by Adam Lazarus
“We came in there with those five linebackers and five defensive backs, we had so many lightweight people in there,” Walls remembered.
It was a perfect call. L. T. was upfield, Pepper had gotten walled off, and here I am, it’s a cover two. So my first steps are backwards: I gotta cover James [Lofton] coming down the seam, I gotta cover Andre [Reed] trying to go down the sideline. I have to work on getting my depth so I don’t get outflanked.
As soon as Thurman got the ball, it was like he and I were looking right at each other. Once he made the move up the field, then that’s when I made an aggressive step forward. But the thing that helped me was, when Thurman and I got real close to each other, we got within five yards, instead of me taking another step forward, I actually took a step backward and allowed him to commit. . . . It was much easier for me to read where he was going, and once he made his move, I just cut his legs out from under him. And we had to line up for another play, but I knew at that time that it was a huge play.
With everyone trying to blame me for this and trying to remember me in history for something I did when I was just turning twenty-two years old, I went into that game thinking, “They are not going to blame me for this.”
Walls’ game-saving tackle limited Thomas’ fantastic run to twenty-two yards. The Bills hurried to the line and ran another play—a short, across-the-field completion to Andre Reed (his eighth catch). The clock continued to roll—a minute remained.
On the two passing plays that began the drive, the Giants’ three-man rush forced Kelly to scramble in order to avoid a sack. But on Reed’s short gain, New York’s front line could not put any pressure on the quarterback. And on the next play, Kelly again was untouched and not harassed as he looked for a receiver.
Although Hostetler was regarded as the mobile, western Pennsylvania quarterback on the field that day, Kelly employed a few nifty moves and darted through the line, picking up eight more yards. Repeated double (even triple) teams had begun to wear out the Giants’ front line.
“I was gonna pass out,” said Erik Howard, who, after Kelly’s scramble, took off his helmet at midfield and signaled to the sideline that he needed a replacement. “That was the most tired I ever was after a football game. I felt like my heart was gonna explode.”
Past the fifty-yard line, Kelly signaled for a time-out with forty-eight seconds left and went to the sidelines to consult with offensive coordinator Ted Marchibroda. Across the field, Marchibroda’s former $25-a-week assistant, Bill Belichick, shouted out substitutions and alerts to his assistants and players. And like his current head coach, Belichick didn’t panic despite several significant Bills gains. The Giants stuck to their game plan. On the play following the time-out, two down linemen, along with Lawrence Taylor, rushed the quarterback, while eight others dropped into coverage.
Again, there was no penetration by the Giants, and again, Kelly could not find a man open downfield. After a few seconds of waiting, he dumped the ball off to tight end Keith McKeller, who made a shoestring catch at the forty-yard line.
Officials wanted to make sure that the ball did not hit the ground prior to McKeller’s bringing the ball up into his chest, so instant replay was called upon to verify the catch. Within a minute of review, referee Jerry Seeman announced the play stood. The twenty-two players on the field appreciated the extra seconds to catch their breath.
Seeman wound the clock and twenty-six seconds remained when Kelly began the next play, another shotgun draw to Thurman Thomas. It was the same exact play that gained twenty-two yards (and nearly went for a touchdown) earlier on the drive. However, instead of cutting back, away from his blockers, this time Thomas flowed to the right side. As he approached the line of scrimmage, two Giants stood hip to hip, ready to make the tackle: Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks, whom one NFL Network analyst later called “as good an outside linebacker against the run as the league has ever seen.” Thomas blew past both of them.
Free from Giants and near the sideline, Thomas was faced with a crucial, split-second decision. Continue trying to gain yards or make for the sidelines to stop the clock.
Neither choice could be wrong—or right. By avoiding the sidelines, he might gain more yards and shorten the distance to the end zone. It also meant that he would most likely be tackled in bounds and the clock would roll. With no time-outs, the Bills would be forced to spike the ball and not have another chance to run an offensive play.
