CHAPTER NINE

THE PHOTOGRAPHER WHO LINKS PAST AND FUTURE

NEARLY ALONE, BUT for their anxieties and each other, as they waited out the final minutes in the green room before the airing of the 2009 Heisman Trophy ceremony was set to begin, Mark Ingram turned to Tim Tebow for help.

The Florida quarterback was an old hand when it came to the setting. Having won the award in 2007, Tebow stood as the only three-time finalist in history, giving him a calm in these proceedings that Ingram sorely needed to tap into.

“Tim,” the Alabama running back, and that year’s trophy recipient, said, “I’m nervous.”

“Let’s go over in the corner and pray,” Tebow replied.

The two did, bowing their heads together, and Kelly Kline knew it was an opportunity she let pass her by.

“I think there was sometimes when I was nervous at the beginning and sometimes I didn’t photograph some moments,” said Kline, the Heisman Trust’s photographer and the only outsider privy to those minutes before the show begins.

“Like I didn’t photograph Mark Ingram and Tim Tebow praying in the corner. I kind of wish I had, but then again the photo might not have told what was happening. It might have been just two guys with their noses in the corner, so you really wouldn’t have known what it was, but it was still an interesting story.… but now it’s just a story. I don’t have an image to support it.”

Heisman Trust photographer Kelly Kline with Alabama running back Mark Ingram, the 2009 winner.
(Emilee Ramsier / Photo from Kelly Kline/Heisman Trust)

Two years later when winner Baylor’s Robert Griffin III, Wisconsin’s Montee Ball, Stanford’s Andrew Luck, LSU’s Tyrann Mathieu, and Alabama’s Trent Richardson joined hands in a circle to pray, Kline didn’t hesitate.

“You get over that as a photographer,” she said. “I think at first I was nervous, ‘Oh, they’re having a moment. I don’t want to photograph it,’ and I think that was just me being a rookie photographer. You learn after you take enough photos that after awhile it’s not about you anymore. You just capture it … I don’t worry about ruining the moment.”

As the Trust’s official photographer she is the proverbial fly on the wall during the Heisman weekend—which stretches from the players’ arrival in New York on Friday through the Monday night gala event—standing as the visual chronicler of the award and the lens through which Griffin, Ingram, and Tebow take their place alongside Davey O’Brien, John David Crow, and Steve Spurrier.

Throughout that four-day run of schedule Kline takes hundreds of images, and has multiple hard drives housing more than a decade’s worth of ceremonies. There are candid moments of the players sharing New York City together, among them a 2008 shot of Texas’s Colt McCoy giving the Longhorns hand gesture and Oklahoma’s Sam Bradford countering it by pointing the horns down in his own rendition; and Tebow and then-Florida coach Urban Meyer walking through Times Square moments after the quarterback’s 2007 victory.

“It’s real, raw emotions,” Kline, an Atlanta resident, said.

Kline also attends the Sunday night dinner at Battery Gardens. An opportunity for the newest and past winners to unwind, it’s attended by roughly 125 people. At that small, intimate affair, Kline has been privy to the likes of Billy Sims and Archie Griffin dancing with Cam Newton, but the value of that event is tied to its private nature, hence those photos rarely, if ever, are seen by the public.

But it’s in the green room where Kline has seen emotion expressed in so many very different ways. While Ingram, Tebow, and the finalists that joined Griffin leaned on faith, Auburn’s Newton instead set the tone with his charisma. Before the 2010 presentation, he sat on a couch with Luck, Oregon’s LaMichael James, and Boise State’s Kellen Moore and Kline took a photo of the four all together, simply smiling.

“Why they were all on that one, tiny couch, I have no idea,” Kline said. “But they were all there together, crammed up tight with nervous energy. They were all smiling, but it all started with Cam. Cam’s personality really just took over and his smile made everyone else smile.”

In 2015, Alabama’s Derrick Henry, Stanford’s Christian McCaffrey, and Clemson’s Deshaun Watson took the opposite approach, each sitting by themselves and barely talking to one another.

“The last few moments before the show goes on, I find, are very fascinating,” Kline said. “They clear the room. It’s like five minutes before the show goes live. Guys always act differently at that time.”

That’s a side of the proceedings that few will ever experience, though those images are rarely seen by those not associated with the winner or the Heisman Trust. Among all those photos Kline creates, it’s two annually that will stand the test of time: one you can’t escape and the one you never knew existed.

The one you know comes seconds after the winner gets the trophy, that photo that appears on countless websites and in newspapers across the country. It is the Heisman photo, the reason that Kline is in attendance during the ceremony.

It comes with its own set of challenges, the biggest being that there is no do-over, no directing the action. The biggest variable is the unknown.

“It’s a very unique situation that I’m the only photographer in the room. There’s not another job that I have where that happens. I shoot a lot of other sporting events, and there’s always a lot of photographers. There’s a lot of pressure to get the shot, because I do recognize I’m pretty much the only one—but I just take more frames. I take as much as I can.”

