I know this sounds like a sitcom bit

But when I was in junior high, I had a friend who owned a football that he said a relative had caught in the stands at the 1963 NFL championship game between the Chicago Bears and New York Giants. That would have been half a dozen years before I saw it.

It looked just like the one below. It was branded with “The Duke” and all the rest.

And we played tackle football with it.

I’m sure some of us questioned the wisdom of treating a potentially valuable souvenir so casually (though this was before awareness of collectibles was standard). But I think my friend’s attitude was, “What’s a football for?”

Not sure if his father shared that view.

Of course, my friend might have been lying about the whole thing. But I’m not sure how easy it would have been for a kid like that to get his hands on an official (at the time) NFL ball some other way.

Besides, his uncle or whomever had to be in a pretty lousy behind-the-end zone seat to have caught that ball. That always added a note of plausibility to the story.

www.americanmemorabilia.com