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Football, Professional, Rocky Mountain News

This one was all thumb screws and root canals

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TAMPA, Fl — Nevertheless, the Steelers of Pittsburgh will keep this Super Bowl trophy. They can put it with the other five, and tell lies later about how this one was a cinch.

It was not. This one was all thumb screws and root canals, shock and awesome, slap and smack, a duel in the cool tropical night.

“This is for you Pittsburgh!” shouted game MVP Santonio Holmes, raising the Lombardi Trophy over his head as if it were the first one instead of the sixth, as if the town had never seen the others.

This may be the least of all the Super Bowl winning Steeler teams, though the trophy is exactly the same size as all the rest.

They passed the shiny symbol around, from owner to coach to players, toted to the ceremony for some undeclared reason by Joe Namath, the trophy a hard earned souvenir, harder than the Steelers thought. Winners get to leave fingerprints.

Losers—in this case the Cardinals are not losers as much as companions in as gutsy, gut-wrenching, a melodrama as any since…well, since last year when the wrong team won with a helmet catch—are left with highlights.

And the Cardinals had highlights, the highest and lightest a catch and run of 64 yards by Roy Fitzgerald that would have, should have stunned the Steelers into an admission that fate or chance was wearing a Cardinal on its hat.

“The Steelers are a 60 minute team,” said their coach, Mike Tomlin.

This one was won with a classic, almost cliché catch, the kind that is staged in movies or dramatized in sports books, impossible and indelible, the football equivalent of the buzzer beater or the walk off homer. It had everything but slow motion, and it even had that later as it was studied for validity and, probably, for artistry.

“Great players step up in big-time games to make plays,” said Holmes. “I knew that was my play. Ben stuck with me, put it up where it was supposed to be and I made the play.”

Whether Holmes is a great player, certainly he had the greatest game of his life and one of the greatest of any receiver in a Super Bowl, for effectiveness and drama, not that the same wouldn’t have been said of Fitzgerald had Holmes not made The Catch.

Unlike the stadium witnesses, who may have chewed their fingernails down, Holmes had just enough left on his hands to stretch, hold the football, “come down on his toes”, as the referee finally and officially confirmed, and lock down a victory nearly blown from 13 points in front.

And, just like that, David Tyree’s helmet catch for the Giants against the Pats last year was bumped from the top of Great Super Bowl Moments.

“We embrace those moments,” said Tomlin. “We are built for those moments.”

The game did not match the boasts nor beat the spread, and the Steelers’ special torment for the Cardinals was to allow them to think they belonged.

“Nobody expected us to be here,” said Cardinal quarterback Kurt Warner, as if he needed to remind anyone of that. “We exceeded expectations and came close to being world champions only to lose it.”

Fewer penalties and just anyone, Warner having the best chance, tripping up Steeler linebacker James Harrison on the last play of the first half as he was galumphing a record 100 yards with an interception for the longest play in Super Bowl history, and the Cardinals would have had the whip in their hands.

This was a memorable Super Bowl because the Cardinals flirted with the improbable, and the Steelers—except for the plays by Harrison and Holmes—were not good enough to do anything about it.

Arizona could allow itself to believe in destiny even with a half minute to play, until the last five seconds, until Arizona quarterback Warner lost the football, breaking the heart of a perfectly nice place like Arizona.

The Steelers were not going to be lucked out of their birthright, and they weren’t going to be passed or punched or tackled out of it either.

“We back up talk with action,” said Tomlin.

“Backyard ball,” said Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, describing his cobbling together the final, winning drive, and at the same time coining a T-shirt slogan if ever there was one.

“It’s never going to be pretty or perfect,” said Tomlin. “There are no style points out there. But this is a team with great resolve.”

Winners can, and will, say all these things, of course, as Arizona would have said and even more loudly, because the Cardinals would have been the most astonishing winners ever of the Super Bowl, at least since the Jets beat the Colts in the third one.

Maybe that was why Namath was here, to represent audacity and surprise, and it was all there for the Cardinals.

So close. So long.

Football, Professional, Rocky Mountain News

The NFL encourages this annual folly

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TAMPA, Fl — It matters not who wins Media Day, even to the media, but of all the Super Bowl hoo-haw only two of the days really matter, this one and Sunday.

