by Adam Lazarus
“The war actually started on the seventeenth of January and the Theodore Roosevelt was still steaming at thirty knots around the Saudi Peninsula to get into the Persian Gulf and arrived on the nineteenth of January and began to fly combat sorties immediately,” Admiral C. S. Abbot said in 2010. “We worked every day until the air war ended, which was essentially at the end of February. People felt very good about what they were doing.”
The ship’s commanding officer, then-Captain Abbot, knew that for most of his young sailors, this would be the first brush with combat. Worse yet, no one knew quite what to expect from the enemy as the ship cruised throughout the dangerous region. Ten days into the mission, Abbot decided to provide his officers and sailors with a small piece of home and devised a plan to let his men experience the ultimate taste of Americana (albeit, a day late): Super Bowl Sunday.
Although live television feeds were not standard in 1991, that did not discourage Abbot.
“There were probably sailors who were trying to determine the outcome of the game,” Abbot said. “But I think the crew, broadly speaking, was waiting until we could get the tape aboard and enjoy watching it through the closed-circuit TV system.”
Hundreds of television monitors were scattered throughout the ship. A videotape of Super Bowl XXV could be obtained, and the game could be transmitted through the closed-circuit television so crew members would be able to see the Giants face the Bills.
Abbot dispatched the ship’s public-affairs officer, Lieutenant Tom Van Leunen, to retrieve a video copy of the game. Supply runs between the T.R. and a base in Saudi Arabia were flown daily. So, several hours before kickoff, Van Leunen boarded one of the C-2 “Greyhounds” headed for Bahrain. There he would watch the game, inside the Armed Forces Radio and Television trailer, while a taped copy was made.
But simply showing the game to his crew was not the sole objective of Captain Abbot’s plan. He hoped that the crew might watch the game as other Americans had: captivated with suspense, unaware of the game’s outcome. To do that, outside communication needed to be suppressed. The ship’s closed-circuit radio was shut down, and updates from the action in Tampa were intercepted.
“Three times a day, we took one of our radio antennas and got a feed in of all the day’s news,” Lieutenant Tom Van Leunen recalled. “It was the old ticker, the old letter ticker. We still needed to get that because we still had to do the rest of the world news and sports for the crew. And we did that every night live. So we had one of the ship’s journalists who worked for me actually go up there, when the stuff was coming in and tear it off so the INTEL and COMS guys wouldn’t get it and send it around the whole ship.”
Van Leunen watched the game in the AFRT trailer and then flew back to the Theodore Roosevelt only to return and discover that news of the Giants 20-19 triumph had leaked through.
“There are some things you can’t stop. When you’ve got a crew of six thousand people, there are probably one hundred short-wave radios, those little portable short waves. It was routine that guys had those. You’re never gonna make an aircraft carrier, even in the middle of an ocean, information-free. Sailors are pretty good at getting around roadblocks.”
Nevertheless, a Super Bowl party still took place later that day. Through the closed-circuit television system, the game was screened in bunk rooms and offices. And on two of the mess decks, the tape flown in from Bahrain was projected onto a large television, and the crew viewed the game. Along with hot dogs, hamburgers, popcorn, and sodas, a large cake decorated to resemble a football field was served. Beer—O’Doul’s 0.5 percent-alcohol beer, a.k.a. “near beer”—was also provided.
“We tried to make it like they were sitting in the living room with their high school buds or their college buds,” the ship’s executive officer, Commander Ron Christenson said. “And I think it really helped.”
The game’s broadcast—throughout the ship’s closed circuit and on the mess decks—was such a comfort to the thousands of sailors that another screening took place later that day for the sailors who had been on duty at the time.
“When you go to sea for six months at that time [of war], those are the things you really miss,” Lieutenant Ron Christenson said. “You miss being with your family, but you also miss those things that you traditionally do, like watching a football game or a special football game like [the Super Bowl]. When you get to watch it . . . it’s very special, for the whole crew.”
