Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

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.

The 1964 Philadelphia set includes a Play of the Year card for each team. Looking at some of those cards this week, I noticed that the Lions’ Play of the Year was pretty lame. Their play of the year went for only 10 yards?

Looking through the rest of the cards, I found that the other teams’ plays were also unimpressive. The Eagles’ play of the year was a 12-yard pass from Norm Snead to Bobby Mitchell. The Colts’ play of the year was a screen from Johnny Unitas to Jerry Hill that netted 15 yards. The Packers’ play of the year, a run by Tom Moore, was also for 15 yards, but it at least went for a touchdown.

Perhaps the plays came in critical situations or were the teams’ bread-and-butter plays throughout the year. There’s no indication of that on the cards, though. My guess is that because the cards were oriented horizontally, there wasn’t room for diagrams of long plays, so the card designers picked short plays instead.