1985 Topps Football : I promise you we'll be back in TIME

 

The only goal that I had in my mind was to get Andy Francis

What I was going to do with him if I caught him was another matter. Probably nothing. But a group of us kids had been playing a cat and mouse game with him around the swimming pool. It was an indoor pool, surrounded by glass windows. As I remember it, during this “game,” Andy kept running inside and outside of the building. So, we divided our team. Mike Bankowski and my brother were outside waiting to get Andy. Me and Brian Luccio were on the other side of those glass doors in case he came back inside. Then it was open season on good ol’ Dorkus Goofus from the Land of Dorkus Goofuses…as we so affectionately called that big eared little jerk. I couldn’t remember what we were mad at Andy for this time.

            Us kids hated Andy Francis. His mom, Cindy Francis, ran a daycare out of her home, one that our parents were forced to send us to because our households needed double incomes just to scrape by in Ronny Reagan’s new morning in America. We had no one else to watch us. Because of the money our parents had to pay to be in the care of Cindy and her cohorts, meant that we didn’t go on summer vacations. We didn’t get to see our friends during those long summer days, where we should’ve been playing wiffle ball in the street. Real life happened again as the sun began to fade in the hazy sky. I hadn't even seen THESE guys in action yet! 

Because Cindy got the bright idea to give us kids some summer recreation, other than running around her yard attempting to kill her son, more of our parent’s hard-earned money was forced into paying for this indoor pool. If you didn’t pay in, you stayed at the Francis home with the kids under five, and all of the screaming, crying babies. As much as many of us didn’t want to be in this daycare, no one wanted that fate. Swimming it was.

            Deep down we probably hated Andy because we hated our situation. Andy wasn’t one of us, yet we were forced to endure him as if he were one of our own. Andy wasn’t dropped off at seven in the morning, dead tired, when we should’ve been sleeping in like all of our friends. He wasn’t made to sit in front of a TV watching cartoons, as more and more tired kids shuffled in. He didn’t spend his days in some stranger’s house, as just another part of the queue in this town.

Andy woke up when he wanted. Andy ate the lunches he wanted, instead of the bottom shelf PB&J sandwiches served with the bruised fruit that we ate. He didn’t have to drink the powdered milk, yes, powdered milk, that we drank. In one gulp, holding our noses, like we were being poisoned. Andy wasn’t one of us. But he tried to be. He sat with us at lunch. Wanted to play wiffle ball and football with us in his backyard. HIS backyard. HIS wiffle ball and bat. We were forced to let him play because he owned our world. And with that came our ire.

But it never struck anyone of us kids that Andy was losing out too…just in a different way. Yeah, he got up when he wanted. But Andy always woke up in a house full of other kids. Kids who’d already dictated what was on his TV. Kids who were already vying for the affections of his mother, before Andy had even wiped the sleep out of his eyes. Our parents had to work, yes. But when my mom and dad were home, we had their undivided attention. Andy had kids inside his house until six or seven in the evening. He had kids, like me, who hated him for his very existence, yet played with all of his stuff. Andy threw a lot of tantrums as a result. That just made us hate him more.

            And just like that, he appeared. Andy. Outside on that hot, concrete patio that surrounded the indoor pool. I was inside looking out and he was outside looking in. No one else was around. Not my brother. Not Mike. Brian Luccio was probably in trouble for trying to drown one of the other kids. We made eye contact. Andy gave me a smirk and had a glint in his eyes, like he was going to spring the minute I gave chase.

Christ, he thought this was all a joke! He thought we were playing around. Just having fun. That were weren’t determined to catch him and beat him to a pulp. For? For? Ah, what a fool! What a stupid, momma’s boy fool.  If I did anything to Andy, at the very least I was going to make him cry. Cry like he did in front of us when he couldn’t get his mom’s attention. Cry like he did when we wouldn’t let him play ball. Just make him cry. Full of rage, I charged at Andy. I went right for one of the sliding, glass doors that the pool kept open for people to go inside and out. I was going to catch that bastard for sure.

            But the door wasn’t open. Or I ran toward the wrong one. My first memories of coming too, after smashing through the glass door, was Andy standing there. His smirk gone, replaced with a look of terror. He was in shock. I was in shock. My brother came around the corner with Mike, saw me, and went into a blood curdling scream. Our chaperone (not Cindy but one of her lackeys. Cindy never came to the pool) had to restrain him. Muscled men from complex’s adjoining gym were racing toward me. The owner of the indoor pool was on her cordless calling 911. It happened that fast.