[1]Although the term “AstroTurf” would eventually become synonymous with all artificial sports surfaces, Super Bowl V was played on PolyTurf, a product made by a rival company. Super Bowl VIII, played at Rice Stadium, would be the first played on AstroTurf.
12
Who Are the Champs Here, Anyway?
“There are occasions when a coach’s words—and even his eloquence—are meaningful to his players,” Marv Levy wrote years later. “This was not one of those times.”
Still, upon his arrival in the quiet, deflated Buffalo locker room, just minutes removed from the bitter end of Super Bowl XXV, Levy opted to address his team.
“Yet I knew that to refrain from all communication would have been a gesture that they could rightly interpret as a display of anger and disdain toward them. No feelings were further from my heart than those. And so I spoke briefly and sincerely.”
“There is not a loser in this room,” Levy told his players.
As Levy expected, his words were little consolation to the team. But soon, amid the sounds of players removing athletic tape, unstrapping shoulder pads, and filing into the showers, two distinct sentiments swirled through the visitors’ locker room beneath Tampa Stadium.
One after another, Bills players and coaches approached Scott Norwood, eager to console their kicker. They knew that his missed kick—no matter how long or how difficult—was destined to become the freeze-frame image of Super Bowl XXV and of Super Bowl defeats.
“His portrayal as some sort of a villain by media outside Buffalo couldn’t be more wrong,” Bill Polian said twenty years later. “It’s not only unfair, it’s disgraceful.”
The other forty-six Bills players in that locker room realized that the best way, the most honorable way, to try and ease Norwood’s pain was to share it. Accept it. Absorb it.
“I said, ‘Scott, keep your head up, that game should have never come down to a field goal,’” Will Wolford said. “You can never hang a loss on one play. Regardless if it’s a field goal attempt in the end or whatever it may be.”
In addition to privately reminding Norwood that this was a team loss, several players did so publicly.
“I remember Darryl Talley sitting up there, and Jim was there up at the podium; we had a bunch of guys that were up there answering questions,” said Mark Kelso. “Everyone has responsibility for the loss. It doesn’t fall on Scott’s shoulders; it doesn’t fall on anybody else’s shoulders. I missed a tackle on third down; I can remember saying that. Had that drive ended up in a field goal. . . . And I wasn’t the only one that missed it on that play, two or three others guys. I remember them all standing up and saying there were plays that we could have made that we didn’t make; and that was the most poignant, how unified we were as a team.”
“I’ll tell you this,” rookie defensive tackle Mike Lodish said. “There was no ‘Bickering Bills.’ No one pointed the finger at anybody. And I thought that was a testament to a lot of classy guys that had learned.”
For Norwood, his teammates’ words were not enough.
During the course of its first quarter century, the Super Bowl had featured several courageous performances by fearless performers.
Joe Namath’s guarantee in front of the Miami Touchdown Club prior to Super Bowl III projected a boldness never seen before (or since) in NFL history.
In Super Bowl XXII, Redskins quarterback Doug Williams’ return to the field—minutes after a hyperextended knee forced him out of the game—flashed extreme grit. Throwing a touchdown pass (his first of four during a 42-10
romp of the Denver Broncos) on his first play back from the injury only made Williams’ comeback that much more storybook.
Even Jeff Hostetler sniffing ammonia capsules, then retaking the field to endure another string of savage Buffalo hits, epitomized toughness.
But no player in NFL history ever displayed more courage and more dignity than Scott Norwood did in the moments following Super Bowl XXV.
Outside the Buffalo locker room, ABC’s Lynn Swann conducted separate live interviews with Levy and Jim Kelly. Both answered Swann’s questions with poise and honesty. After a glimpse into the victorious locker room—Brent Musburger’s interview with a grinning Lawrence Taylor—Swann returned on camera to speak with Norwood.
“I know your teammates do appreciate the effort, they’re not down on you, they want you to come back and play strong,” Swann stated to Norwood. “It’s a tough time to go through. . . . You did a good job.”
“Thanks Lynn. Again, I missed an opportunity for this football team. I feel badly, let a lot of people down,” Norwood said. “But as you said, you realize in this profession that you’ve got to come back off of times like this, and I’m certain I’ll do that.”
