Super Bowl Monday

by Adam Lazarus

  Despite the optimism and excitement that flowed throughout western New York, few Americans—even the die-hard, long-suffering Bills fans who had just witnessed their team’s great victory—would rejoice in unbridled celebration that evening.

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  While the Bills were busy churning out their victory over Miami, 533 U.S. senators and members of the House of Representatives sat in the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Before them was House Joint Resolution 77, a bill authorizing the use of military force against Iraq. In the narrowest such vote since the War of 1812, the bill passed, first in the Senate, 52-47, then in the House, 250-183.

  “We have now closed ranks behind a clear signal of our resolve to implement the United Nations resolutions,” President George H. W. Bush told the American people. “Those who may have mistaken our democratic process as a sign of weakness now see the strength of democracy. . . . Throughout history, we have been resolute in our support of justice, freedom, and human dignity.”

  For months, Americans were aware of, but not overly concerned with, a bubbling conflict in the Persian Gulf. Iraq had invaded its neighbor Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Since that date, U.S. naval groups had been in the area, while the president and his foreign allies condemned Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. At least officially, this was not yet a war.

  “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait,” Bush declared in August, just before he launched Operation Desert Shield.

  Over the ensuing months, Hussein remained defiant. His troops refused to let approximately one thousand Americans in Iraq and Kuwait—and hundreds more from other nations—evacuate. (Some of those hostages were used by Iraqi military personnel as human shields. A handful of them were eventually freed when Muhammad Ali, the famous boxer, met with Hussein in Baghdad. Hussein said he released them out of respect for Ali, a hero to many Islamic Arabs.) Hussein also openly boasted about his country’s nuclear aspirations.

  “We don’t underestimate the military might of the United States, but we belittle its evil intentions,” Hussein declared to his people during a speech in late November. “If Allah wills that war should take place, the Americans will find that their Stealth plane is seen even by the shepherd in the desert, and is also seen by Iraqi technology.”

  That same day, the United Nations Security Council voted to impose upon Iraq a January 15 deadline: either Hussein withdrew his troops from Kuwait or the Unites States and its allies would remove them.

  Hussein scorned the deadline, declaring to his people and troops via radio broadcast “the mother of all battles is under way.” He urged them to prepare for a battle “of justice against vice, of the believer against the infidels.” Given the power by Congress, President Bush declared war. Operation Desert Storm had begun and at 7 p.m. EST on January 17, the United States launched air attacks and missile strikes on Iraq and occupied-Kuwait.

  “We’re using force and we’re not going to stop until he pulls out of Kuwait,” Bush insisted.

  The president quickly backed up his stern words by authorizing the call-up of one million army reservists and national guardsmen and guardswomen. Those potential reinforcements were added to the tens of thousands of men and women already serving in the Persian Gulf.

  One of those soldiers already stationed in Saudi Arabia was Conway Bailey. That October, Bailey left his post as deputy warden at the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland to return to active duty as a member of the 260th Armored Division, Army Reserve Unit of Baltimore. A chief warrant officer, Bailey’s platoon supplied ammunition to military units throughout Saudi Arabia.

  Age forty-four, Bailey had already served two tours in Vietnam a decade and a half earlier.

  “I was a lot more frightened [in Saudi Arabia],” he recalled. “I kept comparing Saudi with Vietnam. I kept expecting things to happen that didn’t. In Vietnam, the danger was real. In Saudi Arabia and Iraq, it was more imagined. You sat around and wondered what could happen.”

  Conway Bailey wasn’t the only member of his family who sat around wondering what could happen. In his hometown of Baltimore, Conway’s daughter, Conya, and his ex-wife, Thelma, also feared the worst. And in

  Buffalo—while he practiced, studied, and watched film to prepare for the biggest game of his life—Conway’s eldest son, Carlton Bailey, prayed for his father’s safety.

  “I knew that things were happening, and I may not ever see him again, and the love that I had for my dad was going to be gone,” Carlton said years later.