Winners have raised the award—in 2013, Florida State’s Jameis Winston hoisted it above his head—and others have, upon realizing it weighs 25 pounds, dropped it down, which creates havoc for keeping the camera focused. Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel made life easy as he literally stood on stage posing with his Heisman in ’12, and then there was Henry, who leaned down and kissed his trophy in ’15.

“Some years you just do it better than others,” Kline said. “It really depends on the guy too. Does he lift it for two seconds or six seconds? You can’t capture more than what happens. Johnny Manziel held the thing up for 15 seconds … you can get 200 frames in 15 seconds. Derrick Henry just went straight for the kiss. He never held it, he just went down and kissed it. So that was a little tricky.

“So what the guy does with the trophy really depends on how iconic that photo is.”

She has yet to miss that moment—“Knock on wood,” she said—but she did come close during Ingram’s win, “and that kind of put the fear of God into me.” She began having her assistant Emilee Ramsier in the back of the room covering a second angle, a luxury that paid off when Winston raised the award and Ramsier had a better image.

“You just don’t know what the guy is going to do and it’s scary sometimes,” Kline said. “I always mentally prepare for it. You’re just ready for it.”

In a period in time in which everyone has a camera in their pocket, and the ability to instantly deliver it via social media platforms, there’s an undeniable quaintness about Kline’s situation and responsibility, none of which is lost on her.

“I do recognize the importance of it.… When you see these photos from years and years ago, they are so cool looking,” Kline said. “So I recognize the body of work now that I’m taking will someday be that history. It literally is the history.”

The body of work Kline references spans a decade, dating back to the 2005 ceremony in which Reggie Bush beat Texas’s Vince Young and his USC teammate Matt Leinart. Kline was one year removed from graduating from the Hallmark Institute of Technology, a career turn for the former weekend sports anchor for Augusta, Georgia’s Channel 12, and she was hired by events company Brightroom to shoot what it described to her as “a high school football banquet, but for grownups.”

“They really didn’t understand the prestige and honor behind the Heisman,” Kline said.

The company, which specialized in corporate events, only offered a basic approach, and Kline saw a bigger opportunity to supply the Heisman with a greater breadth of imagery. When Brightroom called back in 2006 to book Kline again, she decided to call the Heisman Trust with an idea. She pitched them on the plan that she could cut out the middleman and give the Trust more content with an archive that she and the trophy’s keepers would co-own.

“Looking back now, it was a little bit of a ballsy move, but that’s what you have to do as a business owner, I guess,” Kline said. “For me I just saw opportunities where I could supply more creative services that a big corporate company that was just cut-and-dry how they did things really wouldn’t meet the needs of the Heisman.”

They bit, and from Ohio State’s Troy Smith’s win in 2006 on, Kline has photographed the festivities as the Trust’s business partner, with one bit of instruction—try not to disrupt television, they would tell her “because the show is really about TV,” Kline said.

And it’s in aiding that aspect of the trophy—the TV product—where Kline has helped to continue a visual Heisman staple.

Manziel returned as a finalist the year after his victory, and during the walkthrough the day of the ceremony, he saw his portrait for the first time hanging among the legendary names that came before him. In a very meta move, the quarterback took a selfie with it. Two years later, Henry used a similar moment during the rehearsal to take his photo with the image of a fellow Crimson Tide running back.

“He was enamored by the portrait of Mark Ingram,” Kline said.

Watch any of ESPN’s ceremonies and, stretched across the background behind the podium will be those portraits of the past winners. Once hanging in the Downtown Athletic Club’s trophy room, the first 60-plus were the work of former Oklahoma All-American wide receiver Tommy McDonald, who finished third in the 1956 voting when Notre Dame’s Paul Hornung won.

Technically, they weren’t created by his hands, but rather by the hands of one of the team of artists that he employed at Tommy McDonald Enterprises, though the ex-Sooner’s signature does appear on the bottom of the paintings. His company had stretched from the first winner, Jay Berwanger (1935), through Wisconsin’s Ron Dayne (1999).

McDonald had lucked his way into the business. When he was with the Philadelphia Eagles, he had autographed a photo for a fan, and after a game, that fan greeted him with a 16 x 20 painting.

“It was fantastic,” McDonald told ESPN.com in 2003. “He tells me that he wants me to have it because he’s a big fan of mine and he appreciated me sending him out an autographed picture. I wanted to pay him for it, but he wouldn’t let me.”

McDonald gave the artist a photo of his wife, who had an upcoming birthday, and asked for another panting. Then it hit him: “I thought about it and of all the rings, watches, trophies and silver trays, nobody gives something like [the portraits],” he said. “I’m telling you it was a gold mine. Hey, what guy is going to throw rocks at his own portrait? Nobody is going to hate himself. It just blossomed into a great business.”

But when he retired, the Trust was missing that ability to link the winners. With the help of ESPN, they had found a shortcut and started manipulating photos to make them look like those portraits. Beginning with Florida State’s Chris Weinke in 2000 they were working with photos from the schools that had been taken during preseason shoots—and there was a drop in quality that was all too noticeable to Kline.

