1970 O-Pee-Chee Dennis Duncan #100 Montreal Alouettes EX 5

Description

1970 O-Pee-Chee Dennis Duncan #100 Montreal Alouettes EX 5 The 1970 O-Pee-Chee Dennis Duncan card captures a running back whose arrival in Montreal added thunder to an Alouettes offence on the rise, and it comes from the set that brought Canadian football cards back to life after a gap of more than five years. Duncan starred at Northwestern State University in Louisiana, where his 1969 season propelled him into the prestigious 1,000 yard club, an achievement the card itself celebrates in the cartoon panel on the reverse. Selected to the all-star team in college, he brought 230 pounds of north-south running to an Alouettes backfield that, later in this same 1970 season, would help carry Montreal on its improbable run from last place to the Grey Cup championship, completing what old-timers still compare to the miracle 1949 Dust Bowl season. The 1970 O-Pee-Chee CFL set of 115 cards is cherished because it was the first national Canadian football issue since the mid-1960s, and because its black bilingual backs make it instantly distinguishable from the Topps football cards of the same era, which shared the design but carried no French text. This card carries the genuine Canadian O-Pee-Chee bilingual back with the biography printed in English and French, and it is not a puzzle back, a distinction that matters to serious set collectors because the 1971 and 1972 follow-up sets moved to puzzle-backed formats. Action-pose cards like Duncan's, with the full stride and football tucked under the arm against a bright prairie sky, are among the most attractive of the entire 1970 issue and display beautifully in a raw collection. the most notable flaw is a vertical wax residue line that runs down the right side of the photograph through the sky area, visible as a lighter streak that likely came from decades of contact with an old wax sleeve, while the corners show light rounding with a touch of whitening at the top right, the edges remain clean and straight, centering is slightly right of middle, and the black bilingual reverse is clean and glossy with only minor corner wear. Because the wax line affects the eye appeal of the front despite otherwise honest surfaces, we assign a conservative raw grade of EX 5, pricing the card on its flaws rather than its beauty so the winning bidder is never disappointed. Grade Estimate: EX 5