  Although Carlton’s parents divorced when he was in high school, Conway stayed a part of his son’s life. He guided and mentored his son in addition to rooting him on during football games, first at Baltimore’s Woodlawn High School, then at the University of North Carolina.

  “He was always supportive, always a positive type person,” Bailey said about his father.

  Despite playing most of his collegiate career as a nose tackle, Bailey possessed great speed and agility; in addition to football, he had been a hurdles champion in high school. A ninth-round draft choice of the Bills in 1988, Bailey cracked the team’s starting lineup two seasons later, at the same time his father was called back into military service.

  “It’s kind of hard not to think about it when one of your loved ones is over there,” Bailey said the week of the AFC Championship Game. “It’s real hard. But in the latest letter I received from my father, about two weeks ago, he said, ‘Do the best you can and don’t worry about me.’ He said to take care of things here and get to the Super Bowl, and he’ll take care of things there.”

  To get to the Super Bowl, Bailey and the Bills would have to defeat the Los Angeles Raiders. During the Bills’ weeklong preparations for the Raiders—whose high-powered running game featured not one, but two, former Heisman Trophy–winning running backs, Marcus Allen and Bo Jackson—Carlton Bailey did his best to follow his father’s orders.

  “He hasn’t missed a beat, he hasn’t missed a call, he hasn’t missed a down,” Darryl Talley said of his defensive teammate. “So that shows he’s concentrating exactly on what he has to do. That takes discipline—a whole lot of discipline.”

  “In one of the letters I wrote to him, I said that, hopefully, when I’m on the field, I can make a big play not only for the team or myself, but for him,” Bailey told a reporter that week. “Whether we win or not, I’m going to put forth the extra, extra effort. And that way, when he’s reading a newspaper article about our game, he can be that much more proud.”

  While Bailey—and teammates Eddie Fuller (stepfather), John Hagy (nephew), Keith McKeller (father-in-law), and Scott Norwood (brother-in-law), who also had relatives serving in the Persian Gulf—tried to focus on football, the Bills’ front office prepared for the biggest sporting event in the history of western New York.

  Not only had the Bills franchise never reached a Super Bowl, virtually no member of the front office had, either. Among the team’s key decision makers, only head coach Marv Levy and his two top assistants, coordinators Ted Marchibroda and Walt Corey, ever participated in the Super Bowl. (Despite eighty-eight combined years of professional football, Levy and Marchibroda each had just one Super Bowl experience, in 1973 as assistant coaches for the Washington Redskins; Corey was a reserve linebacker for the 1966 Chiefs but did participate in Super Bowl I.) Not one member of the Buffalo roster had ever reached the Super Bowl.

  By contrast Al Davis’ Raiders—victors in three of the previous fourteen Super Bowls—assembled a squad filled with championship game heroes. Future Hall of Fame defensive end Howie Long and Super Bowl XVIII MVP Marcus Allen starred for Los Angeles. Even journeyman starter Jay Schroeder had taken a few significant snaps (subbing briefly for injured quarterback Doug Williams) as the Washington Redskins backup quarterback in Super Bowl XXII.

  More pressing than the Raiders overwhelming edge in experience was the welfare of Buffalo’s defense.

  Aside from a marginal effort during the second half of the Giants’ victory,
the Bills offense had been spectacular all season, even without Jim Kelly. In two matchups with Miami—the only meaningful games the Bills played during the previous month—Buffalo totaled sixty-eight points and 922 yards against a defense that finished second in the AFC. Given that they were averaging more points per game (26.8) than any other NFL team, the Bills expected a tremendous offensive output each week.

  Buffalo’s defense had been comparably steady all season. But the unit anchored by all-pro Bruce Smith and a trio of outstanding linebackers, Shane Conlan, Cornelius Bennett, and Darryl Talley, faltered in the playoff rematch with Miami. Dan Marino torched the Bills for 322 yards and three touchdowns.

  Familiar Buffalo weather—wind and cold rain freezing into snow—contributed to defensive woes. The AstroTurf at Rich Stadium became very slippery and, as one reporter noted, “was more suitable for skiing than football.”

