On the morning of Oct. 14, 1995, it had been five days short of a full decade since Tennessee had beaten Alabama. The Third Saturday in October rivalry had been tilted toward the Crimson Tide 19 out of 24 times since 1970, but this time, the Vols had a sophomore named Peyton Manning under center and were four-point favorites.

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No. 6 Tennessee was 5-1, coming off an 18-point road win against No. 18 Arkansas. Alabama was ranked 11th.

The previous summer, Jamie Hunley and Mantrell Price had worked side-by-side as room service servers at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville.

“All he could talk about was Ohio State,” Hunley said of the Buckeye State native.

Hunley, then a student at Tennessee, made Price a promise during their summer together. That fall, he would take Price to his first Tennessee game and give him his first taste of SEC football.

So on the night of Oct. 13, Hunley picked up Price in Nashville. The next day, they made their way inside the gates of Legion Field in Birmingham.

By the end of the night, both were in jail, clothes stained with grass and mud, Price’s sweatshirt torn from a struggle with police. The smell of pepper spray hung in the cold, concrete holding cell throughout the sleepless night.

This week, 25 years later, Tennessee finds itself on a similar cold streak against the Crimson Tide. No. 2 Alabama is headed to Rocky Top as a three-touchdown favorite and hasn’t lost to the Vols since 2006, the end of a run of 10 Tennessee wins against rival Alabama in 12 years that began on that night in Birmingham.

But just like Manning’s first pass of the night and his memorable bootleg later in the first quarter, Hunley and Price are two of eight faces (and one butt) featured in a photo that’s stood the test of time in the decades since.

Hunley wore all orange to Birmingham that night. He’s in the back left of the famed photo in a backward white Tennessee hat. When the shutter on Getty Images photographer Al Bello’s camera closed, Hunley’s eyes were drawn to a section of Tennessee fans who, in the moment, were hoisting the student in the Smokey mascot costume from the bottom of the lower bowl to the top in a euphoric crowd surf.

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“I was a little bit in awe of the whole thing,” said Bello, a New York-based photographer who had never been to Birmingham before that night and hasn’t been back since.

In response to the arrests on the field, fans were chanting “Let! Them! Go! Let! Them! Go!” as Smokey surfed atop the Vols fans.

Birmingham police did not let them go. Or get help for the fans they had pepper-sprayed.

(A Birmingham police spokesperson declined to comment.)

In the photo, the face of Price (middle, torn gray sweatshirt) is in mid-scream, pleading for help from anyone within earshot for the fan bent over in agony in front of him. At that moment, that fan is screaming in pain with his face pressed against the grass and hands zip-tied behind his back.

“He got pepper-sprayed,” Jamie Hunley said. “And he never even ran on the field.”

Price didn’t know him, but the pain was obvious to anyone within earshot.

Three policemen hover in the background, with two others out of focus on the left of the photo. The policeman in the middle of the background?

“We called him ‘Smiley,’” said Byron Small, then a photographer for the Knoxville News Sentinel. “That’s the cop who arrested me.”

Small was also on the field as a credentialed media member, but Bello was the man who snapped the photo that’s proven timeless.

That particular tableau caught Bello’s eye, and he snapped a few quick photos and kept moving.

“I just thought the whole thing was a bizarre scene. They had ’em all corralled in a circle,” Bello said. “I cannot believe that photo is still floating around.”

Said Hunley: “It’s funny that 25 years later, it’s something we’re still talking about.”

Small wasn’t supposed to be shooting the game for the News Sentinel, but he agreed to fill in for one of the usual sports photographers who couldn’t make the trip.

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“I thought, ‘Wow, you know, I’ve never been to Birmingham. It seemed like it’d be a great place to go. Lots of history, the civil rights movement,” Small said. “That day didn’t end up quite the way I thought it would.”

For most Tennessee fans, it was just the opposite. Manning found Joey Kent on the game’s first play for an 80-yard touchdown, igniting a 60-minute laugher. The Vols trounced the Tide, 41-14. The 27-point margin is tied for the most lopsided Tennessee win in series history.

Hunley and Price watched it 25 rows up behind the goalposts in the end zone Kent ran away from. Manning later ran in a touchdown on a famed naked bootleg to put the Vols up 21-0 in the first quarter.

“The rout was on and we were just having a good time,” Hunley said. “It was exhilarating. When you make that trip, that game was everything you were hoping for.”

The playing field inside Legion Field was surrounded by a chain-link fence. Near the end of the game, Hunley made his way down to it as Tennessee’s players were high-fiving Vols fans lining the fence on their way off the field.

But a lot of fans had that idea, and their collective weight popped open a gate that was not supposed to be open.

