Flashback Friday: 1965 glossy APBA Football brochure

This contribution from Scott Veatch’s vault is quite a treat.  Released in 1965, it’s a sleek, colorful brochure touting the fun you can have with APBA Football. 

This engaging piece uses catchy phrases like “Now The Pro League Comes To You” and “The Passing Averages Are Unbelievably Similar” and “Every Phase Of Ball Carrying Is Reproduced”. 

And even:

Yes, “The Kicking Averages Will Amaze You”.  Color me impressed. 

APBA smartly continued with their marketing theme from their Baseball game of “You Be the Manager” with the Football game.  This time though, it was “You are the Coach on Every Play”.

Equally effective in my opinion.  Get me out there!  I can do better than that bum Halas!

APBA goes into pretty good detail about player usage and accuracy in their “Realistic Usage will give Realistic Results” section.  They say,

“In order to attain the most true-to-life statistical results for the individual players, they should be used with about the same frequency as they were in the season upon which the cards are based”. 

They then use Jim Taylor, Johnny Morris and Fran Tarkenton and their respective stats as examples.

APBA players don’t need to limit the players to real life usage, APBA says.  But it is necessary for the “figure filberts”.  A curiously funny term. 

My guess is that back then, the Company’s people on the phones were answering the question, “How is it pronounced?” a lot. 

…problem solved. 

Historically, it’s interesting to note that APBA offered the NFL teams in their 1964 set but at the time the AFL was still on its own.  For $4.00 more though, you could obtain the eight teams from the upstart league.  I was a mere baby at the time so I honestly didn’t know how APBA handled this until now.

You can see the whole glossy APBA Football ad from 1965 here.  It was too big for the scanner so Scott scanned in two halves. 

Thanks again to Scott Veatch!   He’s got a great archive going and you can see what we’ve posted so far here.