VINCENT PUGLIESE / Courier & Press
MaKaylee Lindauer (2), reaches up to give her father, North High School Asiistant Baseball Coach Dirk Lindauer, a big kiss prior to the start of their Class 4A State Championship Game against Brownsburg in Lafayette Saturday.
Professional photographer, Vincent Pugliese, shares his love of sports, one picture and one memory at a time. Today: a pre-game good luck kiss at a high school ballpark.
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Editors Note: Vincent Pugliese has spent the past 20 years traveling the country taking sports photographs for a living. Each picture tells a story. Each picture stores a memory. Each a window into sport, and how we connect to it. In ‘Beyond the Lens,’ Good Men Project Sports selects one photograph and tells the story behind the shot.
Today. . . a pre-game good luck kiss at a high school ballpark.
LAFAYETTE, LA
For me, the road to photographing Super Bowls, world class athletes and the big time assignments was paved with countless high school, college and little league games.
There is a point at every professional game that I shoot where somebody lets me know that I have the best job in the world. And I have a difficult time disagreeing. They often ask if they can trade positions or hold my camera bag. Often I hear how lucky I am.
Lucky is one of those words in my vocabulary that I hesitate to use on someone until I know more details. Again, I agree that I am lucky- but maybe not for the reasons that they would list.
I’m lucky, for starters to have been born. Take a moment to think of the odds of any of us making it into this world, and we should all feel lucky.
I’m even more lucky to be born in this country and all of the opportunities that we have afforded to us. With all of the boneheaded mistakes that I have chosen to make through my time on earth, the fact that I get to live this life is astounding. I’m lucky that I didn’t die in a car accident at 17. I’m lucky my parents are still happily married after nearly 46 years. I’m lucky that my wife didn’t run away screaming after meeting me- or anytime after.
But luck, as many have described in the past, is where preparation meets opportunity. All of those scenarios of luck I described in the previous paragraph all had one thing in common. I had little to no control over the outcome. If true luck is the preparation + opportunity factor, those examples would be described as dumb luck.
Building my career as a professional sports photographer was something I was going to do. I didn’t view it as something that I wished for. I viewed it as something that was inevitable.
When your mind is fixed on a goal, and that goal will eventually happen, it’s tremendously hard to be stopped. I was going to do whatever it took to make it happen.
Shoot multiple high school baseball games as a wet-behind-the-ears freelancer making peanuts per game? Give me the addresses and consider it done. You need me to do it again the next day, and call in sick to my other job as a waiter? I’m all yours. Whatever it takes.
The money I made from those assignments did not matter to me. The experience did. The trust did. Is it luck that, twenty years later, the same newspaper in New York now hires me, at a healthy pay rate, to photograph the big time sporting events related to New York teams here in Pittsburgh? I’m not sure. But Samuel Goldwyn said it better than I can. The harder I work, the luckier I get.
Has there been luck along the way from the desolate high school fields to “big time”? Undoubtably. Mostly in the form of the people who have went out of their way to be helpful and lightning fast baseballs that decided to speed past my face and not into it.
But there would have been no luck if I would have stopped. If all of those times when I felt like quitting, that I actually did quit. When I was turned down for that staff job in California that I desired, when the assignment to photograph the Super Bowl in Miami was pulled from me (I really wanted to quit that time) or when that big time wire service didn’t value my work as much as I had hoped.
Ironically, a few of those examples did lead me to quit… them. But not me. Just because they didn’t see in me what I could do, did not mean I wasn’t good enough. It just meant they were wrong. One of the greatest lessons I have learned through this process is that there is always another way. And that way usually leads to better assignments and money. Who would have thunk it?
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So why did I choose this photograph for the vault? Because when I look at it, I think of many of the aspects of being lucky. It was an assignment back in 2003 that would have been very easy to turn down. My editor asked if I would like to cover the state championship game more than four hours away.
In my mind, I envisioned a raucous celebration photograph that could be a contest winner and not an exhausting drive and a tiring weekend on the road. But the image that lived on for me had nothing to do with the game. And I would never had gotten it if I wasn’t ready.
As the game was getting ready to start, I made sure I had an extra camera body around my neck with a wide angle lens, just in case anything meaningful happened close by. Maybe the first baseman lunging next to me to grab a foul pop up. What I didn’t expect was to hear the adorable little voice of two-year-old MaKaylee Lindauer calling out to her dad. Her father Dirk was the assistant coach of the North High School baseball team preparing to win the state championship.
And in a flash, she ran down next to the dugout to give her dad a good luck kiss right before the game began. Totally unexpected. Totally random. And totally lucky.
Or was it?
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Photo Credit: Author
This post originally appeared on the Into The Uncommon Blog.
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