1972 O-Pee-Chee CFL Rudy Sims #71 Base Set Ottawa Rough Riders CFL

Description

1972 O-Pee-Chee CFL Rudy Sims #71 Base Set Ottawa Rough Riders CFL A rookie who was already an all star before the ink on his biography had dried is the promise offered by this 1972 O-Pee-Chee CFL Rudy Sims #71 Base Set Ottawa Rough Riders CFL card, whose reverse cartoon bluntly labels him Mr. All Star in rookie year. The front shows Sims smiling in the dark Ottawa jersey with orange and white sleeve trim and the number 65 across his chest, held inside the deep red ROUGH RIDERS border that frames every Ottawa card in this set. The reverse is the classic Canadian O-Pee-Chee bilingual back, printed in blue and green ink on grey cardboard stock with his story told in both French and English, which confirms it as a Canadian bilingual back and not a puzzle back. That back lists him at six foot one and a half inches and 258 pounds, notes that he came out of Florida A and M, calls him a tackle to watch, praises the combination of size and striking quickness that would make him a candidate for an Eastern Football Conference All Star selection in the near future, and records that he was already an all star in his first season. Florida A and M is one of the proudest names in American college football, a program that produced generations of professional talent under the legendary coach Jake Gaither, and importing that kind of athletic pedigree to the interior of the Ottawa defensive line was exactly how CFL clubs built the punishing front fours of the early seventies. Sims lined up in a defensive group that the league learned to respect, on a team that had already won Grey Cups in 1968, 1969 and 1973, and he added the weight and quickness that a CFL tackle needed on a field twelve yards wider than the one he had grown up playing on. His card sits at number 71 inside the Ottawa block of a 132 card set that carried 13 players from each of the nine teams along with 14 Pro Action cards and a checklist numbered 132, and that set was the last CFL football issue O-Pee-Chee ever produced, giving even a hard nosed defensive tackle card a meaningful place in the history of Canadian collecting. the photograph is dark with visible print snow in the black background, which is typical of the darker images in this issue, and the top right corner is lightly soft while the remaining corners stay reasonably sharp. There is a light rub on the red border at the bottom right, centering is near 52/48 left to right, and the reverse is clean overall with normal cardboard fibre visible in the stock and a faint tone line in the blue border at the upper left, with no creases, writing or trimming detected on either side. A conservative grade assessment places this card at the EX 5 level. The softened top right corner, the light border rub and the heavy print snow in the dark photo hold it to EX 5, while the absence of creasing, the strong reverse and the honest original colour keep it well clear of the VG range and make it a solid mid grade example for any collector chasing the tough dark photo cards of this final O-Pee-Chee CFL set. Grade Estimate: EX 5