Last time out I was surprised to discover I had never covered the 1973 set Topps issued to commemorate The Rookies. Originally an ABC-TV Movie of the Week that aired in March of 1972, the flick and the series that followed that fall focused on the work and personal lives of a small group of Los Angeles police officers that had recently graduated from the police academy. The most famous member of the cast turned out to be Kate Jackson, who played a nurse married to one of the fledgling cops. Ratings were middling until the third season when it crept into the Top 25 and a syndication deal was reached. That fell apart and after one more season the show was done.
The middling ratings may explain why this set is so hard to track down these days. It's clearly a 1973 issue based upon the test T-code assigned by Topps and in fact it's only the second one to use their new nomenclature for test sets (the first was Emergency!/Adam-12, which also kicked off a rather generic refinement of many non-sports sets to follow). A test wrapper is known:
As mentioned in my post last week, only 60 cards have been graded by PSA. I can't say I've seen any with gum stains but that wrapper does look like it had been folded with cards inside. I have to assume the test failed miserably. With many examples known in the hobby being severely miscut, I wonder if a sheet, or a partial, was cut up after the fact somehow?
Happily, my type example is cut well; it's not perfect but for this set it's close:
That's Georg Sanford Brown pictured, whose missing "e" I found fascinating as a kid.
As I've written, the cards are extremely tough to find and only one full set is shown in the PSA Registry. In theory, it's easier than Emergency!/Adam-12, which has a mere 46 graded PSA examples, with 50 cards needed for a set, but that's splitting hairs. In fact, I've seen more raw E!/12 cards than examples from The Rookies over the years , although not by much. Not all of the most difficult Topps test cards are from the Sixties!
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