Interesting NY Times story about famous football game picture

BleedGopher

Well-known member
Joined
Nov 11, 2008
Messages
60,943
Reaction score
16,505
Points
113
This isn't college football related, but it's an interesting story about one of the most fascinating sports pictures ever taken, at a 1965 football game:

The photograph, nearly 50 years old, is a social media favorite, a perennial entry on top-10 lists of strange-but-true sports images. And it is certainly strange. Fans watch a football game from the stands as a building burns behind them, failing to look even mildly alarmed at the flames shooting out and the black smoke billowing into the sky.

Even at the time, when the photograph was reprinted around the world, people thought it was too weird to be real. “My colleagues maintain it is a real picture, but I believe it is of the April fool type,” wrote Phil F. Brogan, an editor at The Bulletin newspaper in Bend, Ore. (“I can assure you that the picture was not faked,” replied Arthur H. Kiendl Jr., the headmaster of Mount Hermon, the Massachusetts prep school where the game took place.)

In fact, the photograph, of the Mount Hermon game against Deerfield Academy on Nov. 20, 1965, was an instant classic. Though the photographer, Robert Van Fleet, never received much in the way of payment for it, it was named The Associated Press sports photograph of the year. It was featured on the back page of Life magazine. It was reproduced in dozens of newspapers and magazines across the United States, including The New York Times, often accompanied by supposedly amusing captions about Rome burning, the teams’ “red-hot rivalry” and the like.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/s...nates.html?ref=sports&_r=4&smid==tw-nytsports

Go Gophers!!
 


Well, you see, they were cooking up some chili to eat after the game, and that chili was REALLY hot..............
 

Was it the light in the attic, or the Israelite in the basement? :confused:
 

I recall that a coach at Rochester John Marshall had this photo displayed outside of his office in the early '70's. He would have been watching the game.
 


FOOTBALLFIRE-master1050-v8.jpg
 




Top Bottom