Thomas could have opted to run out-of-bounds in an attempt to preserve time (twenty seconds would have been left, time enough for at least one more offensive play). But doing so would have sacrificed a chance to gain more yardage. He made the aggressive choice, shunning the sidelines and continuing upfield to gain six additional yards. Mark Collins tackled him, in bounds, at the twenty-nine-yard line.
“Bill [Belichick] said to me ‘We may have just lost the game on that play,’” Parcells recalled. “He said, ‘We were in the wrong defense for that one.’”
The clock rolled—twelve . . . eleven . . . ten . . .—while an official spotted the ball. At the nine-second mark, Kelly (under center for the first time in the second half) took the snap and fired the ball into the ground to stop the clock.
Only eight seconds remained. The Bills could not risk running another play. If the ball carrier were tackled in bounds, that would surely end the game. They had to attempt the field goal. Scott Norwood jogged out on the field to attempt the Super Bowl–winning field goal. As both teams began to line up for the kick, Parcells gestured and shouted to the officials: he wanted a time-out to “ice” the kicker.
Norwood’s strong suit was accuracy, not distance. Because the Bills played their home games on the AstroTurf of Rich Stadium in 1990, Norwood had attempted only one field goal on natural grass. And throughout his entire seven NFL seasons, he had never attempted a kick that long on natural grass.
This championship-deciding kick would be a forty-seven-yarder, which, if good, would be the second-longest field goal in Super Bowl history. He remained focused and confident.
“I thought about the mechanics, about getting a good plant, going into it slow, hitting the ball solidly, probably taking the breeze into consideration a little bit, whether or not to get a draw on the ball, and following through,” Norwood said. “I don’t back away from that type of kick. It’s something I’ve done all my career.”
Meanwhile, New York’s field goal block unit remained on the field as well, stretching out, encouraging one another to block the kick.
“It’s an emotional roller coaster,” said Erik Howard, who recovered enough stamina to return for the field goal.
Everybody out there is thinking, “I’m gonna be the one to block this kick” or “I’m gonna be the one to make this play.” And there’s a bit of willing it to happen, a bit of prayer, whatever you want to call it. But for those guys that are out there on the field, it’s the culmination of what they’ve done their entire lives. It’s hard for people to probably grasp that. But think about all the blood, sweat, and tears of an entire lifetime and trying to get to that one moment and it comes down to [eight] seconds and a field goal. I don’t know that you can describe that or bottle that emotion.
That emotion so overwhelmed at least one Giants player, that it nearly cost New York five critical yards.
Lawrence Taylor had a fairly quiet Super Bowl. Taylor was matched up with Pro Bowl tackle Will Wolford throughout most of the game. And Wolford limited the three-time Defensive Player of the Year to just one tackle. With several Giants coaches distracted amid last-second preparations during the time-out, Taylor decided he would not be a spectator on the Super Bowl’s decisive play.
“Out of the corner of my eye, I see Lawrence Taylor run on the field,” Giants special teams coach Mike Sweatman said.
Now, Lawrence is not on the field-goal block team. I’m thinking, “Oh shoot, here goes Lawrence, we’re going to have twelve on the field.” But Lawrence sends somebody off. So now we’ve got eleven on the fi
eld, I think, I can’t really tell . . . but we’ve got Lawrence out there, who’s not on the field-goal block team. I’m thinking, “I’m gonna let this pass, I’m not gonna make a big deal of this.” It wasn’t like Joe Schmo the Ragman.
After the game, I go up to Lawrence and I say, “Lawrence, what were you doing out on the field on the field goal block team when you’re not on it?” He says, “I wanted to be on the field when the game was decided.” I thought, “What a great answer.”
For Matt Bahr’s last-second game-winner in the NFC Championship Game against San Francisco, Taylor had been on the field as the kicking unit’s left wing. Perhaps, he simply wanted to be in the same place, on the field, rather than on the sidelines.
Coincidently, a handful of his teammates also assumed a spot resembling their place along the sideline a week earlier at Candlestick Park. At least one bended-knee prayer group—Pepper Johnson, Greg Jackson, Mark Collins—was too nervous or too antsy to view the fate of a game-winning field goal attempt. Their anxieties were slightly eased knowing that no one would be there to narrate the moment. Everson Walls was part of the unit trying to block the kick.
