We are up to 23 cards from 1993 Action Packed Hall of Fame in our video collection. If interested, you can find the first ten cards, a subset called “One on One,” the next six cards, a group of coaches with some NCAA greats and a five-card Larry Bird subset. But please allow me one more if you don’t mind. Card #22 is K. C. Jones and I wanted to keep going with it for three reasons. First, we’ve been on the Celtics so long with the Larry Bird subset, I figured one more Celtics wouldn’t hurt! Second, with card #22, we now enter the base cards and that’s the rest of Series I, so I figure a review of the structure of Series I would be nice. Finally, these cards always have great historical info and here we have a chance to talk about a rare topic, the basketball Triple Crown. So let’s get started.
First of all, we have a nice player card of a well-known coach. Purists won’t consider it a true player card since it wasn’t printed while he was actually a player, but it’s still fun. As with all of these cards, there’s a nice embossed action photo on the front. Great texture on that basketball. It’s not just the ball that pops out. They tried to put detail on the leather itself. The Celtics have the record for most NBA Championships with 18 and K. C. Jones was an integral part of so many of them. Eight of them as a player…look at the third bullet-point on the card “Played on 8 consecutive, consecutive World Champion Celtics teams from 1959-66.” And let’s add two more as a coach, that’s the fifth bullet-point, “Posted NBA career coaching mark of 522-252…and led Celtics to 1984 and ’86 NBA titles.” So that’s ten championships out of the 18 in Celtics history.
Now let’s talk about the basketball Triple Crown. First you need an NBA championship. Well, as we just discussed, he has plenty of those. Next you need an NCAA championship. “Played for the 1955 NCAA Tournament champion University of San Francisco Dons.” Finally, we need an Olympic gold medal. “Member of the 1956 gold-medal winning U. S. Olympic team.” Really a neat landmark in basketball. Only eight players did it… They include Jordan and Magic. Anthony Davis is the most recent to have achieved it.
And as with nearly all of the cards in this set, the year of induction into the Hall of Fame is included as the last bullet point on the card, here 1989.
So that was card #22, all base cards until the end of Series I now. A quick review of of what we have so far. Cards 1-10 are called “One on One” and we were presented with pairs of players related somehow. For example, the first two cards are Walt Frazier and Jerry West, and they competed against each other in the 1970, 1972 and 1973 NBA Finals with Frazier prevailing twice. Or take Elvin Hayes and Nate Thurmond, that matchup was obviously all about rebounds. Hayes is still in the top five today and Thurmond once had 42 rebounds in a game. Cards 11-16 are coach cards. We have legendary NBA coaches, like Red Auerbach with probably the only embossed cigar on a basketball card, and great NCAA figures too, like this John Wooden, Dean Smith, Bobby Knight and Lou Carnesecca who just recently passed away. Card 17-21 are a Larry Bird subset. These are strange, because they are the only five cards where the player wasn’t in the Hall of Fame when this set was printed, and it is a Hall of Fame set. But they give a great overview of Bird’s career and this year, 1993, was the year that the Celtics retired his number, so you have this nice gold-foil #33 jersey in the corner marking this subset. And of course, with card #22, we’ve entered the base cards. We’ll look at more of these for the history, like this basketball Triple Crown with K. C. Jones.
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