“A school headshot is very different than this Heisman hero portrait or how they’d always been in the artists’ renderings,” she said.

The photographer would suggest that to properly link the trophy’s past to its future, they should pay homage to those McDonald paintings by replicating the poses and taking advantage of modern technology.

“I think more than anything I felt like there was a need for it,” she said. “I was like, ‘We can take this to another level and make it work a little better with the past and make the present feel like they all work together.’”

Beginning with Tebow in ’07, she has held a 10-minute portrait session with each winner on the Monday after the ceremony. She’ll take note of the old renderings, shoulder angles, and the different perspectives—with one caveat. A number of the old images showed the winner looking off into the distance, a trend she opted not to continue.

“I don’t really shoot that way,” she said. “I’ve shot a few off-camera and none of them have been edited into the process, but I don’t do the final edit. But I do think of camera angle—whether I’m above a guy or below a guy, if he’s turned a little bit.

“I go through a whole series of ‘he turns left, he turns right; I go high, I go low.’ I might get 10–15 different angles and when you go through that process, some of them stand out and look better than others.”

From Kline’s images, Rob Whalen, the executive director of the Heisman Trophy Trust, will send a select few to Dan Cunningham, ESPN’s creative director. Charged with building the environment for the ceremony, Cunningham decides which photo will become the rendering we eventually see. ESPN senior artists then add effects to the image before cutting out the headshot and placing it on a painted background.

“I look at the face … the smile means a lot,” Cunningham said in 2013 of the selection process. “I want to make sure it’s the shot. It’s representative of what he’ll do for the rest of his life.”

That’s the message Kline works to convey during the photo session.

“There’s not any huge rocket science that goes into the execution of the picture, but it’s understanding the subject and getting them into that frame of mind of ‘This is going to be your Heisman portrait that’s going to go up on the wall forever. How do you want to look?’’”

Henry, so enthralled by Ingram’s image, took it seriously. He asked to see every shot and pushed for more photos of him straight on with a slight turn. “It was just his personality … and he didn’t want to smile,” Kline said. “Some guys don’t want to smile. Cam Newton wanted to smile. RG3 wanted to smile. Derrick? No. No smiles. Their own personality plays into it a little bit.”

That’s what allowed Kline to take an admitted risk with Griffin. When the Baylor quarterback won and flashed his Superman socks, Kline was hit with inspiration. She asked her assistant to purchase a costume and a pair of $10 black-rimmed sunglasses with the lenses removed.

“I asked [Griffin] first, ‘What do you think of this idea? Because we’ve only got about 10 minutes to do it,’” Kline said. “He said, ‘I love it. I love it. Let’s do it.’”

The result was Clark Kent in transformation, the Heisman winner with his trophy in front of him as he wore the glasses frames with his open dress shirt revealing the Man of Steel’s logo underneath. Griffin kept those frames, wearing them to the Monday night banquet—a white-tie affair. They stayed on during a speech the Bears star made to the crowd, and he continued wearing them until coach Art Briles took them off so he could sport them himself when he addressed the attendees.

That Superman shot, of course, wasn’t the image that appeared as Griffin’s portrait. In that, he’s smiling while wearing his No. 10 Baylor jersey, his shot nearly indistinguishable in style and execution from that of Andre Ware, the 1989 winner from Houston.

While that painting, and so many before and after it, were crafted by McDonald’s artists, they are more closely related to Kline’s photos than you’d think—because what you see during the ceremony is actually Kline’s work.

When the Sports Museum of America opened in May 2008 in Lower Manhattan, it was to serve as the official home of the Heisman Trophy after the Downtown Athletic Club closed its doors in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. That included housing the original trophy and creating an exhibit using Heisman artifacts and memorabilia, including the oil paintings.

Not the actual paintings, though. They remained in storage, and Kline had been commissioned by the museum to photograph each of them for its collage. But while the Sports Museum of America was closed by February 2009—it cited low attendance and $6 million in cost overruns—those copies of the Heisman winner’s portraits had another life as part of ESPN’s set. So in reality, the paintings that line the back wall during the announcement are actually photographs Kline took of the originals.

It’s a contribution to the Heisman that, despite millions seeing every year, is hidden in plain sight.

“I don’t want it to be about the photographer,” she said. “It needs to be about that moment in time.”

Still, that front-row seat for history has provided a rather unique perspective.

During a visit to Twitter’s headquarters on West 17th Street during his victory lap of media appearances, Henry was greeted with a large screen showing one of his tweets from 2012. “I’m gone win Heisman #Goals #DreamingBig!” he wrote. That boast, he would disclose, came on the heels of his posing with Manziel and his trophy while the Yulee, Florida, product was in NYC as a finalist for the U.S. Army Player of the Year.

When Kline went back through her archives from Manziel’s three-year-old photo shoot, there was the photographic evidence: the Texas A&M quarterback in a tuxedo posing with his trophy; next to him is Henry in his Army All-American jersey.

Kline’s job, as she puts it, is “to chronicle the Heisman, and I feel very strongly about that. This is historic.”

And, every once in a while, prophetic.