George Tiedemann is a Nikon legend Behind the Lens.

George Tiedemann's life was shaped by sports long before he began to photograph them. Attracted to the competition, welcoming the responsibility, he played as a youngster, as a young man and as a member of the Marine Corps. "It was one of the reasons I joined the Marines—because it was competitive," he says. "In the Marine Corps, it was always, 'What else can you do for us?' Standards and expectations were there to go after, to live up to."

George joined the Marines in 1964 and did a year-long tour in Vietnam. He carried a camera, but he was "a Marine who liked to take pictures," not a combat photographer. "I point no cameras at people who point guns at me," he says.

It was in the Marines that the interest in photography he'd had as a youngster was revived and the idea of photography as a career was born. "While I was in Vietnam I decided that I didn't want to do something the rest of my life that I didn't like," George says. "I made up my mind to do what I enjoyed."

Out of the service he went to work for the Asbury Park [New Jersey] Press in the circulation department. "I did some freelance work for them while in circulation, and eight months later was offered a staff job." One of his first assignments was a Janis Joplin concert. "It was 1969, and four years in the Marines was like four years in a time capsule. I went to photograph the concert and looked around and thought, what happened while I was away? Being in the Marine Corps, I had time off the base, but I just wasn't involved in the social turmoil that was going on. It did not exist in my mind. Other people's attitudes didn't bother me, I wasn't even aware of them. I did what I was asked to do because that was my responsibility."

George spent seven years on newspapers before moving on to sports photography. "There's the emotional stress and strain that newspaper work puts on you when you get close to the stories or attached to your subjects," he says. He mentions photographing a policeman's grieving widow, then talks about a photo he took of young girl kissing her father just after she'd had exploratory surgery. "She had a brain tumor, and the doctors gave her a thousand to one chance of surviving the operation. I got the assignment. I didn't want to go, didn't want to be there. But I went and took the pictures, and she survived. But suppose she hadn't?" The attraction of sports was obvious: "Sports is a game. Nobody dies. You can be the last out on the losing team in the World Series, and the next morning you get up with your family."