In a close call, Arizona wins this one, complete with voting paddles, as on “Dancing With the Stars.”

That silliness was under the direction of Warren Sapp, the once and no longer defensive lump who always nattered at least as well as he played. He had persuaded two Cardinals of his own ilk, 330-pound defensive tackles Alan Branch and Gabe Watson, to show their dance steps with a spangled beauty.

To music barely audible over the din of the day, the stars danced as stars do. Branch bit his lip and concentrated on his feet. Watson whirled and tried not to hurt his tiny partner.

At the end the paddles declared that Branch had won narrowly over Watson, though the pair of them were about as agile as a couple of front loaders. Handed his prize, a mirrored ball on a mirrored pedestal, Branch raised it over his head and bellowed—“Yessss!”—as if it were the Lombardi Trophy itself.
Sapp put his hands over is ears, slunk away, rolling his eyes back in his head. “Whoa. This is too nutty even for me,” Sapp said, leaving the poor young woman to fend for herself.
Not nutty at all, actually This is relatively mild for Media Day, no costumed brides looking for grooms, for example, as was one asking Pats quarterback Tom Brady for his hand. No costumed gorillas or bottles of Gatorade with feet.
The nonsense was down a bit, which had to disappoint the girl reporter from Austria.

“I ask you a question,” she said, not asked. And I nodded. “Vere ist Kort Vorner?”
I pointed in the direction of the Arizona quarterback, assuming that anyone named Kurt would be a big hit back in Salzburg. She did not say thanks.

The NFL encourages this annual folly, or at least does not discourage it, especially now with its own network to service. To find wisdom is futile, but one has to try.
“Right here is the epicenter of the NFL,” said Arizona coach Ken Whisenhunt, surprising for throwing the word “epicenter” into any football discussion and, at the same time, diminishing the occasion since the grandest game of the greatest sport of the greatest nation surely makes this the epicenter of the world.

Fred Dryer of the then Los Angeles Rams parlayed one Super Bowl experience into a career. Dryer gave the answer to my favorite Media Day question. Is the Super Bowl bigger than death? “No,” Dryer said, “but it comes in a bigger box.”

And now I have to give some consideration to this response to the question of what this all means.

“People are going through hard times,” said the Steelers Hines Ward, he not being one of them. “But in Pittsburgh if you’ve lost a job or your house you’ve still got the Steelers and you don’t worry about that, the light bill, the rent, stuff like that. When the Steelers play you’re hugging each other without regrets at the bar.”

Now, that’s the epicenter of something. Inflated self-importance for certain.

One shudders to think should the Steelers somehow lose to the upstarts from Arizona, what those bar hugs might turn into.

“There’s an old saying in football,” said Betrand Berry, now a Cardinal once a Bronco. “If you bite when young, you’ll bite when old.”
This is just the kind of gibberish that flows easily from the mouths of football players who are given podiums and microphones for a while. Philosophers, like dancing stars, are not born but made.
“You have to pass failure on the way to success,” said Cardinal punter Ben Graham, the notion sounding more profound because it came with an Australian accent. Austria and Australia in the same day. What a sport.
The NFL itself has operated all season under the slogan, “Believe in Now,” which was, I believe, the same position taken by bankers and brokers.

“I’ll carry this team on my back if I have to,” said Steeler Santonio Holmes.

The Chicago Bears were probably the best example of collective look-at-me-ism at a Super Bowl, but the thing has always had its share of outrageous individuals. The very first one had Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, who was, for his cheek, hammered by Green Bay. Still, The Hammer got the movie contract and his fame subsists.
Todd Christiansen of the Raiders showed up for Media Day with copies of his poetry, which he passed out as press releases. Dexter Manley tried a similar thing by pre-answering questions with a printout, the first public indication that he was functionally illiterate.

This is the one day of the football season when the anxious gives way to the excessive.

“When I retire, I’ll write a book,” said Arizona linebacker Chike Okeafor.

We all say that.

Football, Professional, Rocky Mountain News

Giants spoil the perfect matchup

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The New England Immortals v. the New Jersey Scarecrows.

Or some such.

Well, there have been worse Super Bowls going in, I suppose, not that it mattered who the Patriots got to confirm their greatness against.

