“Sundays used to belong to the church. Today, Sunday belongs to the NFL.” Anyone who has ever experienced one of these football Sundays in the USA and has seen the almost boundless joy, but also the heartbreaking sadness, that the sport brings to those who love it (and there are many) , knows that this statement is by no means as exaggerated as it might sound to some ears. American football is the number one sport in the United States, by a wide margin, and the National Football League (NFL) is also on the rise internationally.
The NFL games are spectacular. They are action-packed, varied, often exciting until the last second, they captivate those who watch and those who stand on the field or on the sidelines. The Brit Matthew Bazell has published a book about this and more: an illustrated book with short team portraits, for which the German football expert Alex von Kuczkowski wrote an apt foreword, from which the opening quote of this text comes. “Power & Glory. The History of the NFL in Pictures” has become a book that manages to build a bridge between the past and present of a league that has existed in its origins for 101 years. A book that shows what this league and this sport are all about, but also what problems existed in the NFL and have not disappeared to this day.
“Power & Glory. The history of the NFL in pictures”: Image: Verlag Die Workshop
The images show the fast, the delicate, the precise, but also the raw, the powerful, the brutal and brutal that has always been inherent in American football. They show what head protection looked like in the early days of the league, how it developed over the years and decades to the high-tech helmets that are now standard in the NFL, which many who played in it refer to as ” Bone mill”, not least because the risk of head injuries and sometimes devastating long-term consequences is still high.
The pictures show how the proportion of African-American athletes increased over time, from a few initially to none at all – from 1933 to 1946, dark-skinned players were banned from playing after a secret agreement between all team owners (at this time the book shows, consciously or unconsciously, just a single photo) – to the two-thirds majority that African-American professional football players make up in the NFL today, although the proportion of dark-skinned head coaches is still comparatively small, that of dark-skinned team owners even lower and the question of diversity in this one League, which has been a white male domain for most of its history.
The images show the big figures and moments of the past decades, sometimes also the small ones that had a big impact. It is understandable that some stories from the past and present are missing, such as the shocking moment surrounding Damar Hamlin, who suffered a cardiac arrest on the field and had to be resuscitated. This league produces too many characters, moments and stories to capture everything in 270 pages.
Jan Ehrhardt Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 9 Jürgen Kalwa, New York Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 25 Jan Ehrhardt Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 12
Although football newcomers may sometimes miss the context of some of the photos when leafing through, especially the historical ones that you don’t see too often, overall this illustrated book is easy to pick up even for sports fans who are previously unfamiliar with football, because it is a book that invites you to marvel. Fittingly, it ends with a photo from Munich from last fall, where an NFL regular season game was played on German soil for the first time. This November there will be two NFL games in Frankfurt, which will once again show how important football and the NFL are in this country for people who love the sport and this league. They will always be Sundays.
Matthew Bazell: “Power & Glory. The history of the NFL in pictures”. The Workshop 2023, 270 pages, 39.90 euros.