“I don’t know, my 21-year-old self saw the opportunity to go running on the field, so I took off, with Mantrell chasing closely after me,” Hunley said.

Price’s sweatshirt was unscathed the first time he was arrested, minutes before the infamous photo was taken. His wrists were double-jointed, and a female Birmingham police officer caught his eye. He slipped off the zip ties and walked up to the officer and mustered his best pickup line.

“Do you want these cuffs back?” he asked.

“That ended up being a very poor decision on his part,” Hunley said.

Officers wrestled him down again, tearing his sweatshirt before roughly guiding him to their quickly growing bank of arrested Tennessee fans.

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“They started spraying mace on them and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a bit aggressive for just kids celebrating,’” Small said. “It’s no big deal. I was shocked. And they were handling them pretty rough. I wanted to start taking photographs of it. I was like, ‘This is ridiculous.’ I think that kind of pissed off one of the police officers. Or all of them.”

A policeman came closer to Small and yelled “No photographs!” at him.

Small wasn’t sure to whom police were referring.

“Yeah, you!” he repeated.

Small, who was wearing an armband given to credentialed photographers, turned around and started walking toward Tennessee’s bench when he heard another officer shout, “Arrest that guy!”

“I’m thinking, ‘It couldn’t be me,’ so I just keep walking,” Small said.

Suddenly, he was shoved to the ground and put into zip tie cuffs.

“It’s one of those WTF moments,” Small said. “This makes no sense.”

As police were pulling Small off the field, he asked why he was being arrested.

“Trespassing,” they said.

He showed the policeman his credential.

“Disorderly conduct,” the policeman said.

“That signaled to me they were just pulling things out of the air, so that signaled to me I just needed to zip it up before they made some other charges to file,” Small said.

As he was being ushered off the field, a colleague grabbed his gear and alerted their bosses to what had happened.

Across the field, Hunley and a few other Tennessee fans were being rounded up in the end zone.

“All these kids were getting arrested on the field and they just didn’t care,” Bello said with a laugh. “They just couldn’t care less, they were so happy. I remember the kid putting the No. 1 sign up, even with his zip ties on.”

Hunley, looking away in the photo, couldn’t take his eyes off the section of Tennessee fans still celebrating the end of Alabama’s decade-long reign in the rivalry.

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“I’m fascinated by everything that’s going on around me,” Hunley said. “I’m not even really paying attention to what’s going on in my immediate vicinity.”

As for the lone fan staring into the lens of Bello’s camera?

“Believe me, for the next two and a half years, I looked for that guy on campus,” Hunley said. “I don’t know if he was a student, but I wanted to give that guy a hug.”

Hunley had never seen Bello’s photo until almost a decade ago when a friend posted it on Facebook and tagged him in it. But he remembered those glasses.

“I remembered faces,” Hunley said. “I looked for all those people.”

Police ushered their new arrests into the holding cell underneath the stadium for an hour or two until a large vehicle arrived to take them to a nearby jail for official processing.

“No one had done anything to worsen the situation, so I didn’t think we were going to jail,” said Hunley, who was still planning to meet up with friends at Five Points in Birmingham to party the rest of the night. “When they put us in the paddy wagon, I thought, ‘Well, they’re not going to take off.’ And then once we started down the road I was like, ‘Oh my God, they’re taking us to jail.’”

At the jail, officers piled them into what Hunley remembers as a 13-by 10-foot room.

“If you’re trying to get any sleep at all, you’re laying on a concrete floor with my head here and two people’s feet right there next to my head,” Hunley said. “I’m just trying to make sure nobody’s getting ready to do anything stupid. Because I’m in enemy territory and I’m still decked out head to toe in orange Tennessee stuff.”

Plus, the door kept slamming as police brought more arrests in from elsewhere in the city and moved others from the holding cell into general population.

“You had people who had been in fights or got DUIs and all that kind of silliness, and then you had these college kids,” Small said with a laugh. “It was just a mixed bag. Some kids just had no experience being around that kind of rough element. It was interesting.”

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Once Hunley and Price were moved into general population after they were processed, he was surprised at the reaction.

“Everybody wanted to talk, they were amazed I was at the game and a free man the night before,” Hunley said. “But this was the first time anything like this has happened to me, and I don’t know what to expect.”

As morning arrived, so did a breakfast of toast, some eggs made from a powdered mix and badly congealed grits with orange juice and a carton of milk served at room temperature.

“The milk was the warmest thing on that tray,” Hunley said.

Hunley didn’t get access to the jail phone until around 6 a.m. and placed a call to his brother back home.

The News Sentinel’s publisher paid Small’s bail, but Hunley’s brother had to drive to Birmingham from Nashville early that morning to free him and Price.

