by Adam Lazarus
“Over the last 10 years, he’s probably been the most dominant player in the league. . . I just think right now, I’ve taken it up a notch above that. I can’t take anything away from Lawrence. I’ve admired him for so many years,” Smith told reporters the week of Buffalo’s regular-season matchup with the Giants. “He’s a friend of mine and I respect him. But right now, I think it’s time to give credit to the person that really deserves it.”
In Tampa, Smith reiterated his earnest belief that he was the league’s best: “I still think I’m the best defensive player right now, is there any reason not to?”
Smith made even more noise when reporters asked him to comment on the Bills’ Super Bowl opponent.
“I’d rather have played the 49ers,” Smith told reporters. “The 49ers are famous and everybody says they are this and that. It makes me sick. I wanted the 49ers.”
Teammate Carwell Garnered agreed.
“I wish we could have played the 49ers too, and I mean it like Bruce does, with no disrespect to the Giants,” the rookie fullback said. “The 49ers were the team of the 80’s, and we wanted to show against them that we’re going to be the team of the 90’s.”
That week a handful of Bills expressed a desire to be appreciated outside of the comparatively small market just a few hundred miles from Times Square and the World Trade Center. Sharing the Super Bowl stage with a team from the country’s largest and most prominent metropolis revealed a subtle resentment within the Bills.
“My reason for making the statement I made was to get the credit I deserve,” Smith said. “I really didn’t think I was getting it and probably one of the reasons is that Buffalo has only one newspaper. It’s been frustrating at times,” he said Wednesday. “It would be nice for endorsements and things like that. You have to play extremely well to get noticed in Buffalo. If I played like that for the New York Jets or somebody, I would be a legend.”
Lawrence Taylor was already a legend, and he would have been one wherever or whenever he played.
The Giants selected Taylor with the second overall pick in the 1981 NFL draft, and he immediately became one of the game’s best players. He won back-to-back NFL Defensive Player of the Year awards during his first two seasons in the league. In 1986, as the Giants charged to a Super Bowl victory, Taylor became just the second defensive player in league history to win the regular season’s Most Valuable Player Award.
Despite scandalous behavior over the years—habitual drug use, arrests, a league suspension a few years earlier, and a casual relationship with prostitutes—Taylor’s play always bailed him out with the coaching staff and the fans.
But Taylor was set to turn thirty-two-years old the week after Super Bowl XXV, and with an influx of younger linebackers emulating his model, he no longer symbolized state-of-the-art. A Week Three hamstring injury literally slowed Taylor down, and by the middle of the season he admitted to feeling “heavy” when he chased after mobile quarterbacks like Randall Cunningham. An heir apparent even surfaced that season. In his second season, Kansas City Chiefs outside linebacker Derrick Thomas recorded twenty sacks, including a record-setting seven-sack performance in Week Ten against Seattle.
Taylor said little to protest his skeptics. In response to Bruce Smith declaring himself the league’s premier defender—prior to the Bills-Giants Week Fifteen matchup—Taylor said, “It doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t concern me. Everybody’s time passes.”
And on Media Day, he was content to acknowledge, “Right now, Bruce Smith is the best.”
Accepting another pass-rusher’s superiority wasn’t quite as absurd or blasphemous as the New York media portrayed. Smith did have an incredible season in 1990: he garnered thirty-nine of the forty-two votes for the NFL Defensive Player of the Year Award.
It was the self-effacing tone with which he spoke during the week of Super Bowl XXV that seemed entirely out of Taylor’s character.
“Can I jump over buildings in a single bound? No, and I’m not trying to,” said Taylor. “At this point in my career, I’m not trying to be Superman. I’m happy with being Clark Kent. Clark Kent can get the job done if he has to.
. . . You come to the realization that no man is invincible.”