Only coronation is left, the anointing of the New England Patriots as the greatest team in the history of football and of Tom Brady as the greatest quarterback, mere trifles what with only those improbable New York Giants in the way.

The least the Patriots should have had to do was to beat the better Manning, and yet they get Eli the Lesser. They could have had Cowboys, if just for the quarterback girlfriend matchup, or best of all and what ended in overtime in subzero Green Bay, the last patrol of Brett Favre.

But, no, the Giants survived on the road again, under the weather again, ruining a perfectly good narrative and allowing the world to wallow in Patriot glory for the next two weeks, as if there are enough superlatives to last that long.
Again and again is proved the old reflection of F. Scott Fitzgerald that there are no second acts in American lives.
That’s what we might have gotten with Favre, if his own and old nemesis, the refusal to believe that he can not throw a football through the eye of a needle, had not gotten him in overtime.

Against the Broncos, we recall, he threw a touchdown pass in overtime. Against the Giants, a careless interception.

Where we are now in the acts of Brett Favre’s life is surely somewhere beyond two, or even three, while Tom Brady is still in a very long first act, greater than Favre already, with the same dignity and appeal at the end yet to be managed.
And of all the possible finishes for a season kissing up to history, when someone had to take the last licks from New England, none could have been more intriguing that Favre and Brady at the end.
Not to take the clunky, ugly, freezer football of Sunday in both Green Bay and New England as an indication of anything other than survival of the thermally fitted, the NFL is the one sport that inevitably comes in from the cold, this time in suburban Arizona for Super Bowl XLII.

Things would have turned out as they did in the tropics or indoors, the Patriots outlasting an injured San Diego team and the Giants riding some kind of serendipitous joy wagon, clearly the least likely Super Bowl finalist since the Chris Chandler Flacons, whipping the Packers in their own ice box.

This was going to be Favre’s Super Bowl, not necessarily in victory but in tribute, the clear, dominating story line until Brady and the Patriots confirm the first 19-0 season.

We were ready to admire a career of courage and distinction and presence, and then when it came to a final defeat, a warm round of applause for the perfect warrior.

When all that history is made by New England, when the greatest single season standard in sports is set, there will be only a sense of conclusion rather than great achievement, a begrudging acceptance that Bill Belichick is every bit as great a coach as his more likeable predecessors.

Yet, the sentiment that would so naturally have flowed to Favre does not drift automatically to Brady, and certainly it will not be wasted on Manning either.

This will be a Super Bowl not of uncertainty nor disbelief but of filling in the blanks, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s as the Patriots confirm the obvious.

What risk there is for New England is that, though they are already the only team to go 18-0, if they do not go 19-0 they will be immortal frauds, the greatest case of false advertising since the free lunch.
Not often does the Super Bowl match quarterbacks who are in the discussion of greatest ever, and that was what was lost when the Giants refused to do the right thing.
Favre against Brady would have been the best matchup since Elway against Joe Montana, at least the equal of Bart Starr and Len Dawson who were in the very first one or when Roger Staubach met Terry Bradshaw.

In fact, Favre lost to Elway when the sympathies were the opposite, Elway then as the well used Favre and Favre as the in-his-prime Brady.

The usual Super Bowl quarterback intrigue is wrung out of a Brad Johnson against a Rich Gannon or a Trent Dilfer against a Kerry Collins.
Brady has matched his Super Bowls against Kurt Warner, Jake Delhomme and Donovan McNabb, and for his most significant one he deserved better than the little brother of the other Manning.

Favre won his Super Bowl over Drew Bledsoe, the predecessor of Brady, and how moving that might have been if Favre could have bookended a career over man and boy.

We sigh for what might have been.

Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

Marino, Dolphins Just Babes Against Bullies

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Dateline: PALO ALTO, CALIF.

Uh, about that wing being built at the Pro Football Hall of Fame to celebrate the accomplishments of Dan Marino of Miami.

Put away the hammer and saw for a few more years. Pack up the spotlight and send back all those autographed footballs collected from assorted end zones with Marino’s fingerprints on them.

Rent out the space for something useful, like a used-car lot. Wait until Marino grows up and wins a couple of Super Bowls, like Joe Montana of San Francisco.

Or until Marino learns to throw the ball lying on his back, or only to his own receivers, or until he gets a defense that doesn’t think it is against the rules to get in the way of the other team.

