Rare 1923-24 Billiken card of Negro League great Dave Brown. There are 60 cards in the 1923-24 Billiken set. Dave Brown is not one of them. There are a handful of mysterious Billiken cards that were part of separate issue, with each card having only one or two known examples. Most of them feature players on local Matanzas teams. But three cards feature players from the professional Cuban league. And those three are all from the Santa Clara team, widely considered the greatest team in the history of Cuban baseball. One card is of Cuban Pablo "Champion" Mesa. One is of Bill Holland. One is of Dave Brown. There are 2 known examples of the Dave Brown card. This one is in much nicer condition than the other example, although the image is lighter.
Dave Brown is one of the most interesting players in the history of the Negro Leagues. He was the ace of Rube Foster's Chicago American Giants in the early 1920s. His career was cut short in 1925 when he was involved in a bar fight and killed a man. The police came to the field the next day to arrest him, but he was already gone. He never played as Dave Brown again, but a dominant left-handed pitcher named Lefty Wilson would later turn up on several local teams in the midwest. Little else is known about his life after the incident in 1925.