As my Uncle Francis used to say, “I’m as old as dirt and twice as dusty.”
Super Bowl XII. January 15, 1978. New Orleans. Dallas 27. Denver 10. Big D vs Little D. Forty-six years ago. I was 27 when I shot my first Super Bowl. Lloyd Easterby was prescient (see my Lloyd Easterby post).
I was a staffer at The Denver Post. My schedule for five years, nine months and one week was the same… Sunday through Thursday, three to midnight. With the exceptions of working some Fridays for high school football and Saturdays for University of Colorado, Colorado State University and Air Force Academy college football games. So, mostly seven days a week. I didn’t mind because I was “known” at the paper as the sports photographer, though I concede Ernie Leyba, John Sunderland and Dewey Howell were so much better. And yet, even with all my experience shooting football, I almost did not get the Super Bowl XII assignment.
The director of photography back then wanted to send a staffer who had not shot sports to cover the game, “so he would gain some confidence.” I told the director if he sent that staffer we might as well not cover the game and just use wire photos. Here’s a twist I almost forgot…
Obviously the game was indoor at The Super Dome. All of us on staff used Nikon cameras. And our “pool gear” did not have any fast telephotos. So, the director got Canon to loan us one of their film cameras and a Canon 300mm f/2.8 lens. Great. Except Canon lenses focus to infinity in the opposite direction of Nikkor lenses. And the best part… in 1978 there were no auto-focus lenses…
With the Broncos in that game, The Post only secured two field passes. One for me and one for the director of photography. I was the only one on the field during game. Come to your own conclusions.
It was required that I meet the director at the edge of the stands at halftime and give him the film I exposed during the first half. He would then give that exposed film to a man from The Post’s advertising department who would leave the game at halftime, get in his small plane and fly it and the film back to Denver. I later discovered the pilot arrived in Denver, but not the film. Come to your own conclusions.
I almost did not turn my film over to the director. I was going to take ten rolls of fresh film, wind the leaders back into the cassettes and hand those over to him. But, if the game went into overtime, I might run out of film. So, I succumbed and handed him a bag of, from what I can remember, some really great photos.
But, wait. There’s more.
The game ended. After going to the Cowboys locker room first (winners don’t celebrate for as long as the losing team mourns), I then went to the Broncos locker room and made a nice image of Rick Upchurch in a fetal position in his locker. I’ll do my best to find that negative so that I am not writing about pictures and can actually show it.
I had to dash off to the airport and get on a Braniff flight to Denver. I was not aware it snowed in New Orleans. And it probably never had. Until the plane backed out of the gate and sat on the tarmac for four hours waiting to take off. I finally got out of my seat and told the flight attendant I had to get off the plane, go to The Associated Press in New Orleans (what I proposed in the planning meetings before going to NOLA) and process my film and transmit the photos so I could make deadline at paper. She assured me the plane would take off shortly. Apparently “shortly” was another two hours.
Back in Denver, Ernie Leyba and John Sunderland were waiting at the paper to help me process and print the negatives to fill page one, eight pages inside and a special edition insert in the sports section. I got to Stapleton International in Denver at 5:00 a.m. and was surprised when Ernie was waiting for me at the gate. Back then you could go out to any airport in America without a ticket and meet people at the arrival gates.
“Where have you been?,” Ernie asked with wide eyes. I told him of the delay. “We have a million pages to fill and not much time to do it,” he said.
“There should be ten rolls at the paper the ad exec brought back,” I informed. “He left at halftime to get the film back before deadline.”
“He’s not answering his home phone,” Ernie said. “We can’t find him.”
It was a 20-minute drive from Stapleton to The Post at 15th and California. Ernie made it in 10.
We processed the film, printed wet negatives and beat the sports’ 7:30 a.m. deadline (we were an afternoon paper) by four-minutes. Twenty eight photographs of game action, game reaction, features…
The director stayed a few extra days in NOLA for some R&R. When he returned I asked him to retrieve my first half film from the ad exec. He returned to his desk in the City Room and told me the guy had lost the film. He must have lost the film because I have been looking for 46-years to see if any of the photographs have been published elsewhere. I have not found one.
Though I had only the second half covered, I made a sequence of photographs of Cowboys’ wide receiver, Butch Johnson beating Broncos’ cornerback, Bernard Jackson, for a touchdown (see the photo above). Those photographs are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Maybe they are still there? Maybe my photographs from the first half are there? Who knows?
Colorado Public Radio’s story on the Denver Broncos and Super Bowl XII.
