Longtime collector chronicles thrill of THE CHASE for autographed cards from 1997 Upper Deck NFL Legends set

I first noticed the 1997 Upper Deck NFL Legends Football set in the old Tuff Stuff magazine, and then I caught a real-life glimpse of the cards on store shelves at Walmart the next Spring.

I bought several packs and cracked them at home later that night. This is long before I was on eBay scouring the internet for cards I wanted in my collection. I barely knew what eBay was in the late 1990s and we had a mostly tenuous dial-up connection that created long wait times for images to load. I started this journey with the Upper Deck Legends set the old-fashioned way: I saw the set in a magazine and bought them in a brick-and-mortar store.

I quickly fell in love with the set. I loved the photography, the beautiful, sleek design of the cards, with sharp, colorful pictures of each player, almost all of them in action. I think that it is the most artistic and attractive set ever produced for any sport.

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And the cards brought back so many memories of my favorite players of the 1960s and ’70s, the days of my youth when I fell in love with pro football, with my Cleveland Browns, and the grace and power and speed of the game on TV, especially while watching the Sunday afternoon games with my father.

The cards brought back my love of sports cards, how they looked, how the pictures popped from the black borders, and how they felt in my hand. They made me think of reconnecting with the hobby again, not just reading about it.

I pulled an autograph from one of those first five or six packs—a Dan Fouts card (#AL-7) showing the Hall of Fame quarterback delivering a bullet pass to a receiver while wearing one of the many versions of the Chargers iconic blue and gold uniforms. 

I didn’t expect to get an autographed card in those first packs; in fact I had never heard of such a thing. I hadn’t cracked any wax since the 1970s as a kid and didn’t even realize it was a possibility until I started opening packs.

Needless to say, I was hooked, and I decided to collect the entire set of cards, all 208. The chase was on, but not THE CHASE that lasted nearly three decades. This was merely the start of it.

My next step was to buy a retail box at Walmart. They were relatively affordable then, with each box holding 20 packs with 10 cards to a pack. (I wish now that I had bought 20 boxes, opened four and stored 16). 

When I started opening the packs, I pulled three autographed cards in the first box, and got a good number of the total cards in the set. So, I bought another retail box to see if I could finish off the set. I had a blast opening the packs, stacking the cards, putting them in order, and cherishing the autographed cards. It became clear to me that I needed a hobby, and this would be it, rekindled by Upper Deck’s fantastic new set.

At nearly the same time, I ran across an article on collecting autographed cards through the mail. What? I had never thought of that or been in tune enough with the hobby to have a sense of autographed cards as desirable, let alone attainable.

So now I had a complete set of the 1997 Upper Deck Legends Football set, several cool autographed cards, nearly a second set of cards in doubles after opening retail boxes, and a plan to start sending cards through the mail requesting autographs from my favorite players in the set.

I started my Through the Mail (TTM) autograph journey with Weeb Ewbank, card #171, part of the base set’s “Legendary Coaches” subset also featuring George Halas, Vince Lombardi, Tom Landry, Joe Gibbs, John McKay, Sid Gillman, Chuck Noll, and Bill Walsh. These coach cards were not part of the autograph insert set.

Ewbank was an all-time great high school, college, and pro football coach who led the 1968 New York Jets to their upset of the mighty Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III in 1969.

I hadn’t yet seen Ewbank in Oxford, Ohio, home of Miami of Ohio University, where he played and where he coached high school football for 13 years.

After a long, Hall of Fame coaching career, Ewbank had settled in Oxford. I mailed the card to his home address, which I got straight out of the Oxford phone book, and attached a personal, handwritten note to the card requesting an autograph, along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope. I received it back in the mail signed by Coach Ewbank within one week. Wow! He signed with a clear, steady hand in blue sharpie and an inscription, “H.O.F. ’78.” 

What a generous, thoughtful response, and so quick. Now I was really hooked. In that moment, I thought, “Now I want all 208 autographs in this set.”