Hunley’s roommates had taken his car back to Knoxville, so his brother gave him and Price a ride back to Knoxville after he arrived in Birmingham at about 10:30.

“I went to an NBA exhibition game that night on zero sleep,” Hunley said, referencing a game between the Penny Hardaway and Shaquille O’Neal-led Magic and the Detroit Pistons.

Four days later, he had to drive back to Birmingham for his court date.

“Of course, there’s not one arresting officer there,” Hunley said.

He’d been charged with disorderly conduct, but the police report said he was just throwing items on the field. That only rose to a charge of littering, so the judge dismissed the charges.

“Thankfully, I had enough sense to keep my mouth shut and not be like, ‘Actually, I was just running on the field,’” Hunley said.

Hunley’s brother also kept his mouth shut. No one else in the family knew about the Hunley brothers’ late-night excursion until Jamie, assuming the statute of limitations had expired, confessed about what really happened that night at a family Thanksgiving dinner almost a decade later.

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“(Our father) kind of just gave us a shake of the head,” Hunley said. “I was his youngest kid and his most mischievous, so it was kind of like, ‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’”

Five years later, Hunley and Small coincidentally ran into one another at The Strip, a row of bars on Cumberland Avenue in Knoxville.

Small’s legal fallout from the arrest was far more complex.

“I was not gonna plead guilty to something I didn’t do,” Small said. “I was working. But I laugh when I see stuff about the O.J. Simpson trial because, for me, it felt like I had my own dream team.”

Small and the newspaper hired two attorneys to work in Birmingham and had two corporate attorneys working out of New York with the News Sentinel’s parent company. Multiple times per week, Small met with his legal team to fight the case police had built against him.

“They said I was arguing with police officers. Wrong. They said I was inciting the crowd and asking them to jump the fence. That was wrong. There were so many little things,” Small said. “It taught me that when you’re in those situations, you really have to have overwhelming evidence that you are not guilty of what you are accused of doing. Otherwise, you’re just another statistic. You’re just another Black guy breaking the law, so they say. Or so society thinks. So that made me disappointed. I was painted one color and that was it.”

The News Sentinel produced Small’s roll of film from the night, as well as other photos from other photographers during the game who had taken photos where Small could be seen in the background during and after the game. Plus, there were photos of Small’s arrest and the aftermath. Small was also the only journalist arrested in the postgame fracas. George Walker IV, a photographer for The Tennessean who saw the entire incident, corroborated Small’s version of the events.

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Photos of Small’s arrest ran on the cover of Photographer Magazine.

“They’d never used an image of a photographer on the front page,” Small said. “There was a big outrage over what was going on.”

After about four months of legal entanglements, the city dropped its case.

“The city did not want to fight this,” Small said. “They were really going to be fighting an uphill battle. You’re swimming up a Class 5 rapid. We had more firepower, as far as the paper was concerned, than the city would have had. Corporate was getting ready to roll up its sleeves and say, ‘We’ll punch your eyes out if you mess with our guy.’”

The city agreed to drop the charges, expunge Small’s record and publicly apologize. But Small and his lawyers had already countered with a suit of their own.

“At one point, I was like, ‘I just want them to stop,’ but they wouldn’t, so we threw more money at it,” Small said. “And when you start talking money, people back off. Otherwise, they shake the big bully stick at you until they realize, ‘All right, this isn’t worth us fighting. We could lose a lot of money.’”

Eventually, Small and the city privately settled the countersuit. The city gave him $5,000 in damages, cleared his record, promised an internal investigation of the department would occur and publicly apologized.

Small now works as a photographer in Atlanta for the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Hunley is a flooring salesman in Nashville who says beyond a great story, that night in Birmingham had little influence on the rest of his life.

Price escaped the night unscathed as well, but after America’s financial crisis in 2008, he attempted to jump to a new job as a recruiter for tech firms. The job was based 100 percent on commission. He fell into financial difficulties and later lost visitation rights to his children, Hunley said. In 2010, Price took his own life. He was 35.

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Hunley and Price had lost touch in the years since their wild night in Birmingham, but when Hunley thinks of the night of SEC football he’ll never forget, he always thinks of his colleague-turned-friend who ended up right by his side for it, too.

Every now and then, when Hunley stumbles upon highlights of one of Tennessee’s most memorable wins, Hunley can’t help but think of his own tale of Tennessee’s trip to Alabama in the 1995 season.

“It was a great experience. I wish I could have spent that night in my hotel bed, but you know, here I am talking about it 25 years later,” he said. “And as I look back, if it still meant Tennessee winning, I wouldn’t change a thing. If I had to spend a night in the clink again for another win against Alabama, I’d do it. No problem.”

(Top photo: Al Bello / Getty Images)