1972 O-Pee-Chee Keith Magnuson #71 Chicago Black Hawks

Description

1972 O-Pee-Chee Keith Magnuson #71 Chicago Black Hawks If there is one card on this sheet that captures the bruising soul of early 1970s hockey, it is this 1972 O-Pee-Chee Keith Magnuson #71, a tribute to the red-haired defenseman who made every trip into the Chicago Black Hawks zone a negotiated risk. Magnuson came out of the University of Denver and stepped straight into a league where blueliners were measured less by points and more by the fear they planted along the boards, and his 291 penalty minutes in 1970-71 stood among the highest single-season totals of his generation. His full-body skating pose against the bright blue studio backdrop is exactly the bold, simple composition that makes vintage O-Pee-Chee cards so displayable today. Born in Saskatoon in 1947, Magnuson spent his entire ten-season NHL career with Chicago, piling up more than seven hundred penalty minutes as the protective conscience of the team, and after retirement he returned to the organization as a beloved assistant coach until his life ended far too soon in a tragic highway accident in December 2003. Because he was never a marketed superstar, his surviving cards were carried in bike spokes and rubber-banded in attics rather than preserved in albums, which makes honest examples like this one genuinely harder to find than the modest price suggests. The card comes from the landmark 1972-73 O-Pee-Chee release, the largest hockey set the Canadian company had produced to that point at 340 cards, with the issue's classic woodgrain tan border, yellow name banner and circular team crest. The reverse is the true Canadian O-Pee-Chee bilingual back, with the English biography and French translation printed side by side above the cartoon panel and career record table, confirming this as an OPC issue rather than the American Topps printing, and it is not a puzzle back design. this example shows three fairly sharp corners with only a touch of whitening at the lower right tip, light edge chipping along the bottom border consistent with normal handling, and centering that favors the left slightly at roughly 55/45, while the glossy surface is free of creases, wrinkles and print marks and the bilingual back stays clean with crisp orange ink. Because vintage OPC cards almost always reveal a flaw under magnification, and because I grade conservatively to protect buyers, this card settles at a raw estimate of EX 5, an honest grade for a handsome set builder or Chicago specialty collection. Grade Estimate: EX 5