1973-74 O-Pee-Chee Bill Flett #20 All-Star Philadelphia Flyers

Description

1973-74 O-Pee-Chee Bill Flett #20 All-Star Philadelphia Flyers Bright yellow, hot red, and a bearded Broad Street Bully standing over a sprawled goaltender: the 1973-74 O-Pee-Chee Bill Flett #20 All-Star Philadelphia Flyers card is one of the loudest and most fun cards in the entire vintage O-Pee-Chee run. The '72-73 NHL All-Stars, West banner sits above a shield-shaped action window showing Flett in the orange and white Flyers road sweater after a scramble, with a St. Louis netminder wearing number thirty down on the ice in front of him. It is the kind of photo selection that makes early-seventies hockey cards feel alive rather than posed, and this particular copy carries the darker grey Canadian stock on the reverse. Bill "Cowboy" Flett is one of the great characters of the era, and the bilingual English and French back of this card leans right into it, opening with the line that he is a former rodeo performer who turned in his top performance ever the previous season. He scored 43 goals in 69 games in 1972-73 with 31 assists for 74 points, and the card notes that he missed nine games and could have approached 50 goals had he stayed healthy. The cartoon panel celebrates his other claim to fame, that he became the first NHL player of the modern era to wear a beard, a look that helped define the shaggy, intimidating identity of the Philadelphia Flyers teams built by Fred Shero. Flett broke into the NHL with Los Angeles in 1967-68 as an expansion-era original King before landing in Philadelphia, and he capped his time there by winning the Stanley Cup with the Flyers in 1974, the first championship won by a post-Original Six expansion club. That combination of rodeo backstory, iconic beard and Cup pedigree keeps this card popular with Flyers collectors and with anyone building a seventies hockey personality collection. This is the dark grey paper stock version, and the reverse is a true Canadian O-Pee-Chee bilingual back carrying the full French translation, the hockey-stick statistics graphic, the cartoon caption "Le premier joueur des temps modernes à porter une barbe dans la L. N. H." and "PRINTED IN CANADA" at the lower right. The set uses no puzzle backs. The front presents strongly, with vivid unfaded yellow and red inks and no visible fading or oxidation. Corners are better than average for the issue, with light fuzzing on the upper right and lower right and only minor blunting at the upper left. Edges are clean along the top and bottom, with faint chipping specks along the right border. Centering measures approximately 50/50 left to right and 55/45 top to bottom, which is genuinely strong for a 1973-74 O-Pee-Chee card. Under angled light the surface shows one small ink dot in the lower yellow border and a trace of print roller texture in the dark upper portion of the photo, but no creases, no wrinkles, no soft bends and no surface scratches. The grey back is clean and free of writing, staining or tape. Grade Estimate: EX-MT 6