So here I am today, a little over 25 years later, near the finish line in terms of completing the autographed set of the entire 208-card base set, including the Legendary Coaches subset as well as the Super Bowl Memories subset, all hand-signed. But that’s only the beginning of the story. The best part is the middle, the heart of the chase, and many twists and turns.

One of the reasons I loved chasing autographs through the mail for this set came in the joy I felt in doing the work. I liked writing a personal card to the player or coach, including something I remembered from their career, usually a compliment (harder for me to do for Steelers players) and making a direct request to sign the card in a black or blue sharpie. And I enjoyed putting the packet together: card in a penny sleeve, then in a top loader, handwritten request letter wrapped around the card, and SASE, all placed together carefully in a larger envelope and addressed. It probably took me 10-15 minutes to put one mailer together. I also catalogued the request by date and then noted the date it was returned (if it did make it back into my mailbox). I didn’t have a regimen, but I put together 10-15 request letters every few months and received about half of the cards back with autographs.

In addition, I loved the thrill of the wait and, of course, finding a returned card in the mailbox.

For my earliest attempts, I relied on articles I read that suggested sending requests to team addresses (even for retired players), and then later I moved to home addresses, especially as it became increasingly difficult to get the card to the player through their former teams. During that period, I switched mainly to sending packets to home addresses I got through an online address provider for celebrity sports stars and paid a small fee for access to those lists.

My chase stalled a bit in 2000 and 2001, mainly because of work and family commitments, but 2002 turned out to be the next turning point. By mid-2002, I had about 30 autographed cards, but I was simultaneously scouring eBay for autographed cards in the set as well as sending out requests TTM.

By January 2003, in just one year, I had accumulated 80 more autographs and was near the halfway point to 208. But over the next seven years until 2011, I only added about 25 more. During that time, though, I had the first of several strange and rare TTM occurrences.

I had sent a card to Ron Jaworski’s home address. “Jaws” had a ubiquitous presence on NFL TV broadcasts during that time, and he returned it signed after FOUR YEARS! As busy as he was, he somehow made time to get through a mountain of mail and requests and sent my card back to me signed. Over the years, I couldn’t believe it when a card appeared in my mailbox and I didn’t think I had any cards in the pipeline. “Jaws” kept my hopes alive.

But my idea of collecting all of the autographs in the set had mostly waned in the 2010s. By then, my sons had become interested in the hobby, and I was buying them new wax and taking them to card shows. But I continued to enjoy looking at the UD Legends cards and collecting them by putting the autographed cards in a binder with cards from the whole set and replacing each unsigned card with a signed one when it came in. However, I realized as the set became more and more popular, and more widely appreciated for its great visual qualities and the amazing autograph set, that the star cards in the set were getting more and more expensive. I came to terms with the fact that I could probably never afford the top-end cards like Joe Namath, Jim Brown, Franco Harris, Johnny Unitas, and Walter Payton, among others.

Nor did I think I could ever collect all of the difficult to find short-printed cards (fewer were signed by the stars, making them much more difficult to find and more expensive), or the cards hand-signed by players who hadn’t signed the redemption cards in the first place, like Billy “White Shoes” Johnson, Fred Dean, Russ Francis, Bob Trumpy, Willie Wood, and Mike Webster. Those cards, signed TTM or at shows, became known as “unicorns,” cards signed and authenticated (or not) that I needed to complete the autographed set but that weren’t part of the officially released autograph crop by Upper Deck and were sometimes one of a kind.

For instance, my journey to get the he Billy “White Shoes” Johnson card (#122) signed lasted 14 years. Johnson hadn’t signed the redemption cards and very few hand-signed cards ever appeared on eBay. My first attempt to get one signed came through the mail in 2010. I had forgotten about his card until an envelope turned up in my campus mailbox in 2022. It had been delivered by a faculty friend who had bought our old house in Oxford in 2018 when we moved to Cincinnati. The card had been returned unsigned in the SASE with a 44-cent stamp to my old address 12 years after it had been received by him.