  “It was horrible,” said Bruce Smith, who the Dolphins frequently occupied with two, sometimes, three blockers. “We couldn’t pass rush. We couldn’t turn the corner.”

  With a similarly miserable forecast for the AFC Championship Game, Smith and the Bills would again be tested. Although they defeated the Raiders in Week Five, a twenty-four-point fourth quarter was needed to do so. And in that 38-24 win, the Raiders actually outgained the Bills in both rushing and passing yards; disturbing statistics given that dynamic runner Bo Jackson did not even suit up. That week, Jackson was hitting cleanup and playing left field for the Kansas City Royals.[1]

  On game day, an entirely different set of concerns permeated the locker room, the city, and the entire nation. Again, war pushed football onto the back burner.

  Iraqi forces launched Scuds—long-range, surface-to-surface missiles—at Israel and Saudi Arabia on Friday, then resumed their attacks late Saturday evening. At least seventeen were reported injured in Tel Aviv and Haifa. The United States struck back, with its own new weapon: the Patriot missile, a seventeen-foot-long, twenty-one-hundred-pound surface-to-air missile that soared three times the speed of sound. In its first-ever combat test, the Patriot was used to intercept airborne Scuds.

  Following Iraq’s strike on Friday, Israel accepted the use of American

  technicians—they had preferred to employ their own technicians—along with two additional batteries of Patriots. Another battery was positioned in central Saudi Arabia.

  “We’re going to have to go in [Iraq and occupied Kuwait] and chase them out,” said twenty-four-year-old Sergeant John Marion of Carthage, North Carolina. “It’s real scary. It’s going to be the unknown.”

  Days before this escalation of warfare, the executive offices of New York State’s Erie County began preparations for an enormous rally to celebrate the Bills and rile up Buffalo’s rabid supporters. It had been scheduled to take place on January 18, the Friday before the championship game against Los Angeles. More than seven thousand people were expected to attend. The County Office Building Plaza was to be strewn with red and blue decorations, and police planned to close off Franklin Street so fans could chant and cheer when the players arrived.

  But two days before the rally, it was canceled. Instead, a noon prayer service took place at St. Paul’s Cathedral, a block away from where the exuberant party was supposed to be staged.

  “There is a time and a place to celebrate,” Buffalo’s deputy mayor, Sam Iraci, announced. “And a time and a place to reflect. This is a time to pray for the people over there, rather than celebrating for ourselves. We’ll have time to celebrate.”

  Bills General Manager Bill Polian and two injured players attended while the rest of the team was at practice. “Once the game starts, I’m sure it’s going to be just as rowdy as ever,” said sidelined wide receiver Don Beebe. “When they get back home, I’m sure it’s going to be back to thinking about the war and the Middle East.”

  The thought of tens of thousands of “rowdy” fans preoccupied with anything—especially a football game—other than the war bothered some Americans. Many citizens preferred that the playoffs be postponed indefinitely.

  “I can’t even believe they’re going to have the game this weekend,” said a spokesman for Erie County Executive Dennis Gorski, the man whose office planned, then canceled the Bills’ pep rally. “It’s good for morale, but . . . it’s too fresh.”

  Throughout the entire week, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue listened to debates on the issue and sought input from each of the league’s owners and NBA Commissioner David Stern. The White House also weighed in.

  “Our attitude is that the business of the nation has to continue and should continue, and we are conducting this war with a high degree of public support,” Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater stated. “We don’t see any need why people should disrupt their lives any more than necessary. The President’s attitude is that the games should go on.”

  Even if it didn’t quite fit his job profile, Bush’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development took to serving as an informal liaison between Tagliabue and the White House. As a six-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Jack Kemp had been a faithful public servant to New York’s thirty-first, thirty-eighth, and thirty-ninth districts. He was also the only man to ever quarterback the Buffalo Bills to a championship.

  Kemp played seven of his twelve professional seasons in a Bills uniform, and won both the regular-season and championship game MVP in 1965. That year, Buffalo won a second consecutive AFL title, defeating Sid Gillman’s San Diego Chargers. (Each of Buffalo’s championship-game victories came against San Diego and Gillman, who cut Kemp in the middle of the 1962 season because he believed that the Chargers “could not win consistently with Jack.”)

