Gitcher Program

Ah, 1974. Somewhat like 2022, most of it was the Year of the Tiger if you're not referring to the Detroit kind. To very prematurely celebrate the 50th anniversary (for which I think I'll have some Sports74 Gold posts), here's my selection of 50 scorecard, program, media guide, and yearbook covers from that year.

I do this because for a few days my attention has been on SportsPaper.info, a site with a bunch of those covers. The wiki could use some work.

BASEBALL

ALCS program for the "Once More in '74" Oakland A's; reuses the yearbook art.

Scorecard for the A.L. East champion Baltimore Orioles; the cover mistakenly calls it a "Golden Glove."

Media guide for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won the National League pennant with Walter Alston at the helm for the seventh time.

Program for the N.L. East champion Pittsburgh Pirates, Pirates, Pirates, Pirates, Pirates, Pirates, Pirates (it was this or the album cover-looking yearbook).

Yearbook for the Atlanta Braves, with the big moment of '74 anticipated.

Yearbook for the New York Yankees, second place in the A.L. East in their first of two Shea Stadium seasons.

Scorecard for the four-games-out-of-first Cincinnati Reds with the image of Don Gullett; the crossword is filled in on the Joe Morgan version. 

Media guide for the second-place Texas Rangers, who hired Billy Martin late in '73 and watched him go to the Yankees in '75.

The All-Star Game program, with Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente as "All-Time All-Stars."

The World Series program, with a neat concept someone had to think up sometime.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL (with final '74 AP rankings; chosen for teams and not designs)

Program for Oct. 5 game, No. 6 Notre Dame vs. No. 12 Michigan State (ND won 19-14). 

Program for Oct. 12 game, No. 18 Texas vs. No. 1 Oklahoma (OU won 16-13).

Program for Nov. 23 game, No. 3 Michigan vs. No. 4 Ohio State (OHST won 12-10). Look at that Big Ten logo, so true to the name and compact in geographical area.

Program for Liberty Bowl, No. 20 Tennessee vs. No. 13 Maryland (TENN won 7-3).

Program for Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl, No. 11 N.C. State vs. No. 19 Houston (31-31 tie).

Program for Sugar Bowl, No. 9 Nebraska vs. No. 15 Florida (NEB won 13-10). Note the bicentennial logo at the top-right.

Media guide for No. 5 Alabama, with newcomer Bear Bryant.

THE NFL

Program for Super Bowl VIII, the second with the trophy on the front (VII was the last without it).

Program for the canceled Chicago College All-Star Game. Not the only charity exhibition game of the year, I could see while browsing.

Media guide for the Super Bowl IX champion Pittsburgh Steelers. Simple and symbolic.

Media guide for the NFC champion Minnesota Vikings.

Program for the Nov. 24 game between the San Diego Chargers and Green Bay Packers, Johnny Unitas having finished his career with the former the year before (GB won 34-0) 

Program for the Dec. 21 playoff game between the Miami Dolphins and Oakland Raiders (OAK won 28-26).

WORLD FOOTBALL LEAGUE

Program for the Aug. 28 game between the Portland Storm and Southern California Sun (SC won 45-15), teams with distinctive uniforms (not pictured). 

COLLEGE BASKETBALL

Media guide for the '74 Final Four, with action from the previous year's UCLA-Memphis State game in St. Louis (it says KPLR).

Media guide for the '74-75 UCLA Bruins, with John Wooden prominently featured.

THE NBA

Playoff program for the Finals-bound '73-74 Boston Celtics.

Playoff program for the Capital Bullets in their only season under that name.

Playoff program for the champion '73-74 Milwaukee Bucks.

Media guide for the '74-75 Portland Trail Blazers, with Bill Walton's distinctive face and figure.

Program for a New Orleans Jazz vs. Kansas City-Omaha Kings game Nov. 5 at Omaha (KCO won 115-97).

THE ABA

Media guide for the '73-74 Kentucky Colonels, with a very '70s font.

Program for the '74 All-Star Game at the Norfolk Scope.

Playoff program for the Western champion Utah Stars. Groovy stripes and Rick Mount.