Super Bowl XXV shaped up as a battle of the old guard versus the new guard. No player on Buffalo’s roster ever suited up for a Super Bowl before; twenty-two Giants had. The Bills were younger, louder, and with their frenetic, high-scoring offense, more exciting: a new team for a new decade. Compared to their opponent, the Giants were relics. Like Taylor, the Giants starter at right cornerback, Everson Walls, was finishing his tenth season. The league’s oldest kicker accounted for all New York’s scoring in their NFC Championship Game victory. And the NFL’s oldest running back spearheaded the team’s snail’s-paced offensive attack. The Giants appeared very 1980s, very passé.
“They’re cocky,” New York’s cornerback Mark Collins replied. “They’re supposed to be. I didn’t fly here to lose. But we’re not talking a good game. We want to play it.”
Perhaps the rest of the Giants were too tired to engage the Bills in a war of words: their trip to Tampa wasn’t quite as swift as their opponent’s. After the brutally physical win in San Francisco, the Giants had to travel cross-country to reach the Super Bowl site. With the time change, they didn’t arrive until early Monday morning.
Many aboard were too excited by the victory to sleep, dancing the conga through the aisle to the music on Pepper Johnson’s portable sound system.
“I think for anybody that was on the plane, it’s one of the most memorable times in our sporting lives because it was very euphoric,” Parcells said. “Have a couple beers, relax, enjoy the fruits of victory.”
Even after the team settled, players and coaches chose their words carefully when speaking to reporters. During New York’s Media Day session, no Giant would announce, “I’d rather have played the Raiders.”
Instead, offensive tackle Jumbo Elliott called Bruce Smith the “best player I’ve ever gone against,” a fact that was not overlooked by the head coach.
“Obviously, Bruce Smith was going to be a key,” former New York Post beat-writer Hank Gola recalled. “And Jumbo was kind of a laid-back guy. And Parcells loved to push buttons and motivate individually.
Jumbo was a little tougher nut to crack in that way because he was so laid back, nothing bothered him, he was very even-keeled. But [Parcells] knew that Jumbo faced this tremendous challenge in Bruce Smith. So he instructed [Lawrence Taylor] during practice that week to just harass, get in his face, and irritate him and get him so angry that he would take it out on Bruce Smith in the game.
[Parcells] knew that was a key matchup and he didn’t want to have to give Jumbo a lot of help: double teams, sliding protection, or anything. He knew that if Jumbo could take Bruce Smith one-on-one, then the rest of the game plan had a chance of working.
The overwhelming public praise for Buffalo—both through the press and on the Giants’ practice field—wasn’t only directed toward Bruce Smith.
Talking about the Bills and their back-to-back offensive explosions, Parcells admitted to reporters that the combination of Thomas, Kelly, James Lofton, and Andre Reed would be a major concern for the Giants.
“The Bills have everything going for them,” Carl Banks added. “And that makes us nervous.”
While several Bills repeatedly complained to reporters about having gone unacknowledged, the Giants could make the same claim. But they didn’t, at least not publicly—not even when they checked into their hotel, the Hyatt Regency Westshore.
“We get there and they didn’t even have the ability to change who was staying in our room,” Giants left tackle Doug Riesenberg said years later. “I was [49ers left tackle] ‘Mr. Harris Barton’ for four or five days. They didn’t even have the ability to take off the ‘Congratulations San Francisco’ signs.”
The Hyatt staff and Tampa’s Super Bowl Planning Committee must have read the San
Francisco Chronicle article that reported that the 49ers sent staffers to Tampa to rent and install $30,000 worth of office equipment (fax machines, filing cabinets, computers, sixty-eight desks, and 112 telephone lines) at the hotel. The team also ordered Super Bowl buttons and tickets to a postgame party in Tampa.
“I remember one of the guys working in the hotel,” said fullback Maurice Carthon.
He says to me and O. J. when we were walking to our room, “you guys cost us a lot of money.” And we were like, “what do you mean?” He said, “’cause as soon as you guys won the game, we had to take all this 49ers stuff out of here. The 49ers were gonna have all these big parties, and they were gonna spend like two or three million dollars at our hotel.”
