Heinz Kluetmeier took some of the most iconic photos in American sports history. His time in Milwaukee is just as fascinating

Posted by author January 21, 2025 Sports

Name the most iconic photograph in American sports history.

Perhaps your mind pictures Muhammad Ali towering over Sonny Liston, Brandi Chastain’s World Cup soccer celebration or Willie Mays making the catch with his back to the infield.

But it’s just as likely that your mind wanders to the 1980 Winter Olympics. Miracle on Ice.

Almost surely, you can picture the chaotic frenzy that followed the United States win over the Soviet Union in the semifinals of the Lake Placid men’s hockey tournament. The greatest upset in American sports came against the backdrop of political tensions, something photographer Heinz Kluetmeier surely understood.

It was his photo on the cover of Sports Illustrated, uniquely unaccompanied by words or graphics to sully the unforgettable moment, that cemented the scene into legend.

Kluetmeier, a native of Berlin, Germany, who immigrated with his family at age 9 to Milwaukee and spent nearly 40 years there, died Jan. 14 at age 82, having endured complications from a stroke and Parkinson’s disease.

The stories and images of his career in sports photography could fill volumes, but his life in Milwaukee — including his work for the Milwaukee Journal — produced its own fascinating vignettes.

Heinz Kluetemeier arrived in Milwaukee at age 9 and pursued photography not long thereafter

Before Kluetmeier became a documentarian of Super Bowls, Olympic games and other cornerstones of American athletics, he was a boy on a boat called the TSS Neptunia, arriving from Germany on March 6, 1952. His father, Fred, had already lived an incredible life, captured as a prisoner of war and sent to a camp in Tennessee, then returning to the United States by choice in 1951 before sending for his family in 1952. Fred worked as a typesetter and printer for the Milwaukee Journal before later changing his career and teaching in Elm Grove.

At a time when German nationals weren’t held in high esteem, Heinz and brother Jorn arrived with their mother, Ilse, on a Friday and were already sent to school the following Monday, unable to speak English and adorned in Lederhosen.

It was Ilse who pushed Heinz toward photography.

“She took a photograph of my dad one day when he was home sick from school in bed, of him eating chicken noodle soup,” said one of Heinz’s daughters, Jessica Kluetmeier. “His pet parakeet, Chripy, was perched on the corner of the bowl, eating a noodle. That photograph ran in the Milwaukee Journal and also went out over AP wires, and I think that did it.”

It was December 1955. By the time he graduated from Custer High School in 1961, he already had experience taking photos from the sidelines at Green Bay Packers games. He started with the Associated Press processing film, working for the same company as his mother.

In 1959, already contributing to Milwaukee newspapers on a freelance basis, his native German came in handy when he facilitated communication with a German freighter in Lake Michigan that had rescued six members of a Sea Scout vessel that had been damaged in a storm. When the boat returned to shore, Kluetmeier took the photo that accompanied the story in the Journal.

After attending Dartmouth to obtain an engineering degree, he came back to photography with a stint at the Milwaukee Journal from 1967 to 1969.

“My grandfather, as many immigrant parents were and are, wanted him to pursue a safe, stable career,” said another of Heinz’s daughters, Tina Kluetmeier. “He worked for a year at Inland Steel in Chicago, but the photography bug had taken hold. He had already been working as a photographer in high school and college, as a stringer for AP. He worked on his yearbook in college. He wanted to leave engineering behind.”

By the time his award-winning career was done, he had shot more than 100 covers for Sports Illustrated.

“It was really my mom (then-wife Donna) who encouraged him to take that plunge,” Tina said. “I think you can see throughout his career how he really married his background in engineering, his interest in photography.”

Groundbreaking work in swimming, Olympics was part of Kluetmeier’s legacy

Those engineering principles were never more evident than his work in swimming, with photography so striking that it landed him a place in the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

He was the first to capture images of high-level swimming races with cameras stationed underwater. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, his photograph of Michael Phelps confirmed that he won the 100-meter butterfly by one one-hundredth of a second. Kluetmeier kept a copy of the photo framed in his New York loft.

“He was cutting-edge,” said Tom Lynn, who spent 30 years taking pictures for the Milwaukee Journal and first met Heinz when Rickey Henderson set the MLB single-season stolen-base record at County Stadium in 1982. “He knew where he wanted to be at the event, and he knew there were pictures to be made in other places, and he would use remote cameras to do that.”

Lynn, who struck up a lifelong friendship with Kluetmeier, also said the maestro seldom worked alone.

“He’d bring his kids, neighbors, friends, a dentist,” Lynn said. “He just asked anybody he could get to come and they would push the button (on the remote camera) and they’d get to go to the event.”

