'He was always smiling!'

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|| SportsShooter.com: News Item: Posted 2010-12-10

'He was always smiling!'
Freelance photographer Mickey Pfleger dies after long illness at 61.

By Brad Mangin, SportsShooter.com

Photo by Brad Mangin

Mickey Pfleger enjoys a wonderful Saturday afternoon photographing the Redskins @ 49ers game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco in December of 2004.

After a long illness, Mickey Pfleger, a freelance sports photographer, friend and mentor to many photographers around the country, died Friday morning in Carmichael (near Sacramento), CA. He was 61.

Many people remember Mickey from the stories published during the past 10-years on SportsShooter.com. In November, 2000, he was crushed out of bounds by Kansas City Chiefs tight end Tony Gonzalez during a game against the San Francisco 49ers at Candlestick Park, and was rushed to the hospital, where an MRI revealed he had a brain tumor (http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/405). After this Mickey’s life was never the same.

I first met Mickey in 1987, when I was a photojournalism student at San Jose State. He spoke to students, and his words made a significant impression - especially on me.

At the time, Mickey was a busy freelance photographer for Sports Illustrated and TIME (after a brilliant newspaper career at the San Bernardino Sun). Even back in those early days, he maintained his own stock library - a collection that provided a major part of his income.

When I was a student, I knew who Mickey was. I had seen many of his amazing pictures of the 49ers in Sports Illustrated, so I was excited when I learned he would be speaking at our school.

I don’t remember too many details from that night, aside from his amazing photographs. However, there was one huge piece of advice that he gave us, and it is something I will never forget.

"Keep your copyright," he told us.

This was a big deal for students to hear in 1987. I was 22 years-old, and had never been lectured before on this topic. Mickey told us how important his stock archive was to him and his business. This is a lesson was put to good use in the real world several years later, when I became a freelance photographer -- just like Mickey.

Soon after his lecture I was able to see Mickey at the ballpark shooting baseball or football games while I was a young newspaper intern in the Bay Area. Mickey was always there with a smile, while wearing a Giants or a Nikon hat. His iconic pictures from that era of 49er greats Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, and Ronnie Lott were all over Sports Illustrated. His pictures of young Giants star Will Clark are some of the best that were ever made of Will The Thrill for the magazine.

Mickey was such a low-key guy. It was tough to get him to say much, but when he did offer his opinions and insights they were well worth the wait. Mickey knew his shit. He was always on top of new business ideas and was one of the first photographers I know to embrace the Internet.

We sat next to each other in a class on the World Wide Web at an NPPA digital photo conference in San Francisco in 1995. I remember we were using version 0.9 of the Netscape browser. Soon after that Mickey became the first photographer I knew to have is own website, and being the brilliant guy he was - he chose a very smart (and today, very valuable) domain name - www.endzone.com. Mickey wasn’t messing around.

Around the same time, Mickey began publishing Sports California, a bi-monthly publication that was tabloid-size and printed on a superior book stock paper. This magazine covered all the Bay Area sports teams and was beautifully illustrated by his photographs. Mickey worked on this project with his children Tai and Amanda, and it had a circulation of 10,000.

Photo by Brad Mangin

Mickey Pfleger and his son Tai at a 49er game at Candlestick Park on December 10, 2000.

Mickey continued to push the envelope in 1997 when the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl. Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he covered the team that year and published his own Packers magazine after the Super Bowl. He then drove the inventory of magazines across the country and distributed copies through small businesses all over the state. Talk about an amazing guy who took his images as far as they could go, so he could share his photographs with as many readers as possible.

I will remember many things about Mickey, but mostly I will remember his smile. He was always smiling! Mickey would bring his smile to every photo party I ever hosted throughout the 90’s. He would be the first to arrive, with a six-pack of Henry Weinhard’s Root Beer. He soaked in the conversation and had a great time before driving home to Pacifica while the drunks sobered up playing ping-pong in the garage.

After the surgery to remove Mickey’s brain tumor, he was not able to drive a car because of seizures, and he ended up moving to Madison, Wisconsin, where he went to college. Many of us in the Bay Area lost track of Mickey after that, until he showed up on Facebook a few years ago. I heard he was having some health problems last year, and things really took a turn for the worse when his son Tai had to move him to an acute care facility in the Sacramento area last summer.

We knew Mickey’s time was running out, so many photographers tried to visit him as much as possible over the past few months.

My first visit was with our friend Kirk Reynolds on August 9, 2010. It was his 61st birthday and we celebrated that afternoon with his son Tai and Tai’s wife Leslie. Mickey told a story about attending the famous Ice Bowl NFC Championship Game in Green Bay between the Cowboys and Packers in 1967. He went with a high school buddy and told us how hard it was to stay warm while sitting in the freezing cold at Lambeau Field. It was a great visit, and we even made friends with an awesome old patient named Lester, and promised to come back.

I took several more drives to the valley with Mickey’s old friend John Storey. We would take Mickey out for walks in the neighborhood in his wheel chair. He loved having us there and enjoyed hearing the old stories. The highlight for me was a special day that occurred in September when Sports Illustrated photographer Peter Read Miller offered to fly up from Los Angeles to Sacramento for the day to visit Mickey.

For that visit, photographers Michael Zagaris and Greg Trott joined us, and I still don’t think the nursing home knew what hit them that afternoon. I can’t imagine that place has had that much laughter bouncing up and down the hallways before or since. What a day of stories. I was laughing so hard listening to Peter and Zagaris tell tall tales I was crying. You could see it in his face - it meant a lot to Mickey to see his old friends.

I felt bad that I did not visit Mickey during October. I was so busy shooting post-season baseball I did not have the time. Tai told me that his condition was worsening, so I knew we had to make one last visit. Two and a half weeks ago John Storey and I made our last trip to Carmichael. Mickey had changed so much since we last saw him. He was very week and spent most of his time in bed. He was not very responsive, but towards the end of our visit he seemed to really be alert and he knew who we were.

We were talking to Mickey and I was telling him how much he taught me. I told him he was the first person to teach me about copyright.

“I did?” he said.

"Yes, you did," I told him.

Mickey taught so much to so many of us. Sure he taught me much about the business, but more importantly he taught me how to be a good person.

(Mickey is survived by his son Tai and his daughter Amanda. Services will be held in San Francisco in January of 2011. Details will be announced at a later date.)