2011 Tristar Obak Football

Hooray! Football day! For the first time in nine months I got to watch the Falcons s#!& the bed! I'm so happy the season wasn't canceled. This seems like an appropriate time to post the Obak Football pack I snagged. My initial reaction: Sepia-colored baseball players superimposed over fluffy clouds are interesting. Sepia-colored football players superimposed over fluffy clouds are boring. I might just be suffering from a case of the Atlanta crappy football despairs. Not even Georgia's winning anymore. We don't even have an Uga right now because they all keep dropping dead. Now I'm very sad. Stay healthy Russ!

I shall attempt to chronicle this Obak pack through the tears. EVEN THE BRAVES KEEP LOSING. BAAAAWWWWWW! :_:

#64 Mitchell

Tristar does the thing where they slpit the player's name up in the write up on the back again in this set. Lord, I hate that. So annoying. SPOILER ALERT: This is the only photograph in the pack that was taken after about 1945. Lydell Mitchell here was a teammate of Franco Harris at Penn State and had a pretty dang good NFL career with the Colts in the '70s. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2004. I recognized Lydell as soon as I opened the pack and would have sworn that I already had a card with this photo on it. It turns out I merely have just about every single one of his cards from his playing days and a couple of the cards have very similar photos. Check out his 1976 Topps card, it might have been taken in the same photoshoot. Unfortunately for Le, Lydell has gotten some recent 'legends' cards in some Panini sets so my inadvertent status as Lydell Mitchell SuperCollector has been revoked.

#74 Beecher

@#$% Tristar doesn't even put the dude's first name on the back of this card!  I'm mad that I had to Google it so you can read Lifetime Topps Project's writeup on HENRY. Heeeeeeenry. Is that so hard, Tristar??

#8 Lombardi mini

Ok, Lombardi I can figure out by myself. This might be the only true keeper out of the pack, although I know at least two Packer fans who deserve it more than me. I shall have to weight the guilt of keeping it against the torment of trying to choose who to give it to and determine which will cause me the least amount of mental illness. Oh who am I trying to kid, I'm pretty much bonkers at this point. Maybe I should King Solomon it and  cut it in half so they both get a piece. The picture of young Vince here is pretty kickass, I've only seen him on the sidelines being a genius.

#79 McNamee

First football play by play announcer, whoopee. The only thing keeping this card of Graham McNamee performing a hand-fart concerto from being the single most boring card I've ever pulled is the fact that he was also the first great baseball announcer. He also worked as the straight man to Ed Wynn, which is pretty cool as well.

#4 Hein

Quick! Name the inaugural class of the Baseball Hall of Fame! You got it! Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson and Honus Wagner. You're really smart, you know that?

Here's another question: Name the inaugural class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame!

I'm waiting...

Still waiting.

Zzzzzzzzz.......

Ok, that was a tough question. NFL history only goes back as far as Super Bowl I and the first Hall class was elected four years earlier in 1963. There were seventeen members elected instead of five as well, and Mel Hein here was one of them. How'd he get in? I dunno, how'd an offensive lineman win an MVP award? Mel did that too.

Not a bad little pack there. Not a chance in hell I'm buying another one though. At least not until all the baseball Obak are gone.