Books commemorating Super Bowl 50 from Sports Illustrated and others

For baby boomers, the Super Bowl came along at a good time. The first one was played on Jan. 15, 1967, which means we have watched every one of them. We really have seen it all.

The Super Bowl is more than a game; it’s a 50-year-old cultural phenomenon. That explains why four supersized hardcover books were recently published to commemorate its golden anniversary. Super Bowl 50, the first one not to use Roman numerals, will be played Sunday, Feb. 7.

THE SUPER BOWL: The First Fifty Years of America’s Greatest Game, by David Fischer. Sports Publishing, 200 pp. $24.99.

You will need to use all of your timeouts to get through this one because you can’t read it in halftime snack-sized chunks like you can with the other three books. It’s the only one that emphasizes words over photos, with Fischer breaking his narrative into chapters and making subjective calls along the way. Since sports fans love a good argument, there’s nothing wrong with that approach and the author supports his opinions with many appropriate game details.

The best parts are the sidebars — for instance, “The Best Who Never Lost,” “The Best Who Never Won” — which offer a slew of interesting angles and insights. Nice cumulative stats and records package at the end.

SUPER BOWL 50: Celebrating Fifty Years of America’s Greatest Game, by Bethany Bradsher. JKR Ventures, 344 pp. $49.95.

This is one book that non-sports fans can also enjoy — it reflects on the Super Bowl as a pop culture phenomenon as much as a sports one and demonstrates why Super Bowl Sunday is, in essence, a national holiday.

A grainy pigskin cover and binding gives a cool look and feel to this book, which is chock full of photos that accompany each of the good-sized 49 game stories. It’s light on statistics but, like Fischer’s book, is heavy on sidebars that leap off the page. There are profiles on star players and coaches but one of my favorites is the “Never Miss a Super Bowl Club” about the handful of 70-something men who vowed to attend every game.

What sets this one apart is that nearly a third of the book is not devoted to the game. There are entertaining chapters on the host cities, TV commercials, halftime shows, even the national anthem Whitney Houston, you are not forgotten.

50 YEARS, 50 MOMENTS: The Most Unforgettable Plays in Super Bowl History, by Jerry Rice and Randy O. Williams. Dey Street Books, 464 pp. $29.99.

Casual fans need not apply: This one is for the football die-hard. Rice and Williams offer a TV highlights package in print — the greatest plays and players from the greatest games. I don’t agree with the rankings (it’s a reverse chronology from #50 down to #1) but that’s the fun of this slick and thick book that doesn’t just use glossy photos for art’s sake. Each story is accompanied by a photo that corresponds to the numbered moment.

The book is deliberately incomplete. Some Super Bowls were duds and are not represented. Likewise, the more memorable games have multiple moments. And I love the starting lineups and scoring summaries at the end of the chapters.

SUPER BOWL GOLD: 50 Years of the Big Game, by the editors of Sports Illustrated. Sports Illustrated, 336 pp. $40.

Aptly titled, this one sets the gold standard for Super Bowl retrospectives. It had the built-in advantage of being able to use its own elite writers and photographers. If your budget (or your back — these books are heavy) can only handle one, this is it.

It has the best writing of the four books, using the actual but truncated Sports Illustrated game-day stories. Each one is accompanied by brilliant photos that are the signature of the magazine. Midway through the book is a long chapter entitled “Halftime” that cleverly acknowledges the Super Bowl’s cultural reach with segments on the entertainment, the media and the commercials.

For each game there is a neat “Just the Facts” graphic as well as “The Way It Was” boxes with first-person accounts from one player on each team. And the SI ranking of all 49 Super Bowls is a great exclamation point at the end.

The National Football League did not publish an “official” Super Bowl 50 book as it did before Super Bowl XL, but it didn’t need to. This Sports Illustrated book does a glittering job.