Super Bowl Monday

by Adam Lazarus

  Although neither would completely follow in his father’s footsteps, the two youngest boys eventually discovered the same thrill of historic victory felt by Walter Bahr in June 1950.

  “[Growing up] we actually pretended we were in the World Cup,” Matt Bahr said. “Soccer gave us everything we have in football.”

  Within a few years of leaving Penn State, each Bahr had earned Super Bowl rings, not a grip of the FIFA World Cup Trophy. Chris kicked two field goals and three extra points in the Oakland Raiders’ 27-10 victory over Philadelphia in Super Bowl XV. Three years later, his eight points (five PATs and a field goal) contributed to the Raiders’ 38-9 blowout of Washington in Super Bowl XVIII.

  A poor 1989 campaign prompted the San Diego Chargers to release Chris. The following August, his younger brother Matt—the seven-year incumbent kicker for the Cleveland Browns—tried to find him a job kicking for the New York Giants.

  “I can remember it like it was yesterday,” later said Giants Director of Personnel Tim Rooney. “Basically, the gist of what he said was, ‘Tim, if you’re looking for a kicker anytime this year, how about considering my brother Chris, please?’ I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t pay that much attention to him. I remember I nodded, because I didn’t want the kid to think I was being ignorant or anything. [But] I didn’t really figure we’d need another kicker this season.”

  A month later, both Bahrs were unemployed until the Giants signed Matt in September 1990. And because the mid-season replacement had accounted for every point in the Giants’ NFC Championship Game victory over San Francisco—including the last-second forty-two-yarder—Bahr drew a lot of attention during the week of Super Bowl XXV.

  “Because it was a game-winning field goal, both kickers were asked invariably, ‘Do you want the Super Bowl to come down to a field goal?’” Bahr recalled years later. “And my answer always was, ‘Hell No! I want to win by two touchdowns. It’s much more fun winning by a bunch, then you can enjoy the game. Things get pretty tense when it’s last second.’”

  Bahr’s counterpart on Super Bowl Sunday, Scott Norwood, also grew up in a professional sports family. Del Norwood pitched for San Jose of the California League in the early 1950s. The Boston Red Sox invited “Red” to spring training in March 1954, and he allowed just one single in three innings during an exhibition game against the reigning World Series Champion New York Yankees. After ending his playing career in 1959 as part of the Washington Senators farm team in Charlotte, Del Norwood managed for the Minnesota Twins Appalachian Rookie League team in Wytheville, Virginia. One of his first players was future all-star Tony Oliva. In the mid-1960s, Norwood left the pros to teach and coach baseball at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington.

  Del’s eldest son, Steve, went on to pitch for the University of Virginia and, in 1978, was drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers organization, with whom he spent the next four seasons, pitching for the Newark Co-Pilots and Burlington Bees. Daughter Sandra was also a fine basketball, soccer, and field-hockey player at Thomas Jefferson High in Alexandria.

  Although Scott, the middle child, was also talented at baseball, soccer was his true passion.

  “[Football] wasn’t a dream as I was growing up,” he said years later. “I was dreaming about playing in the World Cup.”

  Twice Norwood earned all-metropolitan honors as a sweeper for the Colonials. But as a senior, Jefferson High’s football coach approached him about becoming a placekicker. Hoping to contribute where needed, he became a two-sport athlete during the fall season.

  Father and son worked together to turn Scott into a reliable soccer-style kicker, and beginning in 1978, Norwood was a two-sport athlete for Division I-AA James Madison University. As a freshman, he kicked the game-winning field goal against Mars Hill on a Saturday, drove to Baltimore with his parents, then scored the winning goal in a match with St. Peter’s College. That winter, Norwood quit soccer to focus on placekicking.

  “I gave up soccer because I thought I had leveled off,” said Norwood, whose five goals as a freshman ranked third on the Dukes soccer team. “I didn’t think I’d get much better. I had watched football and enjoyed it.”

  During his first year, Norwood shared the kicking duties with Joe Showker, then took over full time for the 1979 season.

  “He’s capable of hitting anything from 55 yards and in,” Dukes head coach Challace McMillin said about the five-foot, eight-inch sophomore, “and he’s got excellent accuracy from 40 yards in.”

  Norwood was a preseason all-American prior to his senior year. Applying visualization and relaxation methods to his pre-kick routine helped immensely.

  “I really began to feel settled at the end of last season. I’ve just gotten a lot of practice, that’s the main thing. I not only have practiced physically, but I’ve also practiced mentally. A lot depends on your mental attitude,” Norwood said as a junior. “I feel I can be successful consistently from the 40-yard line and in when I’m kicking well and coming through the ball. When you get out farther, you think about kicking the ball hard and that takes away from other things.”

  On November 22, 1981, the Dukes took on the host East Tennessee State Buccaneers at the “mini dome” of Memorial Center Field. In his final college game, Norwood’s twenty-yarder with nine seconds left broke a 14-14 tie and gave James Madison its first victory over a Division I school since switching to I-AA in 1980.

  That kick was not the last game-winner for the future professional. Although the Atlanta Falcons signed Norwood out of college, he was cut prior to the 1982 season. He caught on with the Birmingham Stallions of the USFL and, as a rookie, set a league record with five goals against Herschel Walker’s New Jersey Generals. In Week Three of the 1984 season, however, a roughing-the-kicker penalty by a Pittsburgh Maulers defender injured his knee, and he missed the remainder of the schedule.

  Rehab and diligent practice back home in Virginia with his father rejuvenated his kicking stroke, and the Bills invited him to their training camp in the summer of 1985. There, he beat out nine others to gain the starting job.

  His teammates immediately liked their shy, soft-spoken kicker; and not just because he accounted for every point the Bills scored in the opening two weeks (four total field goals in losses to San Diego and the New York Jets) of the 1985 Season.

  “Scott was just a guy who showed up every day, worked his butt off, did everything he was told, didn’t cause any problems, was a nice guy, and did his thing,” said John Kidd, Buffalo’s punter and holder for placekickers from 1984 to 1989. “And he was really good at it. He worked really hard at being the best kickoff guy that he could be, and really trying to do everything field position–wise to help the team win. And he was an accurate field-goal kicker with a really good leg and handled the conditions in Buffalo really well.”

  As the Bills began to mold a championship-caliber team in the later part of the decade, Norwood was a key contributor to the success. An overtime field goal in Week Six of the 1987 season snapped a six-game losing streak against division-rival Miami. An exuberant Norwood jumped into the arms of teammate Steve Tasker.

  The next season—the precise time that the Bills morphed into a contender—Norwood was the conference’s best kicker. A pair of overtime winners—a last-second forty-one-yarder to defeat New England, and two field goals in the final quarter of Buffalo’s 9-6 comeback over Miami—helped produce four of their franchise-record twelve victories. In late November against the Jets, his thirty-yard kick in overtime clinched the AFC East