Program for the '74 Western runner-up Indiana Pacers' interleague game against the Milwaukee Bucks. How'd they make that picture?

Media guide for the '74-75 Pacers, whose new arena had just opened.

Yearbook for the reigning champion New York Nets of '74-75.

Media guide for the "new" Denver Nuggets, who with the name change had more of a claim to "new" than the Squires.

Media guide for the "new" Virginia Squires. Only that of the San Antonio Spurs was plainer that season.

THE NHL

Media guide for the Stanley Cup champion Philadelphia Flyers. Bobby Clarke had 37 goals in '72-73, not 36.

Playoff program for the Eastern champion Boston Bruins. Speaking of arithmetic, sometimes you'd get a program that explicitly stated the actual price plus tax. 

Media guide for the '74-75 California Golden Seals, whose Schulz-created mascot would be around for only two years.

Media guide for the expansion Washington Capitals.

THE WHA

Program for the '74-75 Quebec Nordiques (from 5th place in East to first in Canadian), with Rejean Houle in his Summit Series uniform.

Media guide for the reigning Avco Cup champion Houston Aeros.

Program for the '73-74 Eastern champion New England Whalers' Oct. 19 game against the blink-and-you'll-miss-them Michigan Stags (NE won 2-1 in OT).

AUTO RACING

Program for the 450-mile Daytona 500, whose winner is on the cover, Richard Petty also having won in '73.

Program for the World 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, won by David Pearson.

Program for the Indianapolis 500, held on the same day as the World 600 for the first of many times and won by Johnny Rutherford.

SOCCER

Program for the West Germany-Holland World Cup final, featuring a few flags no longer in use.

EDIT 6:55 p.m. EDT: Did some more underlining and corrected category of the Orioles item.

EDIT July 16, 7:55-8:01 a.m. EDT: Added Houston's final AP ranking and deleted an unnecessary "an."

EDIT Jan. 17, 2023, 1:32-1:43 p.m. EST: Added a period after Rutherford's name, re-worded part about Braves yearbook, and kind of fixed broken link to Rangers media guide.

EDIT June 15, 2023, 12:06-12:17 p.m. EDT: Fixed some more broken links, I hope.

EDIT Nov. 30, 2023: 2:25 p.m. EDT: Introduced the "football" label.

Junior Johnson, 1931-2019

Junior Johnson, NASCAR giant, died Friday.

By the middle of the 1974 season, the accomplished former driver had two racing teams to his name. One was the No. 52 that had belonged to Allan Brooke, with Earl Ross driving. In late September, Ross won the Old Dominion 500 in Martinsville. More famously, there was the No. 11 team. Cale Yarborough already had six victories that year, and after the halfway point, the South Carolinian won four more, repeating as the second-highest finisher in the season standings.

What brought these two teams together was Carling beer. The Toronto company, according to Johnson, "had been sponsoring Ross on a smaller team," but wanted to boost the Canadian driver's chances of winning Rookie of the Year. The beer makers came to Johnson, who was Richard Howard's partner in the Yarborough venture, and proposed buying the team with the points leader. "As far as I knew," Johnson recounted years later, "to have a business like Carling actually own a team was a first in NASCAR."

This arrangement began with the Firecracker 400 in July, but ended that fall, when the brewery owners suddenly abandoned their NASCAR aspirations. Johnson bought back his enterprise. The Rookie of the Year from north of the border would return for a few more races thereafter, but not under the banner of Junior Johnson & Associates.

Yarborough stuck around, and later in the '70s, the man driving the white and orange No. 11 car would be the Winston Cup champion three times in a row. Darrell Waltrip would bring another three titles to that team in the '80s.

"Carling's sponsorship efforts had served the team very well," Johnson wrote, but from there, the owner and his driver would have to overcome a rough 1975 to build on the legend of No. 11 and the legacy of a man who came from moonshine-running roots.

