1969-70 O-Pee-Chee Dick Mattiussi #147 Rookie Card Oakland Seals VG 3

Description

1969-70 O-Pee-Chee Dick Mattiussi #147 Rookie Card Oakland Seals VG 3 Northern Ontario produced a certain kind of hockey player in the 1950s and 1960s, and Dick Mattiussi of Smooth Rock Falls was exactly that type, a patient, hard-nosed defenceman who spent nine full seasons grinding through the American Hockey League before expansion finally opened the door. This 1969-70 O-Pee-Chee card #147 is his first-year issue and it tells that story right on the back, noting that Dick toiled for nine years in the AHL before moving up to the NHL with Pittsburgh and was traded to Oakland the previous season, with the same biography repeated word for word in French for Quebec collectors. The cartoon panel drives the point home with a drawing of a weathered veteran under the caption that Dick was a pro veteran before the NHL, one of the most endearing gag panels in a set full of them. His statistics are appropriately modest, 24 games with a goal and nine assists in 1968-69 and 68 games lifetime, but the card matters because it belongs to the O-Pee-Chee high-number series that runs from 133 to 231 and never appeared in the smaller American Topps release, making it a Canada-only card that many United States collectors still need to complete a master run of the era. The Oakland Seals connection adds further appeal, as the franchise's green and blue sweaters and its brief, chaotic California existence have made the team a favourite among vintage collectors chasing defunct-club material. The reverse is the standard 1969-70 O-Pee-Chee bilingual back in teal and gold with English and French biographies, a cartoon feature and NHL record lines. It is a bilingual back, not a puzzle back. the front shows a thin surface scratch running diagonally through the upper right sky area and light print speckling in the background, corners are rounded with visible fraying at the top left and bottom right, edges carry white chipping along the top and left borders, and centering runs slightly high with the bottom red name band a touch wider than the top; there is no full crease through the portrait but there is gentle surface waviness consistent with decades in a stack. The reverse shows heavier edge chipping along the left and bottom borders, softened corners and a small area of teal ink loss at the upper left, though all English and French text and the statistical lines remain crisp and legible with no writing or tape. A conservative raw grade estimate of VG 3 fairly reflects the corner rounding and border chipping while crediting the strong colour, clean statistical panel and complete, undamaged card body. Grade Estimate: VG 3