Straightest of shooters with an eye for truth

America at Large:In the days before the traditional 1982 Harvard-Yale football game at Cambridge, students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology up the road had, as a prank, planted a huge, black, rubber balloon at midfield.

Cued by remote control with The Game in progress, the blob sprang from the ground and began to inflate. The rogue blob had expanded to perhaps six feet in diameter by the time the game officials took note and called time-out.

As bewildered players from both sides of the by-now thoroughly disrupted game stood around watching the inexorably expanding mass, someone in an adjacent seat in the Harvard Stadium press box exclaimed, "My God! What's Dick Raphael doing in the middle of the field?"

At his fighting weight, which in his prime easily topped 400lb, he was the most visible non-participant at any sporting event he covered. Whether precariously perched atop his tiny courtside stool at the old Boston Garden or racing, in his unmistakable waddle, from one end zone to the other following the play at the Super Bowl, Dick Raphael was hard to miss.

Though some might not immediately recognise his name, his work was familiar to anyone who followed sports over the past half- century, and even those who didn't were exposed to Raphael's photography by sheer osmosis.

His photos graced the covers of Sports Illustrated and virtually any other sporting publication you could name. A Raphael photograph of Bill Russell blocking a Wilt Chamberlain shot in the 1960s may arguably be the most famous basketball picture ever taken.

Raphael's Relentless, a portrait of Bill Rodgers breaking the tape on Boylston Street, epitomised the Boston Marathon and remains a best-selling poster 30 years later.

He photographed every Super Bowl, from the game's inception 41 years ago through the one in Miami a few weeks ago. (Dick himself wondered if this achievement might subsequently be marked with an asterisk. Taking relief from the day-long downpour, he left the stadium at half-time, joking that his record should henceforth note he had more accurately covered "forty-and-a-half Super Bowls").

It is the rare man who is able to turn his passionate interests into a life's work, but Dick combined his boyhood hobby, photography, with an all-consuming interest in sports, and the 68 years he spent on this earth were rooted to those dual pursuits.

Raphael, who died last weekend, grew up in Marblehead, on Boston's North Shore, and his father, recognising that his sports-mad son was never going to be an athlete himself, bought him a Brownie Hawkeye and created a makeshift darkroom in the basement of his home.

Dick had just turned 13 when his first photograph, an action shot of Marblehead Race Week, was published in the local newspaper.

At Boston University, which he attended ostensibly to study chemistry, he joined two other teenagers, the late Joe Concannon and Richard Waterman, to form what would be a memorable three-man sports staff at the campus publication, the BU News.

Concannon, who died in 2000, went on to become one of the nation's most respected golf writers, as well as the keeper of the flame for the BAA Marathon. Waterman embarked on a career in the music business, one that saw him revive the careers of old bluesmen like Mance Lipscomb and Mississippi John Hurt, as well as that of a young singer named Bonnie Raitt. And Rafe took pictures.

Raphael was still in college at BU when he approached Howie McHugh, public-relations director for the Boston Celtics, about permission to shoot a few games at the Garden. The results were so impressive that within a year or two he was the team's official photographer, a position he would hold through the Larry Bird years. The Basketball Hall of Fame would later curate an exhibition of his NBA photographs from that era.

As one might have anticipated from a man of such impressive girth, Dick was a bon vivant who enjoyed eating and drinking almost as much as he loved sports. A wonderful dinner companion with an impressive repository of sporting lore and off-colour jokes, he seemed to have been born with a big cigar clenched between his teeth.

His coverage spanned the glory years of the Celtics and Bruins, the Red Sox' 1967 "Impossible Dream" season and first World Series victory in eight decades, in 2004. He recorded the Boston Patriots from their inception in 1960 through their three World Championships of the present decade. Along the way he also found time to photograph, as he put it, "every sport you can think of - including lacrosse, field hockey, rugby, crew, soccer, ping-pong, squash, indoor and outdoor track . . . cross-country, sailing, and golf."

Raphael, who never owned a digital camera, "came from an era when f-stops and all that stuff mattered", his longtime Boston Globe and Sports Illustrated colleague Leigh Montville recalled yesterday.

"He could be cranky to work with," said the former Boston television personality Clark Booth, "because he didn't suffer fools gladly."

He never ceased to amaze those of us who worked with him, with his uncanny ability to be in the right spot at the right time, no mean feat for a fellow who wasn't the most agile lensman who ever hefted a camera. What envious colleagues would sometimes write off to blind luck was, those who knew him better realised, more often the result of countless hours analysing games on television, the better to formulate the probabilities of what might happen next in one he was covering in order to secure what he liked to describe as "the money shot".

Raphael said the secret of a photographer's success lay in the necessity to be "a straight shooter" - in the literal as well as the figurative sense. "Be honest with people," he explained. "Always tell the truth."