I had the idea to paint this parking lot blue. I also trucked in an NBA-regulation basket that I could move to create a shadow where I wanted one. I stood in a cherry picker, some 20 or 30 feet above the ground, and looked straight down, waiting for the right light with a camera that took 14 frames a second. Michael has young legs back then and could fly. Not only do you see his beautiful form from above, but you also see the same image from the side, in his shadow. Of all the pictures I've taken of him, it's my favorite. It was just so unusual; no one had quite gone there before.

I brought together the two most dominant surfers and watermen of the last decade for a shoot on the west side of Oahu. I picked up Laird from the airport and Kelly drove in from the North Shore, where he'd surfed Pipeline earlier that day. I asked him about it as we stood around talking before the shoot. He said he has gotten some really good rides at Backdoors, to which Laird replied, "It's only Pipeline." Anyone who surfed knew the young man had just been put in his place.

I wanted to do this shoot at twilight, but Joe arrived at 3 p.m. Sunset wouldn't be until 7 o'clock. He said, "I've got to meet my wife. When is this shoot going to end?" I said, "How about in three and a half hours?" He said, "No, I can't stay that long." I didn't know Joe, but I had heard he liked to have a beer. I had a six-pack of Corona in my truck with all my gear. We sat in the truck drinking one beer after another, talking. You have to love Joe Montana; he's one of the most engaging guys, a real man's man. We became friends. He was injured at the time and he talked all about the controversy over Steve Young taking his starting job. I didn't ask about it; he just started to tell me. A couple of hours went by and I'm close to the magic hour. At about five o'clock we started shooting. I had a dolly on a track that panned as he rolled out. I hit him with a flash at a slow shutter speed and blurred the sky around him at twilight. We're shooting, we're shooting, and then it's just about dark. He said, "What time is it? Oh, my god! I've got to meet my wife." Off went Joe, but by then we had the picture.

There's an old line from an R&B song that goes, "Hollywood is a town of cars, women and stars"—that's basically what's out there. It was down to a week before my deadline. I went to see Kobe at the Lakers' practice facility in El Segundo and said, "Kobe, are we going to do this picture?" He groaned. I said, "What's the problem? Is it the concept?" He looked me in the eyes, put his hands on my shoulders and said, "Walter, I just can't pose for another picture." I'd never heard an athlete say that. I was flabbergasted. I said, "Kobe, please think it over. Come tomorrow, dress like you're in Italy, bring your black Ferrari, and we'll do it in five, 10 minutes." He said he'd think about it. The next day I called the Lakers p.r. guy, John Black, and said, "Hey, any news from Kobe?" He laughed. "Are you kidding?" he said. "Are you counting on a 22-year-old to remember something?" Fifteen minutes later the phone range in my hotel room: "Walter, Kobe's here. He just asked where you were." I called my assistant and we beelined over to El Segundo. Kobe got in the car. He wasn't wearing any of his great Italian clothes, just a sweatsuit. This was his way of giving in but still not doing what I wanted. It was the child in Kobe. He said, "I'm going to tell you right now, I'm not looking the camera." I said, "O.K., Kobe, pretend you're driving and about to make a right turn." He repeated, "I'm not looking at the camera." I said, "You don't have to look at the camera, just turn your head like you're making a right turn." He turned toward the camera, we shot for five minutes, and that was it. Boom! 'Bye. A week later he asked, "Hey, how'd those pictures turn out?" That's Kobe.

On this day I had my first field pass to a pro football game. I don't remember how I got it. I took the train from Newark to Baltimore. I was nervous. I would finally be on the same field as my beloved Colts. Every Thursday there was a show on TV called Pro Football Highlights. I loved it, you could see the photographers on the sideline. I thought, "If I wear all light-colored clothes maybe I can see myself on TV." So I wore khakis and a khaki-colored jacket. With about a minute left in the game, Johnny Unitas threw this pass to Jimmy Orr, who bobbled the ball but held on to it as he fell into the end zone, and the Colts won. In those days photographers could stand on the sideline, so I was right next to Orr as he reached for the ball. I didn't have a motor drive on my camera; I didn't even own one. I took two or three steps backwards, cranked the focus and took one frame. I was sure I'd missed the shot. When Orr finished catching the ball, I jumped up in the air, like the teenage fan I was, leaped on his back and patted him like a deranged stalker. I completely forgot about being a journalist. He brushed me aside. The next Thursday when they showed the highlights of that game on TV, there was Orr bobbling the ball, and me jumping on him and patting him on the back. I was part of the highlights and I got my first great catch picture. One frame, tack sharp—impossible. But there it was.

There's a famous picture taken in the '50s of Willie Mays playing stickball in Harlem. I played a lot of stickball growing up and always loved it. I wanted to replicate the Mays photo in Cuba because baseball is the national sport there. It's everywhere. Cuban children play ball in the streets like kids in U.S. cities used to do. It was my last Saturday on this trip and I was slowly weaving through the streets of old Havana, looking for kids playing ball, when I came upon this corner, La Esquina. If you study the picture, you see that every eye, not just the kids' but even the dog's, is on that taped ball. It's the decisive moment, and there's no way to anticipate when you're going to get it. I had a vision of a picture that I'd tried and tried and tried to find but hadn't yet, and I came within a day of not finding it. To me it was all about getting the photograph I'd been searching for and I did it in 20 frames.