            (Yes, this is an actual image of the pool that i found online, facing the windows I ran through)

I hadn’t even assessed the damage that I done to myself. Was my face cut up? My hands? My arms? No, they looked fine. My face felt fine. Subconsciously I must’ve protected myself upon impact. And what an impact! There was glass everywhere around me. Regular glass and glass mixing with blood. But from where?  My left knee was bleeding and so was my right ankle. But not in a way that would create such a mess.

Then I looked down at my left leg. There was a one-inch-thick shard of glass sticking out of my shin. It sickens me to this day to think about it or remember it. Still in shock, though, I pulled the glass out and blood gushed everywhere. That’s when everything went momentarily black for me.

            Next thing I knew, the muscle men had put me on a picnic bench. I remember looking back at that window, the glass all over the concrete, the pooling blood, the me-sized shatter in the middle of the door. The men took off my shirt and used it as a tourniquet around the wound in my leg. All the kids were staring. Adults too. My brother’s cries. Music was playing. Huey Lewis and the News, The Power of Love. An ambulance sounding in the distance.

            What in the hell had happened? All I knew was that earlier in the day I was just a kid stuck at some daycare, at a home that wasn’t mine. The same place that I was stuck at every single day. We’d played some wiffle ball that August morning. Of course, Andy cried when we wouldn’t let him pitch. He made such a stink that Cindy was going to make me, my brother, Mike and Brian stay home from the pool that day. Teach us a lesson. Maybe that was why we were gunning for Andy that afternoon at the pool.

I remember Mike and I traded cards after wiffle ball. I got my first Clemente off of him. My first Clemente ever! A 1960 Clemente with a huge chunk of the front ripped off. Leaving nothing left but brown cardboard. But it was still a Clemente card. Like this one. 

Only picture half the image gone.

It was August. Football season was upon us. I was then and I’m not now, the type of football fan that I am a baseball fan. But I liked it enough. And I liked cards! August meant that the new football cards were out. 1985 Topps! Thrift Drug had them. Miller had told me about the fresh stock of cards the evening before, in the usual, reverent, mythical way that we talked about brand new cards. He was going to Thrift to pick up some football cards that very, fateful day that I went ramming through that window. In the sane, rational world in which blood wasn’t oozing from my leg, I had planned on trying to get my mom to make a quick stop at the Thrift so I could pick up some packs too. Maybe I’d get that Louis Lipps rookie card!

Funny how plans change.

Instead, I was in an ambulance that was tearing down Allegheny River Boulevard toward St. Margaret’s hospital. 

I’d never been in an ambulance before. As an eleven-year-old I suppose that was a good thing not to have experienced as of yet. I was scared. One minute I was going to pulverize Andy Francis, and the next I’m in an ambulance. But the EMTs were great. They made me laugh. They made me try to forget where we were heading, and the fact that my bloody, damaged left leg was wrapped up. They made me forget the trauma that had just happened.

            I remember my mom waiting for us at the emergency entrance. She worked in the medical billing department at St. Margaret’s, so it was no bother her being there to meet me. She looked a wreck. Ashen. The fear of God in here. Mom didn’t know what to expect when she saw me. But she brightened when she saw how much the EMTs had amused me. What eleven-year-old gets out of an ambulance laughing? That ambulance trip would be the last laugh I’d have for quite a few weeks. Why couldn’t I have gotten through my day and just bought those damned football cards? Fucking Andy Francis.

            Things are a blur from there. Doctors in and out of the ER, examining the major wound. The glass had cut through several layers of my skin and tissue. I was going to have to have an operation. My dad arrived looking just as haggard as mom. Some nurse gave me a sharp shot right in my ass. I screamed out in pain.

Then it would be the anesthesia. Before I knew it, the doctors were wheeling me into operating room. I remember being fine one minute then drifting, drifting, until one doctor said softy to me…good night, John. When I woke up hours later, I had stitches on my right ankle. Stiches on my left knee. There was a cast on my left leg. Because of the depth of the cut, I had damaged a number of tendons in my leg.

