Does the 1989 O-Pee-Chee Hockey Set Have The Worst Goalie Photos?

I try to stay very positive about the hobby, but over the years, I’ve seen a lot of comments that the 1989 O-Pee-Chee hockey set has the worst photos of goalies ever. Well, I clicked through all 330 cards in the set on TCDB and counted 32 goalie cards, and it turns out, yup, many are genuinely awful. 

There are quite a few goalies in warm-ups, others that are zoomed in too tight, and glaringly few action or in-game shots. The Patrick Roy card, #17, stands out amongst all the other goalie cards just for not being terrible. 

The 1989 O-Pee-Chee hockey set is pretty great in a lot of other ways, though. It has a few Hall of Fame rookie cards (Joe Sakic and Brian Leetch), many other stars, and an excellent design that invokes a “grey ice-like effect,” as Cardboard Connection describes. However, OPC  overproduced the set, and, as I said, the photos they and Topps selected for the goalies were atrocious; here are a few examples:

1989 OPC #11 Peter Sidorkiewicz

The image is so zoomed in that it could just as well be a baseball catcher.

1989 OPC #92 Sean Burke

One could suppose that OPC wanted collectors to know what the goalies looked like. But perhaps posed head and shoulders shots would have been more appropriate.

1989 OPC #97 Mike Liut

Liut could be skating around in warm-ups or pulled from the game; there’s little context, and the image is very dark.

1989 OPC #137 Greg Millen

Another shot zoomed in so far as to lack context; Millen might just be sitting on the bench.

1989 OPC #144 Glen Hanlon

Hanlon sure looks sad.

1989 OOC #155 Ron Hextall

Speaking of sad, I can’t say that Hextall looks too pleased in this photo either.

1989 OPC #170 Clint Malarchuk

This photo isn’t that bad, Malarchuk seems to be doing something, but then you have a stick in the foreground as a distraction.

1989 OPC #204 Rick Wamsley

Do you think his pads were once white?

1989 OPC #258 Mario Gosselin

Sigh.

1989 OPC #263 Ron Tugnutt

Tugnutt’s photo has to be a warm-up shot, right? It would be pretty silly to have published an image of a goalie not noticing a puck at his feet.

1989 OPC #285 Steve Weeks

You wouldn’t even know that Weeks was a goalie from this photo.

The number of “bad” hockey cards out there is somewhat humorous. And while the pictures selected for the goalies in the 1989 O-Pee-Chee hockey set leave a lot to be desired, they give us something interesting to laugh and talk about. Happy collecting!

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