Inching closer to the 1971-72 finish line

I'm sure I'm far from alone in this, but my favorite vintage hockey set (if we're defining vintage as pre-1980's) has to be 1971-72 O-Pee-Chee/Topps. It's one of the most memorable card designs of all time. I never had any as a kid, but I found two dozen or so from the Topps set about a year ago at a local hobby shop. I've been steadily chipping away at the set ever since. Here's the latest batch to arrive, all purchased from a pair of different Sportlots sellers.

This was the most expensive card of the bunch at $5. I wouldn't normally pay this much for a Sportlots card, but I'd bought from this seller in the past and been generally pleased with the conditions. This one was listed as NM, which I think was fair. I was pretty excited to knock Jacques here off my list, as he was one of the bigger names remaining on my need list. (Unfortunately, the others all significantly more expensive.)

Here's the other Hall of Famer of the lot. This card isn't in quite as sharp a condition, as there's a fairly noticeable ding in the upper right corner. But I've generally aimed for Excellent-ish condition cards, just because they are so much cheaper. In fact, the first batch of cards I found at the local card shop were all in fairly rough (read: "affordable") condition, and that was just fine with me. If I ever do finish this set, maybe I'll starting looking for condition upgrades.

I have to confess, I hate these "leaders" cards that kick off the set. It's not that their bad cards. It's just that they don't look nearly as good as the individual player cards. And yet they are much more expensive than regular base cards, because they include big stars (Tony Esposito, in the case of of these two.) I would much rather have had six more player cards, or even a set of Stanley Cup Playoffs recap cards like you find in later OPC/Topps sets. Anyway, with these two in hand, I now have three of the six of this subset.

Next up are a pair of semi-stars, and the only other cards in the lot that cost me more than $1 a piece. Derek Sanderson is probably best known for his lifestyle off the ice -- at one point, he was the highest-paid hockey player in the world, drove a Rolls Royce and described his pregame meal as "a steak and a blonde." Redmond was the first Red Wing to score more than 50 goals in a season and just the third player in NHL history to record back-to-back 50-goal campaigns. But his career was cut short by injuries, and he retired at 28. He's now a color man on Red Wings TV broadcasts. (He's also another example of buying lesser-condition cards for a lower price, as there is a fairly noticeable wax stain on the left side of the card.)

The remaining cards in these two orders were all commons. The most interesting to me: Juha Widing, who was apparently just the third Finn ever to play in the NHL and was nicknamed, "Whitey." My goodness, how times have changed....Altogether, these bring me to 118 of the 132-card Topps set. Unfortunately, that's a bit misleading, as the 14 include four of the five biggest cads of the set, including the Ken Dryden rookie. So I've a ways to go yet. But it's not the destination, it's the journey, right?