IN ONE MISTY afternoon on the campus of Stanford University, Marino was exposed, not as a boy wonder, but merely as a boy, befuddled by the adults of the 49ers, who allowed him only one touchdown pass and none after the first quarter.

“Marino had only a fair game, but he’ll be back,” said 49ers’ coach Bill Walsh. “He’s a brilliant quarterback.

“He’s a great quarterback, a great young quarterback.”

The longer the game went, the younger Marino got. By the end, you expected Marino to curl up in the huddle with a pacifier in his mouth.

“It was our poorest offensive game of the year,” said Miami coach Don Shula. “Our defense never stopped them. We just didn’t have the answers.”

What was supposed to be the greatest Super Bowl ever ended up being the greatest mismatch.

THIS WAS BABIES against bullies. The 49ers even looked better during calisthenics.

And this wasn’t just a bunch of overweight guys with fish on their hats who wandered into Stanford Stadium on stolen credentials. These were Shula’s Dolphins, the most prolific offensive menagerie on record.

They could score so fast the stadium clock needed to be a stopwatch. You had to take off your shoes to count the touchdowns.

This was the team with the state-of-the-art passing attack, inexhaustible and indefensible.

“All we heard all week,” said Montana, “was about their offense. We knew we had an offense, too.”

WHAT SAN FRANCISCO had was more weapons than Miami. Not only was there Montana, the game’s most valuable player, but Roger Craig, who scored three times for a Super Bowl record, and Wendell Tyler, who did not fumble, and Dwight Clark and even a third-string running back, Carl Monroe, who caught the first of Montana’s three touchdown passes.

Montana was as nimble as Marino was inert, dashing away from a timid Dolphin pass rush, running once for a touchdown and, at one point, posing the question of whether he could rush for as many yards as Marino could pass for. Anyone without a microscope would have thought the Miami defense had missed the team bus.

“Montana had a lot to do with that,” Shula said. “He was outstanding in every way. When you get beat the way we got beat, you just take your hat off to the victor.”

If this had been a prize fight, the 49ers would have been given the decision on a TKO, just as soon as Montana found Craig for a 16-yard touchdown late in the third quarter.

THE 49ERS COULD pass and run, often at the same time. Miami couldn’t even walk. So insecure was Miami’s running game that the Dolphins tried it only nine times, with little effect.

Miami had one bullet, Marino, and on this day it was only good for shooting itself in the foot.

Marino threw the ball 50 times, a Super Bowl record, and completed 29 to friends and two to San Francisco, one each to Eric Wright and Carlton Williamson, who weren’t supposed to have the speed or the savvy to stay with the Marks Brothers of Miami, Duper and Clayton.

Duper caught only one pass, and while Clayton caught six, none was ultimately of consequence.

Marino’s most effective pass was a dump-off to running back Tony Nathan.

“We knew we were the key to beating these guys,” said Wright. “It would all come down to what kind of day we had.”

THE SECONDARY and the pass rush, led mostly by Fred Dean, Gary Johnson and Dwaine Board, tested Marino’s noted quick release as it had never been tested in his young career.

To get the ball off in time, Marino would have had to throw it back between his center’s legs.

There can be no doubt now that San Francisco is the best team in football, complete in all phases, while the Dolphins are only as good as Marino can make them.

“This team is one of the best of all times,” said Walsh.

Instant history is dangerous. Just a day before, we would have believed that about Marino. PHOTO: UPI Telephoto. San Francisco running back Roger Craig is upended by Miami cornerback William Judson after a short gain. Craig scored three touchdowns to set a Super Bowl record.

Chicago Tribune, Football, Prediction, Professional

Trying to Figure the Super Winner

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Dateline: PALO ALTO, CALIF.

I’m a numbers guy when it comes to picking football winners and here are the most important numbers to consider in choosing a winner of Super Bowl XIX. The odds of an earthquake actually destroying either the Miami Dolphins or San Francisco 49ers on Super Sunday are 10,000 to 1, reported to be the same as the last time nature tried to shake this city into the bay.

A lot less was at stake in 1906, of course, there being no Super Bowl but merely the infancy of the future Paris of America, which has since been more or less restored, to the eternal gratitude of hairdressers everywhere.

