Most of the action photos AquaViva took were of Chargers’ home games. But occasionally he travelled with the team on the road. Such was the case on September 25, 1966, when the Chargers visited the Oakland Raiders. This was just the second regular season game at the newly-constructed Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum:
During the game Aqua Viva took two photographs of quarterback John Hadl that looked very similar:
Let’s count the similarities: Hadl is running down the right sideline. He has the ball in his right hand. The shot is taken from the other side of the field, toward the Chargers’ bench. He is being chased by a Raider defensive back. It’s got to be the same play, right?
Nope. The first clue is this guy:
He’s in both shots, and his relative position to Hadl is similar, but everything else around him is different: the crowd, the players, and the sideline members (the Chargers’ bench can be seen in the first shot, not in the second).
The second clue is that the photos are not in sequence. Remember, these are scanned from contact sheets. Generated from the negative roll, the contact strips indicate the order the shots were taken. Between the first shot and the second was this one:
That’s tight end Jacque MacKinnon catching a touchdown in the corner of the endzone (notice the ref indicating touchdown). Checking the stat sheet, we see that MacKinnon did indeed have a touchdown reception in the game, a 19-yard scoring grab in the second quarter. So the two runs must have bracketed this score. Mystery solved.
Except it isn’t. Because we already have a photo of MacKinnon’s TD catch, and it’s a different play than the one above:
He’s not in the corner of the endzone, and he’s on his feet. So what is that other photo of him? A check of the game log resolves all of this:
The first photo was Hadl’s run for 13 yards. The photo of MacKinnon in the end zone was a play that was nullified by penalty, because Hadl was across the line of scrimmage when he threw the ball. The second photo of Hadl happened several plays later, after the Chargers got the ball back, and resulted in a 21 yard gain.
So there we have it. In the same quarter, just a few plays apart, John Hadl had a couple of big runs down the right sideline. And if it wasn’t for that guy on the sideline, we might have assumed both photos were of the same run.
Oh, and one more thing, from the first photo:
I hope he didn’t spill the beer.