Paul "Bear" Bryant, the grizzled coaching giant with the Chesterfield growl, was less than a year away from hanging up his signature houndstooth hat at the University of Alabama.

Pat Dye, the cocky young buck who had earned his coaching stripes as an assistant under Bryant at Alabama, was just getting started rebuilding rival Auburn.

It was an early Saturday afternoon in February 1982, a couple of months after Bryant's historic 315th victory, when his next-to-last Crimson Tide team rallied in the fourth quarter to defeat Dye's first Auburn team 28-17 at Legion Field.

With recruiting done and spring practice still a few weeks away, Bryant and Dye, a couple of country boys from way back, had been invited to hunt cane-cutter rabbits on a spread called Allen Acres along the banks of the Black Warrior River, just outside Moundville.

Before their afternoon hunt, Bryant and Dye got together in the camp house for a lunch of rabbit stew, and for a few minutes of catching up. It was just the two of them sitting at the table, the mentor and the protege.

As he walked out of the room, Birmingham News photographer Charles Nesbitt, a guest on the hunting trip, instinctively but inconspicuously shot a single frame of the two coaches, engaged in a private conversation.

"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, recalls in an interview for AL.com Vintage.

"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," he continues. "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."

Football coaches Pat Dye and Paul "Bear" Bryant enjoy a few minutes alone in this famous photograph that was taken during a hunting trip in 1982 near Moundville, Ala. (Birmingham News file/Charles Nesbitt)

The almost-forgotten photograph

Nesbitt had no idea at the time, but that one click of the shutter would later turn out to be one of the most popular photographs ever taken of Coach Bryant, and certainly the most prized shot of Nesbitt's 40-plus-year journalism career.

"I've seen it everywhere," he says. "Filling stations, meat-and-three restaurants, people's houses. It's just everywhere."

Ironically, the photograph didn't even appear in The Birmingham News until sometime well after that 1982 hunting trip, according to Nesbitt.

Instead, it was another photo Nesbitt shot that day -- one of the two coaches walking along a dirt road, Bryant cradling his shotgun and Dye with his stock resting on his shoulder -- that ran alongside a column Birmingham News sports editor Alf Van Hoose wrote the following week about their rabbit-hunting excursion.

"Coach Bryant and Coach Dye were just chatting as they walked down the road," Nesbitt remembers. "And I just stayed in front of 'em and made pictures as they were walking down the road. . . .

"You know, it made some nice pictures because of the time of the year it was and the trees didn't have any leaves on 'em and the road twisted and had ruts in it. So it made a nice picture."

Nesbitt isn't sure exactly when or how his other, more famous photo of Bryant and Dye surfaced.

"I think sometime later on there may have been a little small picture published of them sitting at the table," he says. "And then it just exploded."

Hundreds of orders for reprints of the almost-forgotten photograph poured into The News' photo department, Nesbitt says.

"My name got to be a nuisance in the photographic department because everybody had to try to print those pictures," he says. "It was a hard image to print because there wasn't a lot of light on it."

Dye, who has both photos framed at his Crooked Oaks Hunting Preserve in Notasulga, jokes that he has signed so many copies that The News should pay him a commission.

"I've probably signed 10,000 of those things -- or more," he says. "Lots of 'em. Everybody that sees it wants one. Not because of me, but because of Coach Bryant."

This photograph of football coaches Pat Dye and Paul "Bear" Bryant rabbit-hunting together first appeared in The Birmingham News in February 1982. (Birmingham News file/Charles Nesbitt)

'I made that picture'

For years after the photograph first appeared, Nesbitt always had a little fun whenever he walked into a barbecue joint or doctor's office and saw it hanging on the wall.

He remembers one particular assignment in Winfield, where he saw his photo when he stopped for gas at a service station. Acting like he had never seen it before, he asked the proprietor where he got it.

"He said, 'My brother was a friend of the photographer that made that picture and he got it for me,'" Nesbitt recalls.

"And I said, 'Is that right? What was your brother's name?'

"And he told me, and I scratched my head a minute and said, 'I don't remember him.'

"And the guy kind of looked at me for a second, and I said, 'I made that picture.'

"(He said), 'Well, my brother says he knew you.'"

Charles Nesbitt, who retired after more than 40 years at The Birmingham News, holds a copy of his most famous photograph, (Robert Clay/rclay@al.com)

The end of an era

Maybe the reason that such a casual, seemingly unimportant picture generated such a huge reaction, Nesbitt says in hindsight, is because it captured the end of an era.

Bryant died the following January, four weeks after coaching his last game.

"I think for the Alabama people it was almost symbolic of passing the baton -- even though Dye was at Auburn," Nesbitt says. "This was only one year away from before he died. . . .

"I think it was just the combination of that, (and) of the two of them being in a non-football scene and enjoying each other's company."

Nesbitt says he took more historically significant photographs in his journalism career -- including one of George Wallace and Jimmy Carter from the 1976 presidential primaries and another from the 2002 capital murder trial of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bomber Bobby Frank Cherry -- but none is as widely revered and remembered as his Bryant-Dye hunting lodge photo.

"To have (the photo of) the two football coaches being the one that is recognized from one end of the state to the other, I thought was sort of amusing," he says. "Not to mention that nobody knows who made it. . . .

"And I always felt like it really couldn't have been that good of a picture," he adds, laughing. "I mean, after all, Daniel Moore never painted it."

Nesbitt, who retired from The News in 2006, also has another, far less famous, photo from that 1982 hunting trip in an upstairs room at his home in Chelsea.

It's one of the photographer, in full beard and flannel shirt, with Pat Dye on his right and Paul "Bear" Bryant on his left.

"Of course, neither one of them looked like they were terribly interested to be standing next to me in a photograph," he says. "But I smiled real big."

Former Birmingham News photographer Charles Nesbitt, center, has his own keepsake photo from that 1982 hunting trip with Pat Dye and Paul "Bear" Bryant. (Photo courtesy of Charles Nesbitt)

UPDATED at 3:35 p.m. CDT on Monday, Oct. 30, 2017, to correct that the rabbit hunt took place on a spread of property called Allen Acres.