The odds are considerably more promising that Stanford Stadium will be rattled around a little bit, something like 500 to 1, which the 49ers may be counting on to stop the passing of Dan Marino of Miami. It is the only defense that has not yet been tried.

THE OPPORTUNITY to witness this Super Bowl in person has been sold for as much as $1,000, the most impressive number ever associated with football ticket scalping. This would seem to confirm the opinion that this is the most desirable Super Bowl ever concocted, when all it really means is that folks around here never pay less than $1,000 for anything, including bread that tastes like it has already been chewed and a ride on a noisy cable car during which you feel as secure as a scab on a child’s elbow.

Parking places are selling for $100, which I believe is only by the wheel, and TV is hawking without blushing one minute of time for a cool million, the same number as Joe Montana’s salary for a whole month.

This is a Super Bowl that will be won or lost by the quarterbacks. The numbers on each of them are revealing.

Montana of San Francisco leads Marino in marriage proposals 3-1 and in weddings 2-0, making him clearly the veteran bridegroom.

Marino’s inexperience in these matters has been of considerable concern to observers who have watched the two all week, trying to determine which one is most adept at handling pressure.

Every question concerning each man’s marriage plans met with severe irritation, with Marino being the more testy, though Montana seemed to have the edge in regret.

MARINO LEADS Montana in number of flashy sports cars, having had three Corvettes to Montana’s two Ferraris. If either one should become most valuable player in the game, he will not win a new automobile, but a bumper sticker that says, “My other car is a Dodge.”

Bill Walsh, the 49ers’ coach, is very big on numbers, as one would imagine about a man who works for a team whose last name is one.

Walsh begins every game with 25 plays called “the script.” The script is never violated until all the plays have been run in numerical order, no matter the down, distance or situation.

Walsh does this to prevent stereotyping of his offense, and to keep Montana’s mind clear to consider more important numbers, such as the address of the church this time.

It also allows Walsh time to dash to the locker room and change in case he should discover himself wearing in public any piece of clothing that does not have a crease.

DON SHULA DOES not bother with scripts other than the one he read a long time ago which told him that any point is made clearer by screaming.

When considering the numerical influence of either coach, one should not look at the sideline but at the roadside. Shula is part owner of five hamburger franchises in the Bay Area, while Walsh is part owner of none.

The most annoying number is nine, that being the total of Miami defenders whose last names begin with the letter B. This oddity is responsible for Miami’s defense being known as the Killer Bees, or on occasion the Beefense.

The Dolphins and their sunburned faithful take great delight in pointing out how clever they are with nicknames, giving an identity to a defense that would be better off hiding its face behind a hat.

SAN FRANCISCO has the much better defense but has no identity except the one it left behind when its pass rush moved north from San Diego. All four of its defensive backs will be in the Pro Bowl, but so will all three important members of Miami’s offense, whose names all begin with M.

There is no telling how good Miami could be if it used the whole alphabet.

The only number that really matters in all of this is No. 13. That is Marino’s jersey number, or the number of touchdown passes he threw last week. I forget which.

Marino is the only reason anyone should pick Miami, but in all the history of Super Bowls, there has never been a better reason.

I make it, by the numbers, Dolphins, 31-24.

Chicago Tribune, Football

Superbowlweek: Can You Top This?

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Dateline: SAN FRANCISCO

There are a million stories at the naked Super Bowl and this one is the most bizarre.

“I was in a bar here named Orphan Annies,” said Bubba Paris, an offensive tackle for the 49ers, “and I picked up a woman. I was a person who liked to womanize, you see.”

Paris weighs 300 pounds, or somewhere in that neighborhood, provided the neighborhood is the size of Idaho.

“We drank some and we drank some more and then we went up to this woman’s apartment,” Paris said. “I used to do that a lot.

“We were lying there in bed and all of a sudden God said, ‘Bubba, you are going to hell.’ ”

PARIS WAS NOT surprised that God called him Bubba instead of by his Christian name of William.

“Everyone calls me Bubba,” he said.

The hour was late, or early, by Paris’ recollection, 5 a.m. on the coast. “I just stopped what I was doing and called a friend on the phone. I told him I had to find a minister,” Paris said. “An hour later I was saved. I haven’t done any sin in two years.”

Whew. And you thought that today’s heroes don’t have any lessons to pass on to the younger generation.

