1970 O-Pee-Chee Gino Baretta #104 Montreal Alouettes VG-EX 4

Description

1970 O-Pee-Chee Gino Baretta #104 Montreal Alouettes VG-EX 4 Kicker cards from the vintage era are a charming corner of the hobby, and this 1970 O-Pee-Chee Gino Baretta number 104 captures the Montreal native in mid-punt, frozen in one of the most dynamic action photos of the entire 115 card set. Baretta was a genuinely local story, a product of the Notre-Dame-de-Grace leagues in Montreal, which makes his bilingual biography on the reverse a small tribute to the city's homegrown football pipeline at a time when the Alouettes relied on a mix of Canadian talent and American imports. The 1970 season documented by this card ended in glory for the Alouettes, who climbed from a 2-8 record to upset their way to the Grey Cup championship, their first in 21 years, and specialists like Baretta played the unglamorous field position game that those late-season victories demanded. The 1970 O-Pee-Chee CFL set itself is the reason these cards matter: it was the first Canadian football issue in more than five years, printed in Canada by O-Pee-Chee of London, Ontario, and its black bilingual backs with the olive green cartoon panels are among the most distinctive designs in vintage Canadian cards. This example carries the authentic English and French bilingual back, and it is not a puzzle back, unlike the 1971 and 1972 sets that followed. Specialist cards were short-printed against star players in collector demand, so clean Baretta examples are genuinely difficult to source today. this is the lesser of the two Baretta copies in the sheet, with dinged top corners showing small notches, a bump on the right edge near the top, minor wax spotting in the upper left portion of the front, and lighter wear at the two bottom corners, while the edges elsewhere are clean, the action photo retains vivid colour and gloss, centering is acceptable, and the black bilingual reverse presents a diagonal surface scratch across the text panel with light corner wear on an otherwise bright back. Taking the dinged top corners, the edge bump and the reverse scratch together, we assign a conservative raw grade of VG-EX 4 and price the card to its weakest attribute, so the buyer who values the photo and the story will feel they received fair value from the first look through the last. Grade Estimate: VG-EX 4