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Rich Clarkson: The Right Place at the Right Time to Get the Shots

Rich Clarkson is a Nikon Legend Behind the Lens

At some point in a long and distinguished career in photography, you get to see your own history coming around to meet you.

Rich Clarkson, acclaimed photojournalist and specialist at capturing not only the peak moments of sports, but the important moments before and after, tells us this story:

Sports Photographer

"In 1988, Kansas, my alma mater, was playing for the national NCAA championship, and I was having dinner with a group of friends and a stockbroker from Denver named Rudy Marich, who I'd just met that evening. One of my friends was saying how the 1966 University of Kansas team would have gone to the Final Four and won the national championship except for a terrible call an official made. At the last second, Jo Jo White shot this jumper with Kansas behind by one point. The shot went in, and Kansas would have won instead of Texas Western, and Texas Western went on to win the 1966 national championship, but Kansas was a better team that year. And if it hadn't been for that bad call, Kansas would have been there. And Rudy Marich says, 'Well, it wasn't a bad call. Jo Jo White did step on the line, he was out of bounds, and that's why the basket was disallowed.' And my friend says, 'How would you know?' And Rudy says, 'Because I'm the official who made that call. And what's more, there was some photographer there who took a sequence of pictures that proved I made the right call.'

"And I said, 'That photographer was me.'"

If you look at great sports images of the past 40 years, chances are you'll find that Rich Clarkson was "that photographer" for many of them. And he's still going strong: When we spoke he had just returned from photographing his 48th NCAA championship Final Four round. He covered his first as a freshman in college. Rich was taking pictures when he was in high school, but his first paying job in the business was on the retail side. "I worked in a camera store," he says, "and I took my first pay in equipment—a Nikon SP [a 35mm rangefinder]. While I was in college, I worked for a newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, and that's where I started to do a lot of sports—and a lot of other things as well. But mostly sports because in a college town, the biggest news is always sports."