What's ironic about this picture, which came to be known as The Catch, is that I never wanted it to happen. I had been covering the Dallas Cowboys the entire NFL season. I was given total access: the locker room, the trainer's room, the off-limits spots where no photographer had been before. I'd seen the things the Cowboys did so they could play in pain. I'd become friends with one player who, the first time I was in the locker room, came up to me and said, "I want you to take a picture of me getting a needle in my shoulder." I looked around, thinking maybe I was being put on, and said, "You're kidding, right? Why would you want me to do that?" He said, "Because I want to give it to my son to make sure he never plays football again." On the day of this game the same player said, "I don't know what to do. My knee is in such pain, my shoulder is in pain, but I can't take two shots. It's too much. I don't know which one to take." With 58 seconds left in the NFC Championship Game, Joe Montana rolled out to my left and launched a pass. Something to my right came into my peripheral vision, and I reached for my camera with the 50mm lens, trying to focus. I just started hitting the motor drive and shot. Dwight Clark caught the ball probably 20 feet away from me. The 49ers scored the touchdown that sent them to the Super Bowl and the Cowboys' season was over. I was heartbroken. I had spent a whole season with the team and had gotten close with the players. I went in the locker room after the game and the mood was as if somebody had lost their family in a car crash. In a single moment my whole story went down the tubes. But the shot of Clark catching the touchdown pass ran on the cover of SI and became the most famous picture I've ever taken.

The problem with shooting the NBA slam-dunk contest was that you never knew how the players were going to dunk, especially Jordan. In 1997 he had twirled and dunked with his back to me. But by this time I knew him a little better. As he sat in the stands three hours before the contest, I said, "Michael, can you tell me which way you're going to go, so I can move and get your face in the picture?" He looked at me as if I were crazy but then said, "Sure. Before I go out to dunk I'll put my index finger on my knee and point which way I'm going." I said, "You're going to remember that?" And he said, "Sure." So later, when they announced his name, I looked over to him on the bench and there was his finger pointing left. I got up and moved to the right side of the basket so I could see his face. He went left every time he dunked. On his last two dunks he ran the length of the court, took off from the foul line and slammed the ball through. On the next-to-last one he landed in my lap. On the last one I set up in the same spot. He looked at me as if to say, "Go left a little, give me some room this time." And that was it, the picture was made: 1000th of a second frozen in time.

The first time I followed Tiger, it was 2000 and I wanted to re-create a picture Hy Peskin once took of Ben Hogan swinging, with a view down the fairway. I wanted to do it with an old-fashioned 4x5 Crown Graphic camera, which meant I had to get close. And getting close to Tiger is a problem. You have to deal with the PGA marshals, you have to deal with Tiger and, especially, you have to deal with his caddy, Steve Williams. I had to be between six and 15 feet from Tiger all the time. I was really on the edge of his rules. At one point Williams came over to me and said, "Excuse me, mate, have you ever covered a golf tournament before?" I'd covered about 15 majors, but I just said, "Yes sir," and he walked away. From that point on he and Tiger kept looking at me because I was still too close. I had my sunglasses on because I didn't want them to see my eyes. About six months later I shot Tiger for the cover of Sports Illustrated and finally met him. I mentioned how I'd covered him that day and said, "Did you notice me?" He looked at me and said, "Every hole."

He was one of the biggest stars in the Olympics, but I never seemed to get the picture of him I wanted. So I went out to Mission Viejo, where he trained, and asked him to go off the platform. Divers can only do that so often—it hurts their wrists and shoulders. He dived at twilight with the pool lights on for me. He passed me at such speed that this red strip of sky and the darkness above it blurred as my camera panned down. I got home and started to edit the chromes. There was one I'll never forget. Obviously Luganis was diving down, but I turned the picture around and he looked as if he were coming out of the flames of Hell, like Dante's Inferno.

On the clear morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was surfing in front of my house at the end of Long Island when I learned about the planes striking the World Trade Center. A year later, I had a quasi-assignment: What would you like to photograph on 9/11? I didn't know. I think we all had the same feelings, especially in New York: How do you mourn or remember the people who died on that terrible day? I decided to go to where I had been then. There's a staircase that goes to the beach in front of my house. I went there at 8:15 a.m. with a 4x5 camera and just sat as a few surfers were going out. There were big waves again, as there had been a year earlier, but it was foggy. At 8:46, one minute after the first plane had crashed into the north tower the year before, this fellow walked into the water by Big Rock. This picture of him has special meaning to me. I have no idea who he was. I wish I did.

This was a story in SI about Hall of Fame baseball players who were getting up in age. We did Warren Spahn, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Bob Feller among others. I shot 8x10 sepia Polaroids. I got Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra to pose during spring training. I had never met Whitey before, but I'd worked with Yogi a few times, and he hated posing. He couldn't sit still. He was like a butterfly; whenever you got next to him he'd move away. I love this picture. For two guys in their 70s, they look cute; there was a little-boy quality to them. A couple of years went by, and I was at spring training again. I hadn't seen Yogi or Whitey since we'd taken the picture. I said to Yogi, "Walter Iooss, remember, I took that picture of you…" And he said, "Hey Whitey, here's the guy who took that horrible picture of us." Whitey came over and said, "Oh, my family hated that picture. Said you made me look like a little old guy." I thought they were putting me on. I said, "Are you kidding me? I love that picture." Whitey said, "Love it? We hate that picture." You can't win all the time.

During his playing days I never really had the chance to meet Johnny Unitas. I kept asking the magazine's editors, "You've got to send me to do Johnny Unitas. I've got to photograph him once." Finally, in 2001, a story came up about the health problems of great veterans of football. Johnny of the golden arm had hurt his hand so badly during his career that he couldn't brush his teeth, he couldn't lift a cup of coffee anymore. They sent me to his home outside of Baltimore. I was nervous because he was the last of my boyhood heroes still alive. There were photographs in his study, all these memories of Johnny, including two action covers I had shot of him. And then in walked the incomparable number 19. All I wanted to do was talk to him; I couldn't have cared less about the picture. After the shoot, I teared up in the car. It was so moving for me; all these emotions from childhood. There was no one else like him for me.