Daughter Erika pushed the button as she sat in the front row at County Stadium when the Brewers played in the 1982 World Series. Tina recalled sitting sideline at Milwaukee Bucks games and watching Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in action. Jessica, who herself pursued a career in photography, accompanied her father to Olympics in Athens, Salt Lake City, Vancouver and Beijing — the latter Kluetmeier insisted on attending a week after surgery for prostate cancer.

“It was a thrill,” Tina said. “My dad was always roping people in. He went out of his way so people interested in photography and sports could try their hand at capturing their moments. He teed them up for us.”

The routine extended to his fourth daughter from another relationship, lifelong Milwaukeean Kirsten Schmitt, who now serves as assistant team photographer for the Milwaukee Brewers and Milwaukee Admirals. She first met her father in person in 2008, when he brought her to an assignment shooting a Packers game. Later, Kluetmeier visited Schmitt during her time in the Peace Corps in Cambodia, highlighting another common trend of a man who flew all over the world to spend time with his children when he wasn’t spending time taking photos.

“I only photographed a couple things with my dad, but the last thing I shot with him … in 2016 (in his final assignment for Sports Illustrated), we drove to Kentucky and shot the Kentucky Derby,” Schmitt said. “My dad had me sit next to him near the finish line and gave me a job: ‘You have to pan the finish line.’ It’s not the easiest technique. Many experienced people will try it and fail, but I got it that day, which is awesome.

“His greatest joy was doing the Olympics, and he did so many of them,” Schmitt said.

Kluetmeier was on hand for some of the biggest moments in sports history … and nearly made some of his own

That started at Munich in 1972, when he was sharing a meal with legendary swimmer Mark Spitz as he received news of the terrorist attack that came to characterize those games. For every Olympics that followed through 2012, Kluetmeier was on hand. He loved track and field events, created innovating figure-skating visuals, thrived at shooting swimming, and, of course, possessed a knack for hockey.

“Miracle on Ice meant as much to him as everybody else in the moment,” Erika said. “The story he could tell and the fact that the cover didn’t require a caption and didn’t need it. … he always strived for telling that story through the picture. Very often, he would say the best pictures were the ones where he could connect with people and he could draw that emotion out. Pull it out of them, draw his audiences into it. That relationship with his subjects was very important to him. He was really good at it.”

“The guy was a creative genius and he was a photographic surgeon,” said former Sports Illustrated managing editor Mark Mulvoy, who first worked with Kluetmeier on a book about hockey legend Bobby Orr in 1972 and eventually hired Kluetmeier as photo editor for the magazine.

“He turned the whole thing around,” Mulvoy said of the photo department. “I really discovered you can’t get somebody (in that role) who doesn’t know sports. That brought a whole new element to everything. He had an unbelievable knack for identifying the right photographer to work a particular story.”

Mulvoy said he once got a call from the state department at 2 a.m.; officials had discovered that Kluetemier and a colleague were abetting East German track and field athlete Wolfgang Schmidt in his attempt to relocate to West Germany. The journalists stood down, but it illustrated Kluetmeier’s strong commitment to what he believed.

Schmidt was able to leave the country a few years later.

“Heinz had a fake passport; we all could have gone to jail,” Mulvoy said. “With Heinz, you never ask questions. ‘How did we get that picture? They weren’t going to allow us to have strobes, but we had strobes (in this picture).’ He wasn’t a schemer; he just knew how to get the job done.”

After every trip to shoot photos, he’d come home to Milwaukee, where three of his daughters graduated from Wauwatosa East. He remained in Milwaukee until moving more permanently to New York in 1989 or 1990.

“Push came to shove, he would show up for people,” said Erika, recalling an instance when he built a bed for her dorm or when he brought a suitcase of American supplies to Tina in Russia during her own time in the Peace Corps. He kept shooting photos until Parkinson’s made photography impossible, including his granddaughter’s high-school sailing regatta in 2016.

Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated memorialized Kluetmeier, highlighting his photographer’s eye, his innovation and his skill for remembering the people he met along the way.

“It’s still difficult to reconcile that someone so full of life is no longer with us,” Wertheim wrote. “But his work lives on, thousands of words for thousands of images. And up there, someone is telling angels how to use a Nikon D4, how to angle for the best images, how to get the film back to the office without getting on a commercial flight … and all the while, he is smiling generously.”

Heinz is survived by his daughters — Tina Kluetmeier of Philadelphia; Jessica Kluetmeier of Gardner, New York; Erika Kluetmeier of Madison; and Kirsten Schmitt of Milwaukee — as well as former wife Donna Orlandi of Philadelphia; brother Jorn Kluetmeier of Carmel, California; and four grandchildren.