‘Spectacular’: Former Star photographer recalls covering Chiefs in 1970 Super Bowl

It was a game for the ages, and photographer Roy Inman, 78, of Olathe, recounts photographing the Kansas City Chiefs as they beat the Minnesota Vikings, 23-7, on Jan. 11, 1970, to become the champions of Super Bowl IV in New Orleans.

In 1970, Inman was a staff photographer at Star Magazine, the Sunday feature magazine of The Kansas City Star. He recalls convincing his editor and “the powers that be” to let him hop over from Tampa, Florida, where he was shooting a story on the Kansas City Royals’ rookie of the year, outfielder Lou Piniella, to New Orleans to cover the big game.

Situated comfortably in first-class, Inman traveled in “quite commodious circumstances,” via Eastern Airlines to New Orleans.

On game day, morning showers left the field muddy. But skies cleared and the stadium was bathed in “an amazing Serengeti-looking light,” said Inman.

“It was spectacular. I could go on and on about the light.”

With three Nikon cameras and no big, exotic lenses, Inman arrived at Tulane Stadium.

“My objective shooting for Star Magazine was not to concentrate on the actions of the game, but on the overall feel and what we call crowd color, sideline color,” Inman said. The other photographers shooting for The Star and its sister paper, The Kansas City Times, would concentrate on game action.

“This game was a different kind of an animal,” said Inman, who had experience shooting professional games, as well as college and high school sports. “It’s the Super Bowl, I mean the Super Bowl. It was extremely big at the time.

“Everything was happening at once. It was just constant motion, constant swirl of color and motion in front of me like I’d never seen at any kind of game before.

“I shot maybe eight or 10 rolls of film, kind of light for that big of a game.”

When Inman returned the next day to Kansas City, he had his Ektachrome color slide film processed at a local lab.

That Monday morning, Robert Pearman, then managing editor of The Kansas City Times, was waiting to see Inman and his photographs. It seems the machine the other Star photographers used to process their color negative film “had messed up virtually all of the negatives from that day,” recalled Inman.

After a slide show with Pearman, photographs by Inman were quickly selected for the newspaper. A six-column photo of Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson seconds before he threw for a final touchdown to Chiefs wide receiver Otis Taylor graced the front page.

“This image represented one reason why the Chiefs won the game. Notice that tremendous protection around Len Dawson,” Inman said. It was his favorite photograph from the game.

When talking about a possibility of a Chiefs’ return to the Super Bowl this year, Inman said he wouldn’t turn down another opportunity to cover the big game.

“If someone wanted to somehow get me a sideline pass, why, I would just go in a heartbeat. It would be, of course, to shoot the color of the game,” he said, laughing.

Inman, who was elected in 2010 to the Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame, is a graduate of the University of Kansas and also the University of Missouri. He lives in Olathe with his wife, Barbara.

This story was originally published January 9, 2020 at 1:28 PM.