Hello! I am trying to research an apparently fairly obscure American college football player by the name of Bill Matthews, also whose card (#65) in the 1951 Topps Magic seems to be the only horizontally oriented one in that set. It looks like Matthews may have been a halfback (though I forget where I read that). He played for New York University. His birth date (going backwards from his age printed on the trading card) was around 1925. Also, he hailed from Carteret, NJ. While there are several archived newspaper game reports online (along with one interesting feature from an old Univ. of Michigan student/alumni paper called “Conning the Campus,” when it seems Matthews tried to switch from NYU to play elsewhere), for me the trail has gone cold immediately after his college playing days with NYU. So far I have also had little luck with the few online reference databases that I’ve tried searching (such as
www.pro-football-reference.com,
http://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/, and
http://www.aaregistry.org). Finally, I wonder if he was African American. Almost all of the black football players from that era (even the college ones) have been pretty well documented, so chances are that he was not. . . . In any case, I am trying to dig just a bit more to find out whatever little else I can about this unknown college football player. (After the forums, my next research stop may be NYU athletics or the alumni folks.) Any help is appreciated!