The ABC audience saw the heart-wrenching, eighty-second interview, then moved on. Some viewers turned off the television and went ahead with the rest of their lives. Others stayed tuned-in to see more from the victorious Giants’ locker room (after the network inexplicably cut to the series premier of their short-lived sitcom Davis Rules, starring Jonathan Winters and Randy Quaid).
Norwood continued to address the media.
“I asked him a couple times, if he’d had enough,” special teams coach Bruce DeHaven said. “No, he wanted to answer all the questions. I felt like in that situation it would have been so easy for him to have ducked in and out of the locker room and just went on his way and not answered the questions. And he answered every one of them as long as someone wanted to ask.
“When we adopted our son a few years later,” DeHaven said. “His middle name is ‘Scott’ and that is derived from Scott Norwood. I just felt like some day I’d be able to tell my son, ‘You’re named for a guy that suffered one of the greatest defeats you could have in a sporting event, and the loss was put on him, and he conducted himself with such incredible grace that, well, this is a great lesson on how you want to conduct yourself as you go through life.”
Each time DeHaven approached the Bills kicker, Norwood rebuked him and turned back to give his interviewer a reflective, thoughtful response.
“I’m sure it will never get to a point where I’ll ever forget it,” he said. “It’s something I know I’ll carry with me in the future, but when I take future kicks, this won’t matter. I’ll just try to give each one of my best. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees out there.”
For many of Norwood’s teammates, the future was also on their minds. Confident that that night in Tampa would not be their last taste of championship football, they looked ahead to training camp in July, the 1991 regular season, and a berth in Super Bowl XXVI to be played at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis.
“To say it’s very disappointing is an understatement,” said linebacker Ray Bentley. “But life will go on. It’s just a football game. We’re already talking about coming back. We know now what it takes to get here and what it takes to win here. We’ve already got our sights set on Minnesota.”
Not every Bills player shared those feelings of optimism—at least not in the minutes and hours following the narrowest defeat in Super Bowl history.
“I was really physically sick afterwards. I felt awful because I had been there since ‘86, and I knew what it took to get there,” Steve Tasker said. “It seemed to me like we had climbed Mount Everest and been about ready to plant the flag in the top of it, and we slide all the way to the bottom. We had to start over again.”
Seventy-two-year-old Bills owner Ralph Wilson had waited a quarter century just to see his team reach the Super Bowl. He was just as forlorn as Buffalo’s players and coaches; thoughts of a repeat journey were too exhausting and of little comfort.
“Who knows what’s going to happen next year,” Wilson said the following morning. “I don’t know whether we’re going to be back in the Super Bowl next year. We may never get back again. That’s just the nature of this crazy game.”
Beside the Giants’ feuding co-owners Wellington and Tim Mara, and General Manager George Young, Bill Parcells accepted the Lombardi Trophy from Commissioner Tagliabue.
“I realized a long time ago that God’s playing in some of these games,” Parcells told ABC’s Brent Musburger. “And he was on our side today. I thought both teams were valiant. I thought we played as well as we could. I don’t think there’s too much to choose between the two teams. If we played tomorrow, they’d probably win 20-19. But I’m very proud of my guys.”
Super Bowl championship tee shirts and hats circulated the Giants’ locker room, as did dozens of reporters, interviewing anyone and everyone. Lawrence Taylor, Carl Banks, Pepper Johnson, and the rest of the Giants defense explained how they limited the Bills offense to just seventeen points. Members of the Giants offensive line talked about dominating the line of scrimmage during the third quarter.
Stephen Baker gave a shout-out to his seventh-grade history teacher, Mr. Hughsley, the man who told him he would never grow up to be a football player. Matt Bahr talked about his kicking (what amounted to be) the game-winning field goal for a second-straight week. He then expressed empathy for Scott Norwood.