I had no exact record of the sending date because I had stopped keeping track back then, noting only the date when the card was returned signed. I found it remarkable that the postal service delivered it without the correct postage. And I have no idea what the scenario could have been for Johnson to have kept and stored the card, no doubt with hundreds, if not thousands, of card requests after all of those years, and then send it back in exactly the same condition unsigned.

But that whole escapade inspired me to send another attempt to Johnson in October 2023, with a letter about the story describing to him what had happened with the same card I was mailing back and this time enclosing a generous check for a charity or a cause of his choice. I got the card back with the check uncashed and the card unsigned in my SASE in February 2024.

The end to this saga came when a signed Johnson card appeared on eBay. I watched it carefully, hoping that it wouldn’t generate much interest since the signature looked like his but was a little smudgy. My plan was to get it without breaking the bank and sending it to PSA for authentication. At the last second of the auction I put in my top bid of $399—I would have been overjoyed and sad at the same time at the expense if it had gone that high—and won it for $145. 

I hoped I had something special in hand since the PSA population report at that time was 1. Now there are 2! PSA authenticated it a few months later and it is my greatest prize, surpassing the Fouts and Jaworski gets.

That final episode of this chase came after I had some success for a few years acquiring high-end cards of the top stars on eBay. Most of those finds are hand-signed, authenticated slabs. During 2022 and 2023, I began to see a trend that the cards were moving on eBay through sellers that had acquired them in large estate sales or just wanted to move them in batches. For whatever reason, more and more slabbed, hand-signed cards in the set began popping up in my searches and I started winning them at what I considered low prices.

For example, I landed a hand-signed, authenticated PSA slab of Jim Brown for $155 and a triple score of Harris, Staubach and Namath authenticated Beckett slabs for just over $400 total.

At the same time, I realized there were more examples of signed cards available online from the last 30-card subset in the series, the Super Bowl Memories Cards (179-208) and I began aggressively pursuing them through the mail and on eBay. But I had to get creative. John Stallworth isn’t signing, even for a fee, and Franco Harris had just passed away, but I paid Steelers kicker Roy Gerela $50 to sign both cards commemorating Steelers Super Bowl wins, #197 and #198, to help complete the set of signed cards.

Other strange and wonderful unicorn cards I acquired include: the iconic shot of Namath by the pool talking with the New York Times writer Dave Anderson (#182), signed by his longtime agent and friend Jimmy Walsh; Packer lineman Jim Weatherwax’s hand-signed card #179 showing him attempting to block a Kansas City PAT in Super Bowl I with the iconic LA Coliseum clock tower in the background; and card #73, which features a great photo of Weatherwax right in the middle of the line. Stunning.

As things stand now, I have 87 cards from the 208-card base set that were issued by Upper Deck at the release of the original set. The rest of the cards I have are hand-signed, most of them acquired on my own TTM, but I also bought many hand-signed and slabbed autographed cards on eBay. The only cards that are unattainable are the Legendary Coaches cards of Lombardi and Halas, who were deceased at the time of the set release in 1997, and Sid Luckman who passed away before signing the redemption cards.

Otherwise, I’ve reached the end for me, with an unrealized goal. I have every card in the base set with an autograph of some sort, except for the holy grail, #4 Walter Payton. I have seen a few of the Payton cards on eBay hand-signed over the years, but I never could bid high enough to get one, and the official, signed cards released by Upper Deck are far out of my reach financially.

No matter, I have loved every minute of the chase because of the cards, the fun and joy they brought, the intrigue, and the thrill of the chase.

But I still search every day for another impossible sale, looking for even a smudged and unwanted Payton that may or may not be authentic. I know a lot about that kind of chase after 27 years.

— Thomas S. Poetter, PhD, is a professor in the field of curriculum studies at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Over the years, Tom has written and edited 26 books, 16 of them with students, and also published over 90 articles, chapters, and reports in the field. A longtime, avid collector, his interest in sports memorabilia collecting is the "chase," the sometimes longer than usual commitment to completing a card set or finding all of the pieces to a unique, sports-related item or toy. Connect with Tom about the "chase" at tspoetter@gmail.com or visit tspoetter.weebly.com.