THE SUPER BOWL is full of them. Who cannot be touched by the saga of Robert Sowell, special teams missile for the Miami Dolphins?

“Yes,” said Sowell, “I used to sleep with a football.”

Just try to not ask why.

“I carried that football everywhere with me for three years,” Sowell said, “because I wanted to be reminded of my destiny.”

Which was?

“To play in the National Football League,” Sowell said.

SOWELL HAD PLAYED one year at Howard University before dropping out of school to rustproof cars, obviously not a career goal since he did not sleep with buckets of undercoating.

He was cut by Toronto in the Canadian Football League, stuck with a semipro team in Sacramento and was ignored by every National Football League team but the Dolphins when he wrote letters in longhand, begging for a tryout. “I had one shot,” said Sowell. “Suicide squad. All I had to do was stay alive.”

Which, subsequent events have shown, Sowell was able to do at a salary of $63,000, which is $1,000 less than he will earn if the Dolphins win the Super Bowl.

“I always had my dreams,” Sowell said, “but I never dreamed of going to no Super Bowl.”

Nothing is impossible if you choose the right companion, though carrying around a stethoscope is healthier and pays better in the long run.

HOW HAPPY WE CAN all feel for Tony Nathan, the Miami running back who avoided the most serious tragedy that can befall a football player.

Nathan lost his playbook.

“It was stolen,” Nathan said.

Sure, tell that to Dolphin coach Don Shula, which is precisely what Nathan was forced to do.

“You sit in front of coach Shula,” Nathan said, “and it seems like your chair gets shorter. You sink lower and lower and pretty soon you’re looking up at him.”

Better to hand feed a wart hog than to endure the wrath of Shula.

“I explained what happened,” Nathan said, “and he was very understanding.”

What happened was Nathan had left his playbook in his new pickup truck, which was parked in his driveway in Miami. He woke up the next morning to find his playbook gone, and, incidentally, the truck.

Police and FBI agents joined the hunt for the playbook. An intense, two- day search ensued.

“They found it at the bottom of a rock pit, under 30 feet of water,” Nathan said. “The playbook was so soggy you couldn’t read it.”

Thus were kept safe the secrets of the Miami offense. And what happened to the truck?

“Oh, they found that, too,” Nathan said.

NO SUPER BOWL would be official without the tale of the sensitive defensive end who composes verse in those quiet moments when he is not trying to break somebody else’s face.

“I don’t pattern my poetry after anyone in particular,” said Fred Dean of the 49ers, “although I like Shakespeare, Poe and Frost the best.”

All the blather of Super Bowl week is worth it if we can discover that otherwise violent human beings are secret softies, able to reconcile the soul of poets with the instincts of assassins.

“Football has a great deal to do with life,” said Dean. “It is a great parable. You strive for a goal, you struggle to achieve, you succeed, you fail. The game has everything.”

Dean is very private about his poetry, reluctant to infringe on the memories of Shakespeare, Poe or Frost, leaving the known poetry of football to this simple verse:

“There once was a nose guard from Texas,/who had a very large solar plexus./He could chew a whole log/and skin a wild hog/and he signed all his checks with crude X’s.”

IT IS NO WONDER otherwise undisturbed civilians will do anything to be part of all of this. A contest was held downtown Thursday to give away Super Bowl tickets. Only the most outrageous contestants would win.

An egg dealer named Tony allowed himself to be pelted by 4,900 eggs, unboiled. Someone named Steve dived into a vat of jello, 39 gallons, colored red and gold, semi-set. Cynthia, who was pretending to be mayor Dianne Feinstein, stripped to her underwear while singing a naughty song about the mayor.

Sam had his body painted to look like a 49er uniform and Bob permitted his girlfriend to tar and feather him.

Describing himself as an “animal imitation artist and synchronized swimmer,” a 274-pound guy named Clay, dressed in a gold lame tutu, tiara and flippers, jumped into a child’s pool filled with fish parts.

And these were the losers. The winner was a young man named Clay, who submitted to a Mohawk haircut and then painted his new hairdo with enamel in the colors of the 49ers.

“I was going to paint my dog, but I was afraid of the humane society,” he said. “People have always said I’m crazy. I guess I just confirmed it.”

Just another day at the Super Bowl.