Parcells, however, felt no comfort. His mind was clouded with one lingering regret: the decision during the Giants’ previous offensive series, on third and one, to run the shotgun draw with Jeff Hostetler instead of throwing a pass to Mark Bavaro.
“When they were lining up to kick that field goal,” Parcells remembered twenty years later. “I’m saying to myself: ‘You know Parcells, if you just had a little more balls you might not be in this situation. Nobody knows that—no one. Not any of the [assistant] coaches don’t really know it. But when you’re alone with your innermost thoughts and you’re trying to think about things that you did and didn’t do, that’s the major play decision in that game, for me.”
As Parcells stewed, more than a dozen Bills players and coaches—Kelly, Lofton, Levy, Smith, Reed, Tasker, Carlton Bailey—joined hands. Others peeled off, away from the group to be alone.
Norwood, standing far from the other ten Bills players on the field-goal unit, continued to focus and practice. Eventually, the unit broke the huddle, and Bills long-snapper Adam Lingner—who spent his off-seasons pursuing a modeling career—bent down and gripped the football with both hands. His teammates crowded beside him, forming a human fence to protect against the soon-to-be charging Giants defenders. Seven yards behind Lingner, holder Frank Reich knelt and tamped down a small patch of grass on the field’s chewed-up sod. This was where he would place the ball.
Norwood marked off his precise starting point—three paces backward, two to his left—then angled himself toward Reich. Slightly bent at the waist, Norwood shrugged out his shoulders and nodded at Reich. He was ready.
“The quiet man of this football team, Scott Norwood, he can fire ‘the shot heard ’round the world’ now,” shouted play-by-play voice Van Miller, as he set the scene for tense Bills fans listening on radios back in Buffalo. “Here we go, with eight seconds to play, high drama here in the Super Bowl.”
Norwood nodded to Reich, who, in turn, shouted out a signal to Lingner, letting him know to snap the ball momentarily.
Lingner fired the ball back to Reich. Instantaneously, a swarm of Giants bolted across the scrimmage line. Reich could see them out of the corner of his right eye, desperately trying to stop the kick. The Giants’ Roger Brown eluded wingman Steve Tasker while Dave Duerson had bowled over Bills blocker Butch Rolle. But neither came close enough to disrupt the kick. The Bills’ barrier resisted. Reich handled the snap cleanly, placed it on the ground—precisely to the desired “eighth of an inch”—and Norwood swiped at the football with his powerful right leg.
Seeing the ball spotted right on target, right on time, Norwood stepped into the kick. With the snap, spot, and kick unimpeded, all the Giants had left to influence the outcome were the upright arms, hands, and fingertips of two defenders just past the scrimmage line. New York safety Myron Guyton and tall nose tackle Eric Dorsey leapt into the air, attempting to block the kick once it had been launched. But Norwood had hammered the ball with such force that it kept climbing higher and higher, far out of anyone’s reach.
“He absolutely crushed the ball,” Reich remembered. “That kick probably would have been good from about 55 to 58 yards. I’m sure he was thinking it was probably going to come in a little bit. But it just stayed straight. Usually, with a soccer-style kicker, you plan on the ball coming in a little bit.”
Approaching the right goalpost, the ball appeared on target.
“As the ball was kicked,” said Bill Polian, “I said to one of my colleagues, ‘We’re World Champions! We’re World Champions!’”
But the perfectionist kicker knew he didn’t hit it precisely.
“I left it out right,” Norwood said that evening. “I may have put a little too much emphasis on striking the ball hard. I hit it good and solid. Again, maybe too much emphasis on trying to get a good, solid kick. And it was a good, solid kick. I hit it solidly. I didn’t get the draw coming from the right.”
Upon crossing the plane of the crossbar, the ball stubbornly sailed outside—not inside—the right upright. Two zebra-clad officials beneath the kick waved their hands to the right, indicating the kick was wide.
Reich and Norwood just stared at the ground. So did all their teammates along their sideline. A despondent Marv Levy let out a sigh of acceptance.