            My summer was effectively over and my fall wasn’t looking so grand. Mom had to change her work schedule, and work nights again so she could be home with me. It was bye-bye daycare but I felt bad. Guilty, really. My mom had just gotten the 9-5 job a year or so before. Now she was stuck right back where she was at before. Man, I told myself. If I ever get my hands on Andy Francis! But wasn’t that way of thinking the reason why I was in the position that I was in? I was a slow learner back then. I’m not much better now.

I also felt sorry for myself. Here I was at home, where I wanted to be, but I was relegated to being stuck on the couch. I couldn’t go outside and play ball with Miller and my brother. I was supposed to be starting my second season on the JV football team that year. One of the older kids, starting on the offensive and defensive line. Practice hadn’t even started yet, but it was already gone. All of it. Just me and my cast. And physical therapy starting in a month.

            On one lugubrious day where I was having a particularly tough time playing patient and prisoner, Miller and my brother went up to the Thrift Drug and come back with a ½ box full of 1985 Topps football cards for me to open. Christ, I’d forgotten the cards were out! It was like someone handed me a life preserver, because I was going down, man. Way down. Cards were the best way to cheer me up.

            Enough trauma, right? Let’s talk football cards.

1985 Topps football cards were unlike any other cards that I’d ever seen before…or after, really. The whole 400-card set was horizontal instead of vertical. THE WHOLE SET. Topps relied on close-up images of the players, saving most of the action shots for the team cards they issued that year. The borders were black. Not a thick black, but no thin line either. And the last names of the players? HUGE. With the first name in a tiny box imposed over the last name. The team name was in a bar next to the player’s last name. If you measure it, one could say the player name and team name take up almost ¼ of the cards, maybe more. The backs of the cards were a sharp red, white and blue motif that Topps kept vertical. It was like a complete opposite of what you expected a card to be.

Here are some examples:

I didn’t like 1985 Topps football cards as a kid. I didn’t want my designs horizontal and sans a good action shot or two. My favorite football designs of the decade are probably 1984

and 1987 Topps.

And as kids we already knew a black border was anathema to what we wanted in our cards. There was no WAY I was keeping any of these in good condition. As a Steelers fan it was strange too. The 1985 set was the first one in years not to feature Franco Harris or Terry Bradshaw on cardboard. Instead, we got cards of these guys…

That said, I’ve actually grown to really like 1985 Topps Football as an adult collector. And I’m warming up to the football cards of my youth overall. I’m actually thinking of getting a few cards of players I liked back then. But opening wax? Not with wax boxes running $2,500 online. But the set is pretty darn sharp with rookie cards of the aforementioned Louis Lipps, as well as Warren Moon

Richard Dent,

Mike Munchak, Mark Clayton and others. 

The set also features second-year cards for legends like Dan Marino,

John Elway,

and Eric Dickerson

for those of you who feel their rookie cards are too steep.

            As for my leg. That fall of 1985, I did start physical therapy. The doctors wanted to operate on my leg, remove tendons from one of part of my body where they weren’t being utilized, to where the damaged ones were. But I didn’t want to be operated on again. So, we didn’t do it. The therapy was kind of a success, but my left leg would never be the same. Because of the tendon damage I can’t arch my left foot like I can my right. My right foot grew to be almost a size bigger than my left. And if you pay attention to me when I walk, I lift my left leg more than my right when I step. I also trip on my left leg a lot more than I ever do my right.

But by October 1985, I was able to play Nerf football in the street again with Miller and my brother. After a failed attempt to return to the daycare, my parents decided that I was old enough and mature enough to watch myself. Then it was only my poor brother being carted off to daycare in the mornings and after school. Although by the summer of 1986 I’d be watching him as well. Two latchkey kids under the age of thirteen with endless hours of summer at their disposal. Ah, the 80s. What could go wrong? I have a story about a tree we almost set on fire…maybe next time.

            That said, I still can’t remember why it was that we were chasing Andy Francis that day.

Thanks for Reading. Happy Collecting.

So apparently that swimming pool has expanded...and is WAY more infamous than what happened to me there. You can read all about it right HERE

If you'd like to learn more about the career of Louis Lipps you can do so HERE and HERE

NEXT FRIDAY:  I think I'm going to expand on my thoughts and feeling about insert cards and parallel cards and autos. Since I've been back into this for almost two years now, I do have a somewhat evolved opinion from where I began. I quit collecting just as insert cards were really gaining steam and momentum in the The Hobby.