Cards: Upper Deck Legends 1997, Topps 1971, Top Notch Trading Cards Signature Select
Acquired: TTM 2014, C/o Home
Sent: 9/2 Received: 9/11 (9 days)
One of my earliest memories of even seeing football was in the 1970s when as a kid I would go across the street and play with my friend Cody. His parents were big football fans and they’d have the Cardinals on whenever they could. I just remember those white on red uniforms. His dad would be sitting in the living room watching the Cardinals, and I remember watching Terry Metcalf do his thing.
Jim Hart’s career spans a rare 3 decades of football. 1966 to 1983 seems like a long time and it is, especially when you go undrafted. Hart ended up impressing the Cardinals brass who signed him after a tryout. He’d take over the starter duties soon thereafter, and while Jim’s teams struggled early on, he’d flourish under Don Coryell and the team became known as the Cardiac Cards for their comeback wins and exciting contests. His best season came in ’74 when Jim was named the NFC Offensive Player of the Year. He also earned Second Team All-Pro. A 4 time Pro Bowler, Hart earned the honor from 1974-1977, and was given the Whizzer White Player of the Year for his charitable contributions in 1975.
In 1981 the Cardinals drafted their second franchise quarterback- the also vastly underrated Neil Lomax. The writing was on the wall, and Hart was slowly being phased out. Jim played for the Cards through 1983. He’d spend one largely forgettable season with the Washington Redskins in ’84 before retiring. While Kurt Warner is now considered the Arizona Cardinals best QB, I’d argue that Hart was the best St. Louis quarterback that the franchise has seen- but those heroics are largely diminished or forgotten by a fanbase that didn’t care or know who he was during Hart’s heydays. Jim is considered an excellent TTM signer.
G/GS 201/180 ATT 5076 COMP 2593 YDS 34655
PCT 51.1 TD 209 INT 247 RAT 66.6
RUSH 159 YDS 207 AVG 1.3 TD 16 LG 23
When Lance’s ‘trainee’ asked for his autograph, Dishman asked the kid how old he was. I wasn’t sure if it was because he was too young to remember the Oilers or because he looked too young to be in the bar. Anyway it was a good laugh. When I approached Cris, he threw me off. He told me that he’d sign anything as long as it didn’t end up on EBay. I had already paired down my selection of cards, because I did not want to go into a bar with a long box- so I left probably 5 or 6 additional Dishman cards in the car. I am not sure how he felt. He signed what I had and reaffirmed he’d sign anything else as long as it didn’t end up on EBay. Maybe he was actually hoping I had more. I then told him that I felt like after that humbling preseason game against Minnesota (in which he intercepted a pass and got busted showboating at the 2 yard line) he really turned a corner and became one of the best DBs in the league for a few years there. He stopped for a second, looked at me and told me that, “It meant a lot that I said that.” I told Cris that I wasn’t going to sell them, that I was a true blue fan thru and thru, and he and I had even talked on SotL for a bit. After telling him that I was ‘the guy with the mask on’, he smiled briefly at me and finished signing.
Cris had some pretty good cards, and despite signing a few for me over the years, he still has a pretty deep selection of decent action shots, even on bad looking cards. I rarely, if ever got Pro Set Platinum cards signed. They provided me nothing different than the base Pro Set. While they were daring with the blank canvas and full color photo, the logo is gigantic and garish. Still the card itself is a great photo of Cris. Unfortunately by this time I had already begun to scale back my card consumption, or else the Skybox ‘Colors’ set would’ve been a must have. It may have been a combination of things: Discovering girls, a market being flooded by too many products, drop in quality, etc- but whatever it was my interest in the product had dropped off the map by 1993.
