FOOTBALL IN FOCUS

Hall-of-Fame photographer Brad Bradley brings a lifetime of gridiron memories to the Century in the Making Action Team

By Steve Pate

Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 11:06am

From the Beginning: Brad Bradley (left) was there to see the legendary Doak Walker (center) at the very start of his career.

Charlie Fiss of the Cotton Bowl Association phoned longtime photographer Jim (Brad) Bradley in the spring of 2007 and said he needed to explain something to him over lunch.

“I’m not going to be able to use you to shoot this year’s Cotton Bowl Hall of Fame inductees,” Fiss said grimly.

Bradley looked like he had just swallowed an electric blanket. Since 1948, Bradley had ALWAYS shot anything related to the Cotton Bowl Classic.

“I can’t use you,” Fiss said, “because you’ll be busy. You’re being inducted.”

The Cotton Bowl Hall of Fame currently has 47 inductees. One is a photographer.

“It’s a very, very special feeling to be in the company of the Hall of Fame members,” Bradley says. “It’s such a great honor.”

For the past 60 years, to imagine Brad Bradley tracking around North Texas without his trusty camera is to imagine Tom Landry on the sidelines of the Dallas Cowboys without his hat.

Willie Nelson on stage without his beat-up guitar.

Old MacDonald, without the farm.

Bradley has not only been a part of North Texas’ sporting history, he has been its eyes, and he has captured its soul.

Today, he is also a member of the North Texas Super Bowl XLV Host Committee’s Century in the Making Action Team (as, by the way, is Charlie Fiss). The committee, chaired by Cowboys announcer Brad Sham, is strapped with creating an overall list of the 250 Greatest Football Moments in North Texas History. During 2010, fans will comb over that impressive ballot and vote on the Top 100 memories, in order.

“I really do feel the committee is charged with some responsibility to bring forth the most memorable events,” Bradley says. “It can trigger an awful lot of interest for a lot of people. That list could be so memorable that it could live forever.

“Those football memories have become a part of our culture,” Bradley says, then chuckles, “and those events, like other events in life, tend to expand in our minds over time.”

Life should never be a blur for a photographer, but in some ways it probably seems like only yesterday that Bradley was snapping shots of the great SMU All-American boy, Doak Walker.

The year was 1948 and the country was giddy with excitement. The long nightmare, World War II, had ended triumphantly and North Texas was abuzz about its future. Doak Walker had gone from Highland Park High into the military and now was back at SMU, the perfect hero of that era. To this day, he remains Bradley’s favorite athlete to have shot.

“There is nobody like him,” Bradley says, rather flatly, then concedes, “and there likely won’t be — I think I’ve rather closed my mind on that.”

During his stint in the Air Corps during World War II, Bradley started in the darkest shadows of photography — in the darkroom, where he helped process and print film for squadron photographs.

“It was kind of a mysterious thing to put some light on a piece of paper,” Bradley says, “and then put it in chemicals and see an image gradually appear. It intrigued me.”

He learned to appreciate the near torturous, painstaking care of developing photographs as an artistic process. But it wasn’t until after the war that he fell in love with the real art of photo shooting.

Within months after the military, Bradley married the love of his life, Betty Laughead, in June 1946, and took a job shooting military property at the Red River Arsenal in Texarkana.

Jim Laughead (pronounced Law-head), Betty’s dad, was a photographer for The Associated Press in Dallas. He phoned one night and said Southern Methodist University had hired him to shoot all of SMU athletics. He needed help.

Thus was born one of the great tag teams and sideshows in the annals of Southern football over the next quarter-century. Laughead dressed wildly and carried on with great animation, purposely the clown to loosen up the clients, while Bradley was his straight man. They were the dynamic duo of their profession.

While at The Associated Press, Laughead had devised a faux action photo that became known as the “Huck-and-Buck”. For colleges and pro teams throughout the South and Southwest, he and Bradley would pose players in fake action – leaping toward the camera as if about to make a tackle, receiving a pass on their fingertips with arms outstretched, linemen growling in their stances. Others tried to mimic their trademark, but nobody could match them.

Before the start of every school year, Bradley and Laughead would toss some 1,500 pounds of equipment into a station wagon and head out, all over the belly of Texas and the South, arriving at one college campus, spending hours setting up and shooting, first football, then basketball, then move on down the road maybe 250 miles or more to the next campus and the next shoot, for five and six weeks.

Then they would return to Dallas and their studio on Hillcrest across from the SMU campus and start developing. In the 1960’s, they produced 100,000 sports prints per year. They did Bear Bryant’s Texas A&M teams of the ‘50s, then Bryant’s legendary Alabama teams. LSU demanded them every year. They knew a young Mississippi State coach named Darrell Royal, and continued to shoot his teams at the University of Texas.

They shot cereal boxes and bubble gum cards and magazine covers for Look and Life and Collier’s. And so many little town newspapers clamored for their action photos to accompany the hometown features about their football heroes.

Bradley shot film in the day when the film allowed for only two shots. Then you had to slide in new film. The camera light bulb needed changing every time. Photographers, like in those old movies, really did wear fedoras with a “PRESS” card poking out.

Kodachrome got popular in the 1960’s and the miracle of digital photography heated up in the 1980’s.

Bradley still uses film because he’s just always been comfortable with it. But the other day, he did confess, “I’m probably going to switch to digital someday.”

He’s only 87, so what’s the rush? Brad Bradley has got a whole lifetime ahead of him.