“That was the most emptiest feeling that I ever had in my life,” said Kent Hull.
For a moment, Bill Parcells began to celebrate. He hugged Pepper Johnson and Carl Banks, then asked them for a favor.
“Take me for a ride,” he asked. “Will you guys take me for a ride?”
“Let’s take this mother fucker for a ride!” shouted Banks.
Banks and Johnson bent down to pick up their coach onto their shoulders, but because four seconds remained, Parcells told them to stop. Instead of “going for a ride,” he shouted to those players celebrating, begging them to get off the field so the Giants offense could run the clock out. Linebacker Steve DeOssie was too busy filming the crowd with his portable video camera to hear the coach screaming. Parcells and his staff were furious with the photographers and professional cameramen. They hollered incessantly to clear the field. During his fiery tirade, Pepper Johnson doused Parcells with a second “Gatorade Shower” in five years.
“We got you two, that’s what we wanted,” Lawrence Taylor said, embracing Parcells. “We got you two, you’re the best.”
“I’m going for a ride, you’re gonna take me,” Parcells told Taylor.
The offense assembled into the so-called victory formation—“six tight diamond,” as the Giants called it—and Hostetler pulled in the snap, touched a knee to the grass, and the game was over.
Hostetler had been stoic in the seconds following the kick. He watched Norwood’s attempt from the sideline with one knee on the ground. Upon seeing the officials gesture “wide right,” his teammates burst into celebration. Hostetler remained frozen.
“I remember looking back into the stands and looking at the Buffalo players and looking at our players, and trying to take in all of the reactions, and I just kept kneeling there for a few seconds,” Hostetler wrote. “I think I was lucky that I caught a moment in our lives that a lot of guys missed because they were celebrating so much. I was celebrating, too. I couldn’t have been happier. But in one way that I’ve always been glad about, I was a spectator. I held back and watched it. I may never know another moment quite like it.”
Taking the final snap of the Giants’ Super Bowl win shocked Hostetler back into the moment. With the game now officially over, Hostetler exploded.
“I was drunk with emotion.”
So were his teammates. As Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” blasted over the public-address system, several Giants hugged each other and high-fived their teammates. Just as many rushed onto the field to congratulate Bills players and coaches on a terrific gam
e, a game that set two Super Bowl records, which will never be broken. Neither team committed a single turnover, and the one-point scoring difference was the closest championship contest in NFL history.
“That’s the best way to end that one right there,” Dave Meggett told Thurman Thomas. “Couldn’t have a better way than that.”
From the sidelines, tackle Doug Riesenberg blew kisses to the stands. At midfield, Gary Reasons held his son, Nick, in one arm and an American flag in the other. At the center of the field, surrounded by cameramen, Johnson, William Roberts, Myron Guyton, and Lee Rouson broke into dance.
“We heard all the talk about putting the game off,” Pepper Johnson told a reporter. “I think that would have hurt more than helped. Hopefully (soldiers’) families taped the ball game so when their loved ones come back, they can watch us. They can watch us dance.”
Back on the sidelines, Parcells’ request was being fulfilled. Taylor holding the right leg, Banks the left, they hoisted the head coach into the air for a few seconds. They let him down to continue handing out thanks and congratulations to his players and assistants.
Heading off the field, moments later, Parcells once again encountered Lawrence Taylor. He threw his right arm around Taylor and the two legends, who had now earned a pair of world championships during their ten years together, jogged into the locker room to continue the celebration.
“Tell ya, boys,” Parcells said the following morning. “Nothing beats winning. Nothing. It’s better than sex. It’s better than Christmas morning. It’s like all the Christmas mornings you’ve had wrapped up into one.”
A few hundred miles southeast of the Bahrain Peninsula near Saudi Arabia, the USS Theodore Roosevelt was churning through the Persian Gulf. At the precise moment that Scott Norwood’s game-winning attempt sailed wide right of the goalpost, it was early morning aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. That day, the “T.R.” and its crew of six thousand sailors would continue her first combat mission: supporting operations in Kuwait and Iraq.
