Video: The story behind legendary hunting photo of Bear Bryant and Pat Dye
A few months after his historic 315th victory at Alabama and on the cusp of beginning his final season with the Crimson Tide, Paul “Bear” Bryant and a young Auburn coach in Pat Dye had been invited to hunt cane-cutter rabbits on Judge Tigger Burke’s spread along the banks of the Black Warrior River.
Before the two went out for their afternoon hunt, though, Bryant and Dye — who were noted friends, having worked together for several years in Tuscaloosa — got together in the camp house and got an opportunity to have a catch-up conversation for a few minutes over some rabbit stew.
Birmingham News photographer Charles Nesbitt, a guest on the hunting trip, shot a single frame of the two coaches, who were at the time engaged in a private conversation. Little did he know that photo would be passed along for decades, cherished to this day as “that famous hunting photo.”
“Once everybody finished up the meal, it was suggested, ‘Let’s all go outside and let Coach Bryant and Coach Dye have some time absolutely alone,'” Nesbitt, who is now retired, told AL.com for its vintage series. “So I picked up my camera, and I was one of the last ones to walk out of the room, and I turned around and made one frame. And somebody asked me one time, one of the other photographers, ‘Why did you only make one image of that?’
“And I said, ‘Well, I didn’t want to intrude.’ I was a guest and not a news photographer. And I just felt like that I owed them that respect, if that’s what you want to call it, not to intrude any more than that.”
Watch the featured video provided by AL.com to enjoy the story behind the iconic photograph of the two coaches taken in 1982 that turns up everywhere in Alabama, from service stations to barbecue joints, man caves to lake houses.