And I remember that morning, O. J. and I got up and we were still excited about being at the Super Bowl at seven in the morning, so we started driving around town. And Nike had these two big bulletin boards. At one part of the city of Tampa Bay, they had Joe Montana on it and the other part of the city they had Jerry Rice catching the ball. And that kinda fueled our fire for the whole week for the Super Bowl and into the game, because nobody gave us a chance.
Still, no member of the media hauled in quotes from a New York player citing a lack of respect.
“That’s a testament to Parcells. The more you say, the more you gotta take back,” Riesenberg said.
There did, however, come a breaking point for the media-savvy, veteran group and they could no longer dish out a wealth of flowery words. The Bills often embarrassed their opponents, especially in the postseason. But the Giants defense yielded the fewest points in the NFL and managed, in two San Francisco road trips that season, to limit one of the greatest offenses in history to just ten points per game.
“We would have to have seven guys break their legs and everybody come out there not prepared in order for a team to score 40 points on us,” Pepper Johnson said. “I don’t see anybody marching the ball up and down the field on us.”
Giants players and staff never feared Buffalo’s offense. They simply immersed themselves in film and preparations.
Although the press had reported that the 49ers sent staff members to Tampa, before the NFC Championship Game, to ready hotel rooms and offices, the Giants had (more covertly) done the same. Parcells’ personal secretary, Kim Kolbe, and George Young’s personal secretary, Janice Gavazzi, also flew to Tampa that week with simple, yet specific instructions from Parcells: “Get it like I want it.”
“I’ll be darned,” Parcells recalled, “[Kim] met us at the plane at about 3:30 in the morning, all the [hotel room] keys were out, the players knew where to go, our offices were set up. And we were up and ready and working by 7:30 that morning.”
Giants players had Monday off. Gary Reasons (nine-over-par 81) and Lawrence Taylor (four-over-par 76) played golf at the North Course of Largo’s Bardmoor Country Club. That week, Taylor remarked, “I’d rather go to the Super Bowl than shoot 70. [But] I’d rather shoot 65 than play in the Super Bowl.” Golf had become a huge part of Taylor’s life: In his 1987 autobiography, LT: Living on the Edge, he claimed that the “golf course was my detox tank” for his cocaine habit.
While Taylor and Reasons hit the links, Jeff Hostetler and Raul Allegre, along with Bart Oates, John Washington, Eric Dorsey, and Mike Fox—a combined eleven hundred pounds crammed together—rode the roller coasters at nearby Busch Gardens. And although each was given twenty-five Super Bowl tickets, more than a handful of players spent their day off trying to find more for friends and family members.
Meanwhile, Bill Parcells and his staff were hard at work.
“There’s a way to do it . . . a way to win. You just have to find it. That’s the mentality that coaching is really about. Nobody else understands,” Parcells told famed sportswriter Jerry Izenberg during the writing of No Medals for Trying, a behind-the-scenes look at one week of the Giants’ 1989 season. “Mickey [Corcoran, his old high school basketball coach] taught me that. He always said there was a way to win every game. Finding it is what separates some people from others.”
By the time the Bills plane landed in Tampa, they had already put in a full day’s work, the first of seven that week. For the coaches, in between practice, game planning, and meetings with players, film study consumed the rest of their days and nights.
“Did you ever eat a meal in the dark? We’ve gotten good at it,” said Bill Belichick.
Belichick’s unit had already strung together a pair of exemplary defensive performances in two playoff games. Parcells expected another one on Super Bowl Sunday. Still, he knew that might not be enough to defeat the Bills.
For the Giants offense, touchdowns were usually the result of a carefully executed, meticulously crafted, lengthy drive. In a close game, Buffalo’s quick-strike ability could pose a real problem.
“I don’t think we can win a shootout game with Buffalo,” Parcells said. “I don’t think our team has proven it can win any kind of shootout game this year. But I think it has proven it can win a lot of methodical games. So if we can play our style, and keep them from playing theirs, then we have a better chance of making it.”
While his defensive staff and players burned their eyes out watching film, Parcells and Ron Erhardt devised a supplementary strategy for curtailing Buffalo’s potent scoring: keep Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, and the rest of the exceptional Bills skill players off the field.
