DOUBLE-THREAT JOURNALIST
WRITER AND SPORTS CARTOONIST MURRAY OLDERMAN ACCOMPLISHED A LOT IN HIS 98 YEARS, INCLUDING DRAWING SOME OF THE EARLIEST SKETCH CARDS
WRITER AND SPORTS CARTOONIST MURRAY OLDERMAN ACCOMPLISHED A LOT IN HIS 98 YEARS, INCLUDING DRAWING SOME OF THE EARLIEST SKETCH CARDS
MURRAY OLDERMAN WAS A LEGENDARY SPORTS CARTOONIST FOR OVER 60 YEARS. AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS CAREER, HIS CARTOONS COULD BE SEEN IN MORE
THAN 750 NEWSPAPERS. MR. OLDERMAN’S IMPRESSIVE RESUME EVEN INCLUDES HIM DRAWING TRADING CARD ART FOR TOPPS IN THE 1950S. IN 1985 HE RETIRED AS A NEWSPAPER CARTOONIST, BUT TOPPS HAD ONE LAST PROJECT FOR HIM IN 2005.
Topps Gallery has been around baseball card circles since 1996, but didn’t issue a release in 2004. e Topps non-sports department had been making sketch cards for sets since 2001 under then art director, Jeff Zapata. In an effort to reinvigorate the Topps Gallery brand, Topps’ sports department turned to Zapata in 2005 to learn what it would take to insert sketch cards into their sports product for the first time. Jeff recommended that a known and respected artist was more buzzworthy than an up-and-comer, so Topps struck a deal with Murray Olderman.
Olderman wasn’t a classically trained artist. Instead he studied journalism at the University of Missouri, where in 1941 he was able to publish one of his drawings in e Columbia Missourian newspaper. A er graduating Mizzou with a Bachelor of Journalism degree, he continued his education at Stanford University with a Bachelor of Science in Humanities, and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism with a Master’s degree in Journalism. A big break came when he was then hired by the Mcclatchy Newspapers of Sacramento as a sports cartoonist.
e sports cartoon is a succinct form of journalism that could capture much more information and attention than a photograph. Recently, sports cartoonists are a breed of artist that seems to be dying out, but in the 1950s and ‘60’s they were a regular fixture in newspapers. Olderman became a standout star in his field. It’s estimated that he drew 6,000 different
subjects in his career. And the honors were consistent – he twice won the National Cartoonist Society Sports Cartoon Award (1974 and 1978), and was inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters
Hall of Fame in 1993. He is also credited as the author or artist on a dozen books including his memoir, “Mingling With Lions” (2004) and “The Draw of Sport” (2017), which combined his full-page illustrations of some 150 sports figures with his remembrances of them.
“In portraying these people, most of the time I couldn’t help but emphasize their heroic qualities, often romanticize them,” Olderman wrote in his memoir. Sadly, as newspaper budgets tightened over the years, artists were a luxury that many publications made the decision to go without.
Then in 2005, Topps gave Olderman a call. They requested a total of 195 unique sketch cards to be created and inserted at odds of 1:1,015 packs. Unlike modern baseball card sets, Olderman was the only contracted sketch card artist, and he only drew each subject once. He was 82 years old at the time.
For Olderman, the request seemed somewhat familiar since he provided back-of-card cartoons for classic baseball and football card series issued by Topps nearly 50 years before. In a 2007 interview, Olderman said, “It was a difficult assignment to try to squeeze an illustration onto a small 2 ½ x 3 ½ card and cramped my drawing style … [If I did it again] I’d want to draw larger and have them issued that way or reduced to a smaller card.”
2005 Topps Gallery was not the first sports set to ever include sketch cards.
That distinction belongs to a little company called TK Legacy who was first to market in 2004 with sets based on college football programs Michigan and Ohio State. TK Legacy had hired experienced sketch card artist John Czop to draw their inserts. However, 2005 Topps Gallery was first to create Mlb-licensed sketch cards, and hire a traditional sports cartoonist. It was also one of the very few sets that ever included each subject only once on custom stock printed uniquely for each player.
Each card features two Topps Authentic holograms on the back with unique serial numbering, and the following text, “Murray Olderman is a combination illustrator-writer, and former syndicated columnist/cartoonist and author of 11 books. He is a member of the National Sportswriters Hall of Fame and has done murals for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Early in his career he provided back-of-card cartoons for classic baseball and football series issued by Topps in the 1950s. He lives in California, and remains active professionally.”
2005 Topps Gallery was a 195-card set.
The packaging was a “mini box” format. Each Hobby box contained four five-pack miniboxes, with each mini-box yielding either an autograph or a game-used relic card. The 2005 set also included a different artistic insert called Gallo’s Gallery (1:15 packs). Each of these 20 card inserts was drawn by Bill Gallo. He was also an American sports cartoonist, having received the National Cartoonists Society Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998. But his inserts were reproduction art, while Olderman’s were all originals.
The other significant chase in 2005 Topps Gallery were a total of 29 cut signature cards (inserted 1:6,880 packs), including Walt Disney, Norman Rockwell, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. The 2005 release would turn out to be the last Topps Gallery Baseball set for a dozen years, until the brand was revived in 2017.
Olderman’s life was as interesting as his art. His position as a cartoonist allowed him unusual access to many famous athletes. Indeed, Olderman followed Jack Nicklaus around the golf course in his first pro tournament, and regularly hung out with the likes of Rocky Marciano and baseball’s Al Rosen.
“Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris happened to think of me as a sports artist, not someone who was going to poke into their private sanctum,” Olderman said.
Olderman passed away in June 2020 at age 98, but his art and legacy live on. Thanks to his artistic contributions we have what is now a standard insert in many sports card products – sketch cards. Few people stayed at the top of their game for over half a century. But Olderman did.