As might be expected, the league was much whiter in 1959, but that’s not to say that blacks hadn’t already made an impact by that time. Jim Brown (shown facing page in color), for one, was arguably the most prominent player in the league at the time, and he had the proud second-year card to show for it. Like the man himself, the card doesn’t neatly fit any category; it’s a portrait, but kept at a distance, maybe figuratively stiff-arming the fans a bit, in what is nonetheless a great football card by any measurement.
Still, he wasn’t exactly alone, and there are plenty of super pasteboards of the likes of Roosevelt Grier, Mel Triplett, Lenny Moore, John Henry Johnson and – my favorite – Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb.
Presenting all of this happy slice of Americana in a football card set was something Topps handled almost flawlessly, unless you would describe an unseemly reliance on the color pink as a flaw.
To continue the movie-making metaphor just a bit longer, utilizing such an, uh, effeminate color so extensively in a football card issue might be considered a shrewd bit of casting against type, but it also would probably be a stretch to suggest that the Topps designers were craftily navigating such nuanced waters
at the time. Probably, they were just looking for bright colors.
I can remember finding the pink usage in 1958 and 1959 Topps Baseball cards
only mildly noteworthy back then, and besides, the pink in those instances had
barely enough blue in it to hint that the goal had actually been purple, rather than pink. But in 1959 Topps Football it was pretty clearly pink, mitigated only slightly by the realization that there might have been two dozen different shades of it pictured.Still, no animals or small children were irreparably harmed by such frenzied usage, though a couple of Detroit Lions standouts, Bill Glass and Alex Karras, probably have a legitimate beef. Maybe the Topps guys were just getting even for having created those masterpieces of Schmidt and Cassady.