Before the Rookie: John Schommer

Chuck Hyatt's rookie card turned out to be a bookmark. John Schommer's is even stranger: a piece of metal — and it didn't exist until 1986, twenty-six years after he died.

And the man deserved real cardboard. He was the first athlete in University of Chicago history to win twelve varsity letters — football, basketball, baseball, and track. At twenty, before his college career even began, he played in the demonstration basketball tournament at the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, where his Chicago Central YMCA team finished second. Then came three straight Big Ten titles and three straight conference scoring titles, plus the captaincy of the 1908 team later named Helms national champions — sealed against Penn by an 80-foot field goal in the final seconds, a shot the Hall's biography still recounts. In 1959 he was one of the first four players enshrined in the Hall of Fame, alongside Hyatt, Luisetti, and Mikan.

The hobby never noticed. There is no cardboard from his playing days (1905–09), which predate basketball cards. The era's showcase set, the 1933 Goudey Sport Kings, gave its four basketball slots to pros, Original Celtics among them; Schommer's college career had ended twenty-four years earlier. He never got a 1968–74 HOF bookmark either. The 53-subject set includes his 1959 classmates Hyatt and Luisetti. Schommer died in January 1960, eight years before the Hall's bookstore started selling them.

That leaves exactly one mainstream issue with his name on it: the 1986 Basketball Hall of Fame Metallic. That's his rookie card.

It's an odd artifact. A Hall gift-shop issue reprinted into the 2000s, it's a brushed-metal plate with his Hall plaque's relief portrait printed on it — an elderly Schommer — and his résumé compressed into a dozen lines: "Elected College Player 1959," then the whole career in miniature. It also notes his second career: a 47-year run as athletic director, coach, and teacher at Armour Institute (later Illinois Tech) starting in 1913, plus forty-plus years officiating Big Ten basketball and football. The back is blank metal.

So the card, when it finally arrived, is this: a metal plate, made seventy-seven years late, for a player the hobby never saw coming.

Images: 1986 HOF Metallic front; 1986 HOF Metallic back (blank metal); relief portrait detail; bio text detail.