Scene Through the Lens | March 28, 2022

It’s the end of March, when the Madness makes for many memories. But this year especially, you can’t help read about or watch the many replays of what is considered the best college Buzzer Beater of all time.

On March 28, 1992, here in Philadelphia at the NCAA Eastern Regionals, Duke’s Christian Laettner took an inbounds pass from teammate Grant Hill way down the court. He dribbled once, faked, and took a turnaround jumper hitting what is now known as “The Shot.” Ultimately, It sent the Blue Devils to claim their second consecutive national championship.

I re-photographed the site where it happened. Today it’s a water retention pond in the middle of Parking Lot G at the Wells Fargo Center. Then it was the basketball court in the long-gone Spectrum during the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 and Elite 8 East Regional.

This year, with the Eastern Regional just finished here at the Wells Fargo Center, and the University of North Carolina going to the Final Four (ending St. Peter’s historic run as the first 15th seed to reach the Elite Eight), I talked with photographer Chuck Liddy, and today, exactly three decades to the day, here’s the story behind that day’s other “shot” — his iconic photo of the moment the ball left Laettner’s hands .

Liddy, now retired from the Raleigh News & Observer, was then working for The Herald Sun, the local newspaper in Duke University’s hometown, Durham, N.C.. He had covered head coach and basketball legend Mike Krzyzewski and the team for years (Coach K’s last game will be in New Orleans next weekend, headed into a record 13th Final Four).

Liddy’s lens was blocked by officials on crucial games in previous years. “I got burned two years in a row, when Christian made the same shot.” Photographers call it “ref ass.”

Just two nights earlier, after the game with Seton Hall, several photographers were injured when security guards — who had been told to keep everyone off the court — somehow inexplicably thought they were supposed to prevent the photographers from taking any photos after the game ended. “The guards were almost shoulder to shoulder and when we started trying to take photos they were grabbing people and yelling ‘NO PICTURES!’ it was insane.” He said one photographer, doing his job, got tackled by two guards when he tried to get past them, and another, “was choked when the security guy grabbed his camera strap and started dragging him around.”

Only in Philadelphia(!)

In the photographer’s meeting before the final game, NCAA officials brought out the Spectrum’s chief of security who apologized to everyone, and all the security guards were told not to touch or interfere with the credentialed photographers after the Duke-Kentucky game.

When the Blue Devils called timeout after Kentucky went ahead 103-102 with 2.1 seconds left in the overtime, Liddy was not going to miss whatever happened next. “I knew where the referee runs the baseline, and I knew if I stayed where I was he was gonna step in front of me.”

He decided he would get up from his seating position with the other photographers — including those from his larger North Carolina competition newspapers — on the floor in the corner of the court.

He waited until the players started to head back on the court, moving next to the TV camera under the Duke basket, which was against NCAA rules. AP photographer Charles Rex Arbogast did the same, standing above Liddy, who was then knelling on the floor. The security guards were not there, but an usher started yelling at them, but they wouldn’t move, saying, “It’s be over in just a second,” and the usher stopped bothering them just before the pass was thrown.

Sometimes there is that rare moment when something dramatic happens right in front of you. And it’s over in an instant. If you blinked, you missed it. But if you’re lucky, you were holding your camera and had the presence of mind to push the shutter, and it was set for the proper exposure, and it was in focus. You probably won a big news photo prize.

But almost all of the time as news photographers we are making decisions and choices: tight or loose; fast or slow; in front or behind; shallow or lots of depth-of-field; flash or available light.

Arbogast’s photo of the ball just leaving Laettner’s fingertips, or the tight frame made by his fellow AP staffer Amy Sancetta, of Laettner’s face as he reacts to the “shot” are reproduced in newspapers, on websites, TV shows and shared on social media hundreds of times every March since.

Liddy decided he would shoot it wide, “because I wanted to get the scoreboard and clock in the photo.” It is his decision to shoot it with a 20mm lens on his Nikon FM2 that makes his image the iconic, historic one that is etched in the minds of basketball, Blue Devil (and Kentucky) fans everywhere.

Liddy was using 35mm color negative film and rushed to a trailer that was outside the building, because there was no space inside the Spectrum press room. He had the color chemicals in a warm water bath, awaiting his arrival, and after processing, took the negatives back to press room because the trailer didn’t have any phone lines for transmitting.

When he arrived another photographer asked if had the picture. “I got one frame, dude. But I got it.”

As he viewed it on the 3-inch screen on his AP Leafax 35 portable transmitter, many of the writers in the room — mainly from Kentucky — were arguing that time had expired while the ball was still in Laettner’s hands.

Even on the tiny screen you could clearly see the ball out of Laettner’s hands with 0.2 second left. Liddy said, “all of a sudden there was a herd of writers crowding around. The Kentucky crew was silenced and walked, slump shouldered, back to their laptops.”

Just then the phone lines at The Spectrum stopped working. Liddy had 55 minutes to make his deadline - and it took the transmitter in those days a half hour to send a single color image.

He had to make another decision. Asking another photographer to watch his gear, Liddy grabbed the 30 lb. transmitter and went to find a cab outside the arena. He offered to pay others already in the taxi queue to let him go ahead of them. “I got in the cab and told the driver I’d give him an extra $20 to get me to the hotel (in Center City) in 10 minutes. He did - breaking a couple of traffic laws.”

Liddy was able to make deadline by 10 minutes. But the picture did not make it into the morning’s newspaper. “An assistant editor didn’t want to change the layout because they would have had to remake the page.”

They did run the photo — the following day — as a double-truck (over two full two pages). And requests for copies of the picture came from all over county. A Duke Law graduate, working as an attorney in Lexington, Ky., had a wall-size print framed behind his desk.

And, as former Inquirer sports writer Frank Fitzpatrick reported, two weeks after the game the referee who made the pivotal call that Laettner made his shot before the buzzer received a package from Krzyzewski. Inside was a signed photo of “The Shot.” He wrote, “I’m glad you got this right.”

“That sounds exactly like something Coach K would do,” Liddy said.

Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column