Veteran sports photographer bats 400

Would you pay $400 for a book of baseball photographs?

One thousand bibliophiles did. Some didn’t even blink when the price rose to $700 for Ballet in the Dirt: The Golden Age of Baseball, a coffee table collection of lensman Neil Leifer’s best work, published in late 2007 by Taschen Books.

Leifer, 65, got his start as an amateur shutterbug as a teenager on the Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the Henry Street Settlement, working for his high school newspaper.

“What was a hobby somehow developed into a profession. I certainly never planned a career as a photojournalist; it just happened,” he told NJ Jewish News in a telephone interview. “One day I woke up and realized people are paying me to do something that I thoroughly enjoyed. I was a rabid sports fan and in addition I had really gotten the photography bug. I loved seeing my pictures printed with a photo credit. So the idea that someone would send me to a World Series or a heavyweight title fight or a championship football game, and pay me to do something I enjoyed doing — you pinch yourself and say, ‘How did I get this lucky?’”

Leifer grew up in household in which Sid Gordon, then a member of the New York Giants, was revered as the greatest ballplayer in the city. But, Leifer said, he was not as impressed as the rest of his family. “Any baseball fan knew Sid Gordon was at best a mediocre ballplayer; he wasn’t Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays or Duke Snider.” The fact that Gordon was Jewish had no influence on Leifer’s allegiance. “I am very proud to be Jewish and I certainly have no negative feelings whatsoever about Jewish athletes, but I also don’t have a great affinity for them.”

One of his signature shots involves one of those athletes. It occurred in 1965 at a game in which the San Francisco Giants’ Juan Marichal clubbed the L.A. Dodgers’ Johnny Roseboro over the head with a bat. Sandy Koufax, who was on the mound for the Dodgers, put himself in harm’s way when he moved to intervene in the scuffle, an act Leifer caught on film. Leifer had been assigned to cover the game by Sports Illustrated to concentrate on the pitching duel between Koufax and Marichal, two of baseball’s best. He was shooting in color and ran out of film so he switched to his back-up black-and-white set-up and caught the surreal moment.

“I didn’t know what happened until I saw the film and the news that night,” he said. “I became a lot more aware when the event was over and Roseboro was taken away bleeding. It happened so fast I don’t remember having any reaction other than the fact that I ran out of film on it.”

Like many of his photographic contemporaries, Leifer’s favorite sport to cover is boxing. “Muhammad Ali is exactly a year older than I am. My career and his career paralleled each other perfectly so I happen to be lucky enough to begin my career when the greatest athlete of our time was beginning his.”

Leifer said working with the ex-champ was easy because Ali enjoyed posing for the camera. “The initial attraction to Muhammad was he made you look good. When you went out to take pictures of Muhammad, you came back with twice as many pictures as anyone expected. He was that cooperative and available and giving.” Leifer cited two other iconic but notorious sports figures as favorite subjects: Pete Rose and O.J. Simpson, whom he considers “two of the great bad guys of all time…. But my job wasn’t getting close to most of the athletes. Most of the time I covered events and you didn’t even meet the subjects you were [shooting].”

He is among a handful of photographers with a reputation hefty enough to command such a high figure for a book. “They published 1,000 copies and I’m happy to say it sold out,” he said.

Leifer is now working on a similar project for Taschen on football. No word on the cover price yet.

(This article appeared in the March 6 edition of NJ Jewish News.)