Seahawks photographer Rod Mar shares inside look ahead of Super Bowl 60

While many Seahawks fans constantly scour their favorite social media sites for another peek at the action ahead of Super Bowl 60, some may wonder who is behind the lens capturing those images.

Rod Mar, one of the men responsible for documenting some of the most iconic sports moments in Seattle sports history, spoke to “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio and provided an inside look as he gears up to photograph Super Bowl 60.

“It’s such a great opportunity for all these years to be able to document some of the greatest moments and players and coaches and teams in our region, and that doesn’t change this week,” Mar said on “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio. “Here we are for the Super Bowl. It’s always a phenomenal experience, and things are just ramping up as we build towards Sunday.”

Mar detailed several main aspects of his job, primarily following the Seahawks wherever they go to give all 12s a detailed account of what it’s like to be at the Super Bowl.

“My job is to document the team and all the things that we do,” Mar said. “That started when we left the Virginia Mason Athletic Center and boarded the buses to take us to the airport, and I was right up front on the first bus so I could photograph all the 12s along the route, and then boarding the plane, and then departing once we landed here in San Jose.”

For Mar, Super Bowl 60 is ‘just another game’

Jake asked how someone might work their way into such a highly coveted position as a Seahawks photographer, to which Mar replied it was his passion and a bit of luck.

“Oh, just pure, sheer accident. I think I’m the luckiest person in the world,” Mar said. “I never studied photography, never took a photo class. The great thing is, you can grab a camera, and you can experiment. Back in the college days, you could drop a class at the University of Washington up until the last day of classes before finals week. I had a class, I was struggling, and I slept through my final.

“I go running across campus, find my counselor, and throw the door open, saying, ‘You need to get me out of this class,'” Mar continued. “She goes, ‘I’ll do it, but you have to take an internship, and you like sports. It’s called Inside the Seahawks.’ And Inside the Seahawks was a weekly fan magazine, and the publisher was none other than Kenny Easley. So I tripped and fell, and lucked my way into an internship where my first boss was Kenny Easley, and I was covering the Seahawks.”

As fans gear up for Super Bowl Sunday, Mar has a plan of his own: Calm the nerves and treat the moment as if it were Week 1 of a fresh season.

“I follow Mike’s mantra, which is, this is just another game. You’ve done this your whole life. They’ve played this game their whole life. I’ve been photographing all of my adult life, just thinking about really being in the moment,” Mar said. “I think the first Super Bowl I photographed in 2005, I overthought it. I made the moment too big, and my photos were terrible. It was awful. The moment never gets too big anymore. It’s just taking pictures.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to “The Jake and Spike Show” weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.