So our first clue shifted our regular Saturday Soccer Spot to America, which is where the Lightning Safety Week takes place. We also chose a card of the Los Angeles Chargers, who compete in the National Football League or NFL, and who not only use a curving lightning strike logo, but have done since the team began in 1960, even through a move to San Diego. You can see that on our card, by looking at the helmet. And last year California had more lightning than usual, recording almost eighty thousand strikes in peak season, between the beginning of June and the end of August.
Our man is James Robert Brooks and he was born on December the 28th, 1958. He started playing American Football at his High School. Warner Robins, in Georgia, and continued when he went to Auburn College, in Alabama, in 1977. He made the cut of the NFL Draft in 1981, joining the San Diego Chargers, and this is often supposed to be his "Rookie" card, but it turns out he was also featured as part of a short run, unnumbered series of sixteen cards jointly issued by the local Kiwanis Club, Pepsi Cola, and the San Diego Police, we just don`t know which was issued first.
In 1984 he moved to the Cincinnatti Bengals, and in 1992 to the Cleveland Browns, ending his career through injury, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, in Florida, in the same year, 1992. This injury is said to be minor, but I cannot find out any more - whatever it was, it was not so minor as to allow him to play on, as he was only thirty-three years old.
Our set has cards and three sorts of stickers.
The cards are true trade as "fifteen picture cards" were inserted with "I stick bubble gum". However, the stickers were not in this packet, they were in a separate packet named as "1982 Topps Football Album Stickers" and they also did not include any gum. We also believe that they were for a separate album to the cards, but I`ve not proved that yet. I also have no idea of how many stickers were in a packet or what the packet retailed for, but the set contained 288 stickers
The majority of the stickers were standard, but certain ones were on foil - these were the first ten stickers, dealing with the Sixteenth Annual Super Bowl and the 1981 NFC and AFC Championship, as well as Joe Montana, voted Most Valuable Player of that particular Super Bowl, then a selection of players (once again including Joe Montana), on stickers 70-77, 139-160, and 220-227 inclusive. I mention this because some people think that this set followed the modern day practise of having a base set and then the same set with a foil inset or printed on foil. That is not the case here, the foil cards and the standard cards were inserted in the same envelope and were part of the same set. But you can find stickers with "Coming Soon" printed on the reverse, and these were actually issued in the packs with the cards, as a kind of teaser. They are pretty scarce, but they are actually trade - as they came in the packet which had the gum, not the packets which only had the stickers.