From Bart Starr, to everyone after, photographer John Biever has shot every Super Bowl
Photographer John Biever has shot every Super Bowl, yet the only football picture he has prominently displayed in his San Diego home is the one he took of Bart Starr scoring on a quarterback sneak with 13 seconds left in the “Ice Bowl,” the 1967 NFL championship game against the Dallas Cowboys, to propel the Green Bay Packers into the second Super Bowl
SAN DIEGO (AP) — Photographer John Biever has shot every Super Bowl, yet the only football picture he has prominently displayed in his San Diego home is the one he took of Bart Starr scoring on a quarterback sneak with 13 seconds left in the “Ice Bowl,” the 1967 NFL championship game against the Dallas Cowboys, to propel the Green Bay Packers into the second Super Bowl.
Biever was a high school kid who had already helped his father, Vernon, the Packers’ sideline photographer, shoot the first Super Bowl, and a trip to the second hung in the balance. His black-and-white photo shows Starr face-down on the frozen turf in the end zone — it was minus-13 degrees — guard Jerry Kramer on the ground, too, after blocking Jethro Pugh, and Boyd Dowler coming in over the pile, beginning to raise his arms in celebration.
“If he wouldn’t have scored a touchdown there, my streak would have ended at one,” Biever said.
Instead, his streak will reach a perfect 60 on Sunday when the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots play in Santa Clara, California.
Biever, 74, has captured pretty much every big moment of every super Sunday, and admits to having missed a few moments, too.
After Super Bowl 60, he plans to hang up his cameras for good, leaving him with six decades of incredible memories.
Biever certainly had fortune on his side. His dad was the Packers’ sideline photographer — a side gig on autumn Sundays — and the Packers reached the first two Super Bowls, winning both behind Starr and coach Vince Lombardi.
“I guess you have to start young to be able to do that,” Biever said. “I started when I was 15 doing the first Super Bowl. I was very lucky. My dad took me along. He was the Packers’ team photographer for 55 years, and so he took me along to the first one, and the second one, and then the third one’s a good story, too.”
Biever’s Super Bowl streak could have ended at two if not for Steve Sabol of NFL Films, who was a friend of Vernon Biever.
Biever recalls sitting in a high school history class in Port Washington, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, when a voice came over the public address system and summoned him to the office.
“I thought, ‘What did I do now?’" Biever said. "They said, ‘Get your books, you’re going home, you’re going to the Super Bowl.’ It’s like, ‘What?’”
Down in Miami, Sabol had wondered where John was. Vernon Biever said he wasn’t able to get a pass for his son because the Packers weren’t in it. “He said, ‘Well, send him down. I got him a pass.’”
Biever said Sabol got him passes for Super Bowls 3, 4 and 5, and after that he and his dad were credentialed by NFL Properties. He did several Super Bowls for NFL Properties, 30 for Sports Illustrated and the rest for NFL Photos.
He and his father did the first 35 Super Bowls together, including 31 and 32 when the Packers returned to the championship game for the first time since the first two. Vernon Biever was inducted into the Packers Hall of Fame in 2002.
Biever was 14 when he started helping his dad shoot Packers games.
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“I mean, even getting into photography, having professional camera equipment in the basement to be able to pick up and try to see how you do at it, that doesn’t happen to everybody,” he said. “And having access that I did, it doesn’t happen to anybody or everybody. I was very lucky.”
His marching orders while shooting Packers regular-season games and the first two Super Bowls were simple: “Stay out of Lombardi’s way, mostly. He was terrified of Lombardi. Everybody in Wisconsin was terrified of Lombardi.”
Biever came away with some incredible memories from the first Super Bowl, which Green Bay won 35-10 over Kansas City at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
“First of all, there weren’t that many photographers on the sideline for the first one, like there are now,” Biever said. “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. 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.”
It wasn’t even known as the Super Bowl. The first two were called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game.
His favorite Super Bowl photo is of Washington quarterback Doug Williams grimacing in pain as he slides in front of Denver defensive end Rulon Jones, kicking up divots from the natural grass in Super Bowl 22 at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium.
“There were just a lot of elements, mostly photographically," Biever said. "I like it. It’s got elements like facial, turf flying, things you don’t always get anymore.”
He said he was “lucky enough” to have the first digital Sports Illustrated cover, a close-up photo showing a wide-eyed Joe Jurevicius of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers stiff-arming Tory James of the Oakland Raiders in a 48-21 win in Super Bowl 37, the last of three Super Bowls played in San Diego.
Biever went on contract with Sports Illustrated in 1988 and on staff in 1998. He took a buyout in 2012.
He moved to San Diego in 2013 and married his longtime assistant, Deb Finnegan, in 2014.
Biever said there was a group of four photographers and four writers who covered the first 50 Super Bowls.
“That group is just me now,” he said. “60 is good enough. That’s a good round number to call it a career.”
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