  The seven-time all-star retired from football in 1969, the AFL’s final season, and transitioned into politics. After twenty-eight years as a congressman, he joined President Bush’s cabinet in 1989.

  With Kemp’s assurances from the “highest levels of the Defense Department,” Tagliabue elected to proceed with the championship games.

  “We can’t be paralyzed as a nation for the situation,” he announced, “and can’t act out of fear. We have to maintain appropriate respect for the situation, and keep appropriate proportion. So we’ve decided to play the games, but we’re going to follow events right up until the kickoffs. There could be a change at any moment.”

  Just after 1 p.m. EST, the Bills sprinted out of the tunnel and onto the Rich Stadium turf. The crowd of 80,324 erupted as the starting offense lineup was announced over the public address system. And for all those who felt conflicted about cheering, arguing, and pleading over a trivial sporting event in times of war, the game was not a contest for long.

  On his sore knee, Jim Kelly jogged onto the field, through blustering forty-mile-per-hour winds. Running the no-huddle, Kelly breezed into the Los Angeles red zone. In less than two minutes, Buffalo gained fifty-five yards on five plays. The bewildered Raiders defense needed a time-out.

  “I really think they weren’t prepared for it,” Thomas said about K-Gun. “We’ve been running it for a long time now, and you would think the (Raiders) coaches would know that’s what got us this far and would prepare for it. But it seemed they didn’t prepare for it until we got down there deep in their territory when they called the timeout.”

  The time-out did not cool off Buffalo’s torrid start. Within four plays, a catch-and-run by James Lofton gave the Bills a seven-point advantage.

  The Bills appeared incapable of making a mistake. At the start of Lofton’s touchdown play, Kelly dropped the shotgun snap—which was nearly recovered by a Raiders defensive lineman—picked up the ball, whirled around, and rolled to his right, where he spotted an open Lofton at the Raiders’ seven-yard line.

  “First I thought I’d just fall on the ball,” Kelly said afterwards, “but then I decided that the line had given me such good protection I’d try to do something. I found James free on a break and tossed him the ball.”

  Ahead 7-0, Bills kicker Scott Norwood toed the bal
l downfield to Raiders return man Jaime Holland. Holland raced upfield, escaped the grasp of a Bills defender, then was clobbered and pinned to the ground by Carlton Bailey at the nineteen-yard line.

  “I was going to do whatever it took—sacrifice my body, knocking myself out—to put the extra edge in there for my pops,” said Bailey.

  Surprisingly, the Raiders—a run-oriented team—countered with back-to-back passes and on just two plays charged into Buffalo territory. The Bills defense settled in and did not allow another first down on the drive and forced the Raiders to attempt a forty-one-yard field goal.

  “This is going to be a great game, Dick,” color analyst Bill Walsh told the audience and his partner, Dick Enberg, during NBC Sports’ television broadcast. “These teams are really playing well, but they’re opening up everything, throwing that ball.”

  Walsh may have chiseled Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, and a handful of other raw players into Hall of Famers during his tenure as architect of the 1980s San Francisco 49ers dynasty, but he was dead wrong that afternoon. Once Jaeger’s field goal sailed through the upright, that was the extent of Los Angeles’ scoring.

  The K-Gun needed just five plays on the ensuing drive to put another touchdown on the scoreboard. The Bills defense then matched Kelly’s score with one of their own. Linebacker Darryl Talley stepped in front of a

  Schroeder pass and charged into the end zone for a twenty-seven-yard touchdown return. Still in the first quarter, Buffalo led 21-3.

  “I don’t think they knew what hit ’em from the opening bell. We knew that if we won that game, we’re going to the Super Bowl,” Talley recalled years later. “And I was just somewhere different that day, I guess. Cornelius [Bennett] came up to me on the sideline and he says ‘I’ve seen you play before, but I ain’t never seen you do the things you’re doing today on the field. What’s going on, I ain’t never seen you play like this.’