“Our whole plan was to shorten the game for Buffalo,” Parcells said. “We wanted the ball and we didn’t want them to have it.”
In addition to stifling the K-Gun, that approach would have a two-pronged effect. Each first down New York gained would further wear down the Bills, both physically and emotionally. Allowing the opponent to convert on third down—when the defense is just one stop away from ending a drive and giving the ball back to their offense—can demoralize a team. Every successive play meant linebackers and 275-pound defensive linemen would have to chase ball carriers across the field, and do so with little recovery time in between snaps. With Buffalo’s defense tired, the Giants hoped to collect points, and piece together a lead.
Meanwhile, on the sidelines, Giants defenders could catch their breath and prepare for their next bout with the fast-paced, intricate no-huddle.
“There were stretches this season when we were able to control the ball between 36 and 40 minutes per game,” tackle Jumbo Elliott said that week. “This gives our defense the opportunity to rest. So when they do go onto the field, they can really sell out, go out there for three downs then get off.”
Parcells’ vision of how to defeat Buffalo made sense. “Power football,” as he called it, had been a reliable victory formula for decades. “It’s always been vindicated. It’s the new stuff that had something to prove,” he said by week’s end.
Still, no matter how well designed the Giants’ symbiotic game plan was, it was up to his players to execute. Especially in one phase of the game: the quintessential element of “power football.”
“You’ve got to feel that we have to run the ball,” Ottis Anderson said on Thursday. “The only way you can keep Jim Kelly off the field is to run the ball, and that’s what we’re going to try to do.”
Sixty nations would broadcast the Bills and Giants battle for the NFL title. For the first time, curious sports fans in Argentina, Portugal, and Switzerland would be able to see the Super Bowl live. But, to virtually every country outside the United States, football’s world champion had been crowned: not in Tampa that winter evening, but in Italy the previous summer.
In July 1990, Andreas Brehme, Lothar Matthäus, Jürgen Klinsmann, and Rudi Völler of the West German soccer team—benefiting from the post–Berlin Wall reunification just a few months earlier—defeated Argentina 1-0 to win a third FIFA World Cup title.
The U.S. men’s team did not fare well in Italy. Because they failed to qualify each time, Team USA did not even compete in the elimination bracket of the World Cup from 1954 to 1986. So when the
United States finally did reach round one in the 1990 World Cup, their 0-0-3 record was not surprising. Following a 2-1 loss to Austria, the team returned home.
Forty years had now passed since the U.S. team won a single World Cup match and American soccer fans had to be discouraged—especially sixty-three-year-old Walter Bahr.
Back in 1950, Bahr was earning $50 a week as a physical education teacher at a Philadelphia high school. He pulled down an extra $100 as a midfielder playing for the U.S. team that traveled to Brazil in June to compete in the World Cup.
Bahr and his teammates lost their opening match to Spain, then drew England, the world’s foremost soccer powerhouse. But great goaltending from goalie Frank Borghi—who made his living as an undertaker—kept the United States in contention against the Brits, a team comprised of full-time professionals. Late in the first half, Bahr laced a kick from twenty-five feet away and watched his teammate Joe Gaetjens head the ball in for the go-ahead goal. England played a relentless second half, but the United States held on to win 1-0 in what is considered one of the greatest upsets in soccer history.
“It would be like a high school team almost beating the New York Yankees,” Bahr said in 2010. “A Division III basketball team beating the Lakers.”
Despite the forty years of World Cup failure that followed the U.S. improbable triumph over England, Walter Bahr was not starved for victories. His playing career ended in 1957, and he became a coach, first for Philadelphia’s franchise in the American Soccer League, then at the collegiate level, with the Temple Owls and Penn State University Nittany Lions.
During that time, Bahr, and his wife, Davies Ann, raised three sons—daughter Davies Ann Bahr became an all-American collegiate gymnast—and taught soccer to each of them. Aside from passing, trapping, and other fundamentals, Walter Bahr instilled in his boys a simple lesson about sports competition, one learned during that June victory over England in 1950: “If the better team always won the game, they wouldn’t play it.”
