“A great deal of my sports work involves covering major championships for various clients,” Darren Carroll shares. ‘I’m the photography consultant to the PGA of America, which makes me not only the official photographer at the PGA Championship, but also the Team USA photographer at the Ryder Cup. I’ve also had the good fortune over the years to be a member of the official coverage teams for both the U.S. Open golf and tennis championships.

My favorite part about all of those is the ability to go behind the scenes and offer audiences a glimpse of things they wouldn’t normally see—and foremost among those is my responsibility to stay with the champion following their victory, and document what life is like in the immediate aftermath of becoming a newly-crowned champion.”

Darren started doing this kind of work a few years ago, when the United States Golf Association began engraving the champions trophy on-site (previously, the winner would have an engraved trophy shipped to his home later). “I had suggested to the creative team at the USGA, ‘Why don’t we hang out with the champion after the last putt drops?’ It just so happened that this was the same year that they were starting the on-site engraving, when Jordan Spieth won at Chambers Bay in 2015. To this day, it remains one of my absolute favorite images—you have Jordan and his entire family standing there, watching the engraver work. But if you look closely, you’ll see that his mom, Christine, isn’t. Instead, she’s staring straight at her son with this look of enormous pride on her face.“

Fast forward to this past summer at a different kind of U.S. Open—the tennis kind. Tiffany & Co. had sent their master engraver to Arthur Ashe Stadium where, for the first time, he would be engraving the champions’ name on the trophy in real time.

Darren was dispatched backstage immediately following Coco Gauff’s victory. “They were set up at a makeshift table in what, for the prior two weeks, had been the player cafe. The engraver was working right beneath a TV tuned to the broadcast. I noticed that they were showing replays of the match, and I was pretty sure they’d show the winning point and Coco’s reaction. So I framed my shot to include both the engraver and the TV screen, and just waited."

Woody Allen once said that 90% of success in life is just showing up, but for Darren that means showing up in the right place, at the right time, with the right eye, and the situational awareness to adapt to what’s happening in front of him, and capture the scenes that tell the story beyond the straight action he’s also so well-known for capturing.



After all, you never know when history is about to be made.