Mr. Johnson's own account of 1974, written in 2011 for Motorsports Unplugged
Yarborough's 1974 season and Ross's, from Racing-Reference.info
Some more about Earl Ross, from NASCAR Yesteryear

Four Flawless Days

This fact about J.T. Poston, winner of the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, N.C., caught my eye in this morning's sports section: "He became the first player since Lee Trevino in 1974 to win a 72-hole stroke-play event on tour without any bogeys or worse."

Trevino was the first to achieve such a four-round run (at least since the Tour split from the PGA in 1968), doing so at the Greater New Orleans Open Invitational. He shot a 267 that weekend, going 21 under and leaving two runners-up in his dust eight strokes behind.

In the last tournament to be held at Lakewood Golf Club, the 12-year host of the local event, Trevino scored 65 in the final round, remarking that it hadn't been since the 1968 US Open that he had "hit the ball so solid." He had shot 67, 68, and 67 in previous rounds and earned $30,000 for winning the championship. Bobby Cole's three-round total was the same going into March 31, but a 1-over 73 that Sunday sent him into a tie with Ben Crenshaw.

This was Trevino's 15th PGA Tour win (including majors) since the Tour went off on its own, and his sixteenth would come at the 1974 PGA Championship.

For comparison: at par-70 Sedgefield Country Club, Poston went 22 under (65-65-66-62), but finished just one stroke ahead of Webb Simpson and two ahead of Byeong-hun An to secure the $1,116,000 prize and his first PGA Tour win. Poston is 26 years old, and Trevino was 34 when he achieved his bogey-free weekend. Times change, and history doesn't Xerox itself.

Cliff Branch, 1948-2019

Cliff Branch died Saturday.

He was a Houston native who went to Wharton County (Texas) Junior College and the University of Colorado. The Oakland Raiders made him a fourth-round draft pick in 1972 and brought him on as a punt returner. By 1974, he bolstered the team's passing game and gave Ken Stabler another favorite receiver. With 60 receptions to the veteran Fred Biletnikoff's 42, Branch finished fourth in total receptions in the NFL, but he led the league in yards with 1,092 and in touchdowns with 13. That performance made him a unanimous All-Pro selection.

Branch's best game of the year may have been the Dec. 1 game against the New England Patriots, one of three in which he took the ball over the goal line twice. Those catches and four others gave him a total of 138 yards. His total of 1,092 for the season was just five ahead of the Dallas Cowboys' Drew Pearson, but he caught three more passes for touchdowns than did Isaac Curtis of the Cincinnati Bengals.

Branch scored a 72-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter of the Raiders' playoff game Dec. 21 against the defending NFL champion Miami Dolphins, a close game from which the black and silver emerged victorious.

Two years later, the team put together its first of three seasons as a Super Bowl winner, and Branch was there for all of them.

[EDIT 11/30/2023: Introducing the "football" label]

Did I Drop the Ball on the Hammer?

Every year I get my baseball annuals from the nearest bookstore, and the March/April issue of Baseball Digest is in this year's haul. Page 64 of that magazine tells me I might have erred greatly in relating a huge sports story for 1974. Here's what I wrote.

He [Hank Aaron] had finished 1973 one short of 714 [home runs], but ties the record in his first at-bat of the season in Cincinnati April 4...Commissioner Bowie Kuhn wanted him to skip that road series, but no way.

In this account ("The Game I'll Never Forget" by Hank Aaron as told to Bruce Levine and Joel Bierig), it is the Atlanta Braves' owner, Bill Bartholomay, who suggested that Aaron not play the two games following the first. But then, says the article:

...Commissioner Bowie Kuhn intervened. Barring tangible injury to Aaron, Kuhn ruled the Braves would face serious consequences if he didn't play in two of the season's first three contests.

Along with the first game, Aaron played the third game of that series. Two weeks from today marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the night he made history with his 715th home run.

In doing my research for the Muhammad Ali tribute, I'd been given a little doubt about the usual story of his "rope a dope," but I didn't change my post. In this case, however, I've probably been misled into posting the opposite of what really happened. Kuhn, in fact, urged the Braves to have the Hammer play ball when they didn't want to risk the milestone happening on the road. I will correct the baseball post now.