1969-70 O-Pee-Chee Al Arbour #178 St. Louis Blues VG 3

Description

1969-70 O-Pee-Chee Al Arbour #178 St. Louis Blues VG 3 Few faces in hockey history are as instantly recognizable as the bespectacled defenceman staring out from this 1969-70 O-Pee-Chee card, and that alone makes card #178 one of the quiet cornerstones of the set. Al Arbour was the only regular NHL player of his era to wear eyeglasses on the ice, a detail this bright yellow portrait captures perfectly, and by the time this card reached Canadian candy counters he was already the captain of the expansion St. Louis Blues and a four-time Stanley Cup participant with Detroit, Chicago and Toronto. He had lifted the Cup with Chicago in 1961 and with Toronto in 1962, and he had won the Eddie Shore Award as the American Hockey League's best defenceman in 1964-65, an accomplishment the French and English cartoon panel on the reverse celebrates with a drawing of Arbour hoisting the trophy. Of course, the larger story was still ahead of him, because this same shot-blocking, glasses-wearing veteran would go on to coach the New York Islanders to four consecutive Stanley Cups from 1980 through 1983 and enter the Hockey Hall of Fame as a builder, which turns this modest single into a genuine legacy piece rather than a common. Collectors should note that card #178 sits in the high-number range exclusive to O-Pee-Chee, since the parallel Topps issue stopped at 132 cards, so this is a Canadian-only piece with no American counterpart. The reverse is the classic 1969-70 O-Pee-Chee bilingual back in teal and gold, listing his age, height, weight and eight years in the NHL alongside full English and French biographies, a cartoon feature and his 1968-69 and lifetime statistics of 536 games played. It is a bilingual back, not a puzzle back. the front shows moderate handling with light surface wrinkling through the upper yellow field and a soft diagonal impression near the top left, all four corners are rounded with the bottom left showing the most fraying, edges display scattered white chipping along the left and top borders, and centering is slightly high and left but well within the tolerances typical of this notoriously rough-cut issue; the reverse shows edge wear along the top and right borders with corner softening and light print speckling on the teal frame, though all text remains fully legible with no writing, tape or pinholes. A conservative raw grade estimate of VG 3 accounts for the corner rounding and surface wrinkling while recognizing that the card is complete, uncreased through the portrait, and visually strong for its age. Grade Estimate: VG 3