Friday, October 24, 2014

Flashback Friday #252

A Bad Choice For Bart


Hello again. Yes, I realized that I missed last week. Busy, busy, busy.

Anyway, this post is about a choice that I offered Bart. In retrospect, he chose wrong. However, neither of us could have known just how wrong at the time.

My on & off girlfriend, Toni, had gotten me interested in collecting baseball cards. I had also been buying football cards. This was the second year that I had  collected. I had many cards that were the same. These are called "doubles".

Bart also had some older cards that his older brother had given him when he got married & moved out. The gem of his collection was Mickey Mantle's last card. I asked him if he would like to get into collecting current cards. He said he would, but he was more of a football fan than a baseball fan. I told him that I could hook him up with some of my football "doubles".


He especially liked the Philadelphia Eagles. I had a few doubles of them that I let him have. He also liked quarterbacks (the most popular position on the field). I dug through my stash to find some quarterbacks for him. I didn't have very many, but I offered him one from each team that I had. Each of the teams had a card of their starting QB and most had a card of the back-up. There were a couple of bad teams that had two quarterbacks with similar stats.

I offered Bart his choice of one particular team. After looking at the stats on the back, Bart chose the guy that had passed for the most yards because he must have been the starter. The card he chose was Steve DeBerg who passed for 1,998 yards for the San Francisco 49ers. The card that he passed up was of a guy that had thrown for 1,795 yards for the same team. This was DeBerg's third year in the league and the other QB had been in the league for two.

The other guy was some guy named Joe Montana. What I didn't realize was that since he wasn't pictured the previous year, this was his rookie card. Yes, I talking about THE Joe Montana that was Super Bowl MVP three times and threw for over 50,000 yards in his NFL career. DeBerg had an OK career, but lost the starting QB gig three times to younger quarterbacks. The first was with the 49er losing out to Montana. He then went to the Broncos for a few years and a youngster named John Elway beat him out for the job. That lead him to the Buccaneers where a transplant from the USFL took his spot. That quarterback's name was Steve Young. I guess if you're going to lose a job, getting beat out by three Football Hall of Fame quarterbacks is the way to do it.