Today’s card of the day is Frank Emanuel’s rookie card, a 1968 Topps. I chose it because it has one of the worst images I’ve seen on a card, and it always makes me laugh. It looks like one of those old grade school photos where they took just one shot, and you and your parents were stuck with it, eyes closed, hair sticking up, whatever. Why didn’t the photographer just ask Emanuel to take his helmet off?
Adding to the insult, the back of Emanuel’s card doesn’t show his bio or stats; instead, it’s a piece of a Len Dawson puzzle. The puzzles that Topps put on the backs of cards were a fun feature, but they came at the expense of some of the players, who didn’t really get a full card. You can see the completed Dawson puzzle, along with a few others, on the Gallery’s Puzzles on the Backs page.
Emanuel was an original Miami Dolphin. He played linebacker for the Dolphins from 1966 to 1969, then finished his career in 1970 with the New Orleans Saints. He played college football at the University of Tennessee, and he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2004.
Emanuel also appeared on a few more cards, fortunately, and they had far nicer images. His 1967 Royal Castle Dolphins card has a nice shot of him in action, and his brightly colored 1969 Topps card shows him looking very Miami-ish.
You can see all of Frank Emanuel’s cards in the Gallery.
You would think that Topps would relegate the puzzle to the backs of linemen’s cards, who don’t typically have any stats on the back anyway. “That’s Just Topps Being Topps!”
Thank goodness that that wasn’t the only card that he ever got.