Fire, Football and the Story of a Renowned Photograph

The photograph, nearly 50 years old, is a social media favorite, a perennial entry on top-10 lists of strange-but-true sports images. And it is certainly strange. Fans watch a football game as a building burns right behind them, failing to look even mildly alarmed at the flames shooting out and black smoke billowing into the sky.

Even at the time, when the photograph was reprinted around the world, people thought it was too weird to be real. “My colleagues maintain it is a real picture, but I believe it is of the April fool type,” wrote Phil F. Brogan, an editor at The Bulletin newspaper in Bend, Ore. (“I can assure you that the picture was not faked,” replied Arthur H. Kiendl Jr., the headmaster of Mount Hermon, the Massachusetts prep school where the game took place.)

In fact, the photograph, of Mount Hermon’s game against Deerfield Academy on Nov. 20, 1965, was an instant classic. Though the photographer, Robert Van Fleet, never received much in the way of money for it, it was named the Associated Press sports photograph of the year. It was featured on the back page of Life magazine. It was reproduced in dozens of newspapers and magazines across the United States, including The New York Times, often accompanied by supposedly amusing captions about Rome burning, the teams’ “red-hot rivalry” and the like.