{"id":738478,"date":"2026-02-08T17:30:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-08T17:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/738478\/"},"modified":"2026-02-08T17:30:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T17:30:14","slug":"this-photographer-has-shot-every-super-bowl-but-this-will-be-his-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/738478\/","title":{"rendered":"This Photographer Has Shot Every Super Bowl but This Will Be His Last"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

A photographer will wrap up a remarkable sports photography career at Super Bowl LX on Sunday when he shoots his 60th and final Super Bowl. <\/p>\n

A teenage John Biever cut his teeth on NFL photography by tagging along with his father, Vernon, who was the team photographer for the Green Bay Packers. The position gave the Bievers the opportunity to cover the very first Super Bowl, as it was played between the Kansas City Chiefs and Green Bay Packers at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

Vernon had taken up the weekend gig of being the Packers\u2019 official sideline photographer after serving in the Army during World War II, and he would often bring John along to games when his son was a teenager.<\/p>\n

Associated Press reports<\/a> that his instructions for photographing the Packers back then were simple: \u201cStay out of Lombardi\u2019s way, mostly. He was terrified of Lombardi. Everybody in Wisconsin was terrified of Lombardi,\u201d says John. <\/p>\n

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 photo of the first touchdown in Super Bowl history when Green Bay Packers receiver Max McGee scored on a 37-yard reception from Packers quarterback Bart Starr.<\/p>\n

The Super Bowl is one of the world\u2019s most-watched single sporting events today, but things were quite different back in 1967 when the NFL and American football were still in their infancy.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst of all, there weren\u2019t that many photographers on the sideline for the first one, like there are now,\u201d Biever tells AP. \u201cI 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\u2019s Bob Hope and it\u2019s like, wow, for a kid from Wisconsin, that\u2019s pretty cool.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd the stands weren\u2019t full at the first Super Bowl,\u201d he continues. \u201cOne 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\u2019s not going to happen now. That kind of stuck with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, John began a career in photojournalism. His photo was on the first digital Sports Illustrated cover, a publication he worked for over 20 years. <\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Michael Zhang<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A photographer will wrap up a remarkable sports photography career at Super Bowl LX on Sunday when he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":738479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2072],"tags":[106476,7,41,345,2514,2513,106477,6,428,106478,13590],"class_list":["post-738478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-green-bay-packers","tag-actionsportsphotography","tag-football","tag-green-bay","tag-green-bay-packers","tag-greenbay","tag-greenbaypackers","tag-johnbiever","tag-nfl","tag-packers","tag-sportsphotographer","tag-superbowl"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116036201716663705","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/738479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}