WHA Card of the Month - March 2012

Today I arrived home from work to find a much awaited package from Amazon in my mailbox. Inside was a book I've been dying to get my hands on since I learned about it from Casey over at Drop the Gloves:

I've been on a huge WHA kick the past few months, and I can't wait to delve into this. Anyone aside from Casey give this a read yet? If so, what did you think? I'll definitely provide some thoughts here as I get through it, but in the meantime what better day to post my WHA Card of the Month for March...

Back in my first WHA Card of the Month post, I selected a high series card from the '72-73 O-Pee-Chee hockey set. These cards, the final series released for the '72-73 flagship set, are some of my favorite WHA cards, and still do pretty well on the secondary market. They are not the most sought after O-Pee-Chee WHA cards from that year however. That honor goes to the team logo cards that were inserted into each Series 3 pack of '72-73 O-Pee-Chee. There are 30 of them in all; the first 17 in the set are NHL logos, the final 13 WHA. According to my Beckett here, the Flames, the Islanders, and all of the WHA cards were short printed. Adding to that, each logo is surrounded by a perforated cut that allows you to punch it out from its rectangular cardboard frame. I'm sure in many cases this was done by an anxious kid just a few minutes after the pack was opened. All in all they're fairly tough to find in good condition. You can usually pick up decent examples of the NHL teams for under $10, but for the WHA cards be prepared to pay more in the $30-$50 range, significantly more for one or two of them. Anyway, I recently acquired my very first one:

1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Team Logos - #18 - The WHA

Each league has sort of a header card within the set, featuring the league logo, before the team logo cards on the checklist. So, card #1 in the set is the NHL logo, cards 2 - 17 are NHL team logos, card #18 is the WHA logo, and cards 19 - 30 are WHA team logos. You can see what I mean about the perforation that I'm sure was responsible for the deconstruction of many of these cards. I always try to show card backs on the blog, but in this case I didn't scan it in, because there's literally nothing to it...just a plain cardboard back.

The WHA logo itself may not be the most visually stunning thing ever, in fact it pales in comparison to the logos of some of the league's teams, but I really wanted to add this to my collection because of what it signifies in the great history of hockey. As far as historical importance and impact on the game as we know it today, I'd put this card right up there with any you can think of.

Well, that's all for now, I've got some reading to do...