This Photographer Has Shot Each Super Bowl however This Will Be His Final

A photographer will wrap up a exceptional sports activities images profession at Super Bowl LX on Sunday when he shoots his sixtieth and ultimate Super Bowl.

A teenage John Biever minimize his enamel on NFL images by tagging alongside together with his father, Vernon, who was the workforce photographer for the Green Bay Packers. The place gave the Bievers the chance to cowl the very first Super Bowl, because it was performed between the Kansas City Chiefs and Green Bay Packers on the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles.

Vernon had taken up the weekend gig of being the Packers’ official sideline photographer after serving within the Army throughout World War II, and he would usually deliver John alongside to video games when his son was a young person.

Associated Press reports that his directions for photographing the Packers again then had been easy: “Stay out of Lombardi’s way, mostly. He was terrified of Lombardi. Everybody in Wisconsin was terrified of Lombardi,” says John.

During the AFL-NFL World Championship Game on January 15, 1967, which was retroactively renamed Super Bowl I, the 15-year-old John captured a photograph of the primary landing in Super Bowl historical past when Green Bay Packers receiver Max McGee scored on a 37-yard reception from Packers quarterback Bart Starr.

The Super Bowl is without doubt one of the world’s most-watched single sporting occasions right this moment, however issues had been fairly totally different again in 1967 when the NFL and American soccer had been nonetheless of their infancy.

“First of all, there weren’t that many photographers on the sideline for the first one, like there are now,” Biever tells AP. “I remember Bob Hope being next to me at one point on the sidelines at the first Super Bowl. Hollywood stars would show up and just walk on the field and go where they wanted to go. And here’s Bob Hope and it’s like, wow, for a kid from Wisconsin, that’s pretty cool.”

“And the stands weren’t full at the first Super Bowl,” he continues. “One of the pictures that I liked from that first Super Bowl shows Max McGee scoring the first touchdown in the Super Bowl and in the background there are a bunch of empty seats. That’s not going to happen now. That kind of stuck with me.”

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, John started a profession in photojournalism. His photograph was on the primary digital Sports Illustrated cowl, a publication he labored for over 20 years.

Additional reporting by Michael Zhang