Stadium, site of the Cowboys final game of the 1960 season, as the back-drop. This has always bothered me a bit about that set, so I've set out to recreate the set with the Cotton Bowl in the background.
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