Jerry Lodriguss won the Pro Football Photograph of the Year for 1980 in the NFL Hall of Fame photo contest after his shot of Ike Harris getting upended during a New Orleans Saints-LA Rams game. However, he’s got quite a story about how he actually captured the image.

This story comes from his website:

All year I had been having trouble with my focus. I thought my eyes were going bad at 26 years old. Two days before this photo was taken I had shot the Roberto Duran - Sugar Ray Leonard rematch fight as one of the ringside photographers for United Press International. This was the famous “No Mas” fight where Duran quit in mid-fight because he was losing and being humiliated by Leonard. Well, I didn’t have hardly any photos from the fight moved on the wire because most were out of focus! Naturally, I was really bummed out by this. My eyesight had always been excellent, as well as my hand - eye coordination, and it was something I prided myself on.

Then came the Saints-Rams Monday Night Football game in the Superdome, which had dim light and was extremely tough for photographers to focus.

Late in the game, I was shooting next to a friend when Harris flipped upside down in mid air, almost right in front of us, filling the frame of the 300mm f/2.8 lens. It was a bang - bang play, with no time to think.

When it was over, my friend looked at me and smiling said he would perform an obscene act on me in public on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter if I had gotten that picture. I didn’t say anything because I am slightly superstitious about talking about what I have before I see the film, you know, the old rule “if you see it, you ain’t got it” because the mirror is always up when the actual photo is being taken, and you never know if a ball boy or referee or another player was blocking your line of sight when the shutter was open, let alone if it was in focus.

After the end of the game the film was developed and I made a print and took it to my friend in his darkroom across the hall from mine in the Superdome, and showed him the print, kidding him about making a date for his statement. We all had a great laugh!

Turns out that there wasn’t any problem with his eyes, or his ability to focus, but rather the camera body had a misaligned mirror. So had the camera body been working properly, the photo probably would have been out of focus. But thanks to this misalignment, Lodriguss was able to get this award-winning photo.

If you want to read the full story, Lodriguss has the entire story on how he caught “The Flip.”

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