1980 Topps Football Player Profile: Calvin Hill

Calvin Hill isn’t just known for his athletic accomplishments. Along with having in impressive professional sports career, he’s done impressive things after retiring from football. And even if you don’t know anything about him, there’s a pretty good likelihood that you know his son, Hall of Fame pro basketball player Grant Hill.

Hill was born in 1947 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was given an academic scholarship to attend Riverdale Country School in The Bronx in New York prior to ninth grade, where he also demonstrated his athletic prowess. According to an interview in The Riverdale Review, Hill had only played baseball prior to arriving at Riverdale, when a coach there asked if he had ever played football.

Hill not only played baseball and football during high school, but also basketball and track and field. He became the football team’s quarterback sophomore year, playing the position for three undefeated seasons. He also graduated with honors, and his next step was college at Yale University.

After one day at quarterback, the Yale coaching staff decided they wanted Hill to play linebacker. It took a few more days as linebacker for the coaching staff to reconsider that move and instead place Hill at halfback, a position that stuck. He was a three-year starter at halfback, while playing the occasional tight end or linebacker. He also starred in track and field, as both a sprinter and jumper, and still holds the school’s outdoor triple jump record at just over 51 feet. And, per his Wikipedia profile, Hill also had a small role in the career of Garry Trudeau, as Hill was a subject in Trudeau’s Yale Daily News comic strip “Bull Tales,” the precursor to Trudeau’s Doonesbury.

After graduating with the Yale class of 1969, majoring in history, Hill was selected 24th overall in the first round of the 1969 NFL Draft by the Dallas Cowboys. The team initially worked him out in training camp at linebacker and tight end, but due to a combination of retirements and injury issues with their other running backs, the Cowboys decided to play Hill at running back in the second preseason game. That decision would pay off, as Hill wouldn’t relinquish the starting role. In fact, after nine games, he was leading the NFL in rushing yards with 807, but as a sign of things to come in his career, he hurt his toe in that ninth game (one where he ran for 150 yards). Even though it turned out the toe was broken, after sitting out two games, Hill would play the final two games with that injury. Finishing with 942 rushing yards and eight touchdowns, Hill was not only named All-Pro and a Pro Bowler, but was the NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year.

Hill played with the Cowboys for six seasons, and those were the best years of his career. Suffering through injury-plagued seasons in 1970 and 1971, he still managed to rush for 577 and 468 yards, respectively, and helped the Cowboys appear in back-to-back Super Bowls, with the Cowboys winning the 1972 Super Bowl 24-3 over the Miami Dolphins. In 1972, with Duane Thomas (his running back competition the last two seasons) traded to the San Diego Chargers, Hill responded by becoming the first Cowboys runner to eclipse 1,000 yards, finishing with 1,045, and followed that up with 1,142 yards in 1973, being named to the Pro Bowl both seasons, and as an All-Pro in 1973. He was selected to the Pro Bowl for the 1974 season, too, after rushing for 844 yards and seven touchdowns.

That would be his last season with Dallas, as The Hawaiians of the recently formed World Football League selected Hill in the second round of the league’s pro draft. (Editor’s Note: I’m embarrassed to say that I managed to forget that there was a pro football team in Hawaii, the place I grew up, but to be fair, I arrived after the team had already folded. I’ll chalk this oversight up to the aging process.) Hill would play only three games for The Hawaiians in 1975, tearing his medial collateral ligament in his knee, then prior to the start of week 13, the WFL folded.

Hill would return to the NFL in 1976 with the Washington Redskins (now Commanders), but he wasn’t the same player. He was a backup to starter Mike Thomas (with future Hall of Famer John Riggins playing fullback), running for 558 yards and one touchdown over those two seasons. Hill decided to retire in August of 1978, but that decision was short-lived as the Cleveland Browns convinced him to sign a contract in late September. He spent the next four years with the team, becoming more of a receiving back his final two seasons, catching 44 balls while carrying the ball only five times. At the end of the 1981 season, he retired for good, finishing his career with just over 6,000 yards rushing and nearly 3,000 yards receiving, along with 65 total touchdowns.

During his playing career, Hill was involved in government and the corporate world in a variety of roles, and upon retirement, he would continue to be active in various capacities. In 1987, he was appointed to the board of directors for the Baltimore Orioles, and in 1988, was named vice president for personnel, a role he held until 1994. Along with being a motivational speaker and sitting on the boards of several organizations, he’s served as a consultant with both the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Cowboys, working with players in need of help, including those with drug and alcohol issues.

Set Profile: 1974 Wonder Bread All-Star Series

When I was a kid, Wonder Bread was definitely a known entity, at least from a branding perspective. If you ever thought about white bread, the first brand name that probably came to mind was Wonder Bread. Around since 1921, the company only took 53 years to get into the sports card game, launching the 1974 Wonder Bread All-Star Series.

The cards pretty closely resembled the 1971 Topps football cards in design, at least on the front - and as this Sports Collectors Digest article notes, the set sometimes used the same photo from that 1971 set. It makes sense, what with Topps producing these cards as well. The back of the cards, meanwhile, along with limited biographical and statistical information for each player, featured a black-and-white photo of a player or players demonstrating a football technique with instructional advice - such as “How to field a low throw,” “How to take a three-point stance,” and “How to field a bad snap.” And as an added bonus, to practice those techniques, kids could use the loaf of bread in place of a football.

There were 30 cards total, with cards inserted into the packaging, and the checklist is packed with Hall of Famers. The above cards are just three of the 14 total Canton inductees in the set, a pretty impressive percentage.

Back in mid-2020, during the Covid card boom, a PSA 10 Alan Page sold for just south of $800 and a Bob Griese PSA 10 went for just under $320 in late 2021, but those serve as pricing exceptions for this set. Meanwhile in February of this year, a raw (i.e., ungraded) 1974 set sold on eBay for $35.