My Favorite Pose
June 19th, 2009 | Published in General Collecting Info, Interesting Message Board Threads, Uniforms | 6 Comments
Head-and-shoulder portraits, fake action shots, and sideline photos are all great, but my favorite pose on a football card is where the player is holding his helmet with both hands, as if he is going to put it on. I like seeing helmets on vintage cards, but if the player is wearing his helmet, it usually makes for a poor photo.
The helmet-in-hands pose appears to have been used mostly in the 1960’s. That was after facemasks got substantial enough to obscure the players’ faces, but it was before Topps started airbrushing logos away in the 1970’s. The photographers for some teams in particular favored the pose: it is used for several of the 1963 Topps Packers cards, for instance, and for most of their 1969 Topps cards.
Below are a few examples: 1968 Topps Jerry Logan, 1966 Philadelphia Irv Cross, 1964 Philadelphia Guy Reese, 1969 Topps Alex Karras, 1963 Topps Lou Michaels, and 1967 Philadelphia Bob Hayes. For more, see a thread on the topic that I started on the Collector’s Universe message boards. I posted a bunch of pictures there before the discussion, um, went south.
June 20th, 2009 at 11:48 AM (#)
Awesome cards; I agree those are great poses.
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:10 AM (#)
I collected football, baseball and basketball cards as a kid in the mid to late 1970’s and always wondered why the football helmets, with the occasional exception of the Rams, never had the logo on them. Why did Topps airbrush the logos off? It couldn’t have been a licensing issue, right?
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:42 AM (#)
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topps#Artwork_and_photography), showing logos on football cards was indeed a licensing issue:
“Throughout the 1970s until 1982, Topps did not have the rights to reproduce the actual team logos on the helmets and uniforms of the players; curiously, these could be found on the Fleer sets of the same era, but Fleer could not name specific player names. As a result, helmet logos for these teams were airbrushed out on a routine basis.”
June 25th, 2009 at 7:35 AM (#)
[…] like the image Bob chose for this card; it’s the helmet-in-hands pose I described earlier this week. Bob has also created a 1966 Philadelphia Piccolo card using a […]
May 8th, 2010 at 9:50 AM (#)
[…] As I’ve written before, my favorite pose on a football card pictures the player about to put on his helmet. It’s fun seeing old helmets on cards, but if the players are wearing them, you can’t see their faces. Here are a few examples; for more, see an old post, My Favorite Pose. […]
May 17th, 2011 at 4:41 AM (#)
[…] favorite football card pose, where the player is about to put on his helmet. For more examples, see My Favorite Pose, More of My Favorite Pose, and Still More of My Favorite Post. Tags: 1969 Topps, Detroit Lions, […]