“I wanted anything else to happen than for Scott to miss that kick, simply because it would’ve taken on and did take on the focus that it seemed the whole game. Really a great game on both sides of the ball, players making tremendous plays all over the field, all during the game—to have that reduced to the sentence of a missed kick is a disservice to everyone who played in the game and unfair to Scotty,” Bahr said years later.
“So even at that [the end of the game], I was standing there on the sidelines with my arms crossed hoping for a fumble, an interception, a bad snap, a bad hold, anything than for him to have the stigma of a missed kick. . . . Unfortunately, that’s kinda the way it turned out. Turned out good for us.”
But the obvious choices for interviews were the pair of former backups who guided the Giants to victory. Holding his two boys, Jason and Justin, one in each arm, and with his pregnant wife Vicky next to him, Jeff Hostetler spoke about the nasty hits he took, his streak of marvelous third-down completions, and becoming an unlikely Super Bowl legend.
“Everybody wrote us off, and we kept fighting, stayed together, hung tough, and this is just a great victory for us,” he told one reporter. “I’ve heard so many guys say that I’d never be able to do it, and, thank the Lord, it’s done and nobody can take it away.”
Hostetler finished the game with twenty completions in thirty-two attempts, 222 yards passing, and the touchdown pass to Stephen Baker. His string of eight consecutive third-down completions, along with the brilliant second-half performance (eleven for fourteen, 117 yards), earned him four-and-a-half votes for the Most Valuable Player Award. But Ottis Anderson’s go-ahead touchdown and 102 yards on twenty-one carries earned him seven-and-a-half votes. The inaugural Pete Rozelle Trophy, which came with a brand new convertible, went to the thirty-four-year-old veteran. [1]
“How he was never the MVP of the Super Bowl is beyond my wildest dreams,” Don Nehlen said years later. “That was the biggest farce. And I have nothing against that Ottis [Anderson], ’cause he played very well. But without Jeff Hostetler, the New York Giants do not win that Super Bowl game. That I’m sure of.”
Other, less-biased observers agreed with Hostetler’s father-in-law.
“Hostetler, of course, deserved the award,” John Markon of the Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote. “As for why he didn’t get it, we can only surmise that there’s a reluctance to bestow a major award on a player with only minor credentials. If the inju
red Phil Simms had played the same game as Hostetler, Simms would be tooling in that Buick Reatta today.”
Despite second-guessers, the choice of Anderson made sense. The Giants won the Super Bowl by executing—to near perfection—their ball-control, run-heavy game plan. Anderson’s punishing rushes allowed the Giants to eat up time and consistently gain yards via the play-action pass. (Still, at least one columnist suggested the entire New York offensive line should win the award.)
The MVP Trophy and the car (which General Motors announced five weeks later was to be discontinued due to poor sales) were not the most significant accolades lavished upon Anderson that evening. Words from his head coach carried much more weight than those material objects.
“He’s going to Canton (the Pro Football Hall of Fame),” Parcells told reporters. “I don’t see how they can keep the kid out. He’s got too many pelts on his horse. The mettle is the test of time and he’s met it. He’s one of the top eight rushers in the history of this league. He’s got to go. He’s got to go.”
“They brought Parcells into the interview tent,” recalled Ray Didinger.
[I remember] asking him about Anderson; and Parcells, the affection that he showed for Anderson when he began talking about him—the respect and the affection that he showed for him.
He talked about him differently than he talked about other players. You could tell that he really admired the guy. He admired his career; he admired the fact that when Ottis came from St. Louis to the Giants, he had a couple of years where he basically didn’t play almost. And he went from being a star in St. Louis to being this forgotten man in the corner of the locker room with the Giants.
And apparently he never complained about it. I guess he accepted the fact that that was his role, and he went out and practiced hard every day and was a good team guy, and whatever they asked him to do, he did. And kinda just waited his turn. And when they needed him and they gave him the ball, he played great, to the point where he’s the MVP of the Super Bowl. The way Parcells—who can be sort of flippant in talking about even his own players—there was just a different tone in his talking about Ottis Anderson. I picked up on it. You just got the feeling he genuinely liked this guy and respected what he had been to that team. And what a pro he was.
