In 1965 Topps held the rights to the American Football League and not the NFL, and so it did something it had never done before: it printed the whole set tall. One hundred seventy-six cards, each one two and a half inches by four and eleven-sixteenths — nearly an inch longer than any card a collector had handled. The hobby has called them tall boys ever since.
The format was a gift to the photographs and a curse to the cardboard. The extra height gave each player a portrait rather than a snapshot, with the team name arched in block letters across the top and the name and position tucked along the bottom. It also gave every card longer edges to bruise, and it fit nothing — not the boxes, not the albums, not the shoeboxes under the bed where most of them ended up. A tall boy that survived the 1960s square and sharp did so by luck as much as by care.
The card arrived before he had thrown a professional pass. It has been the AFL's signature ever since.
Namath sits at number 122, in the back half of the set, and his card is a short print — printed in smaller numbers than most of its neighbors, a detail that has shaped its availability for sixty years. He had signed with the Jets that January for a reported $427,000, a figure that startled professional football and did more than any game to make the young league look permanent. The card was in packs before he had thrown a professional pass. Four years later he would guarantee a Super Bowl and then go win it, and the AFL's case would be closed.
So the tall boy carries a double distinction: it is the only rookie card of the quarterback who made the AFL credible, and it is a short print in the one set that never sat flat on a shelf. Every copy has spent six decades being slightly the wrong shape for the world around it. The ones that came through straight are the reason collectors still talk about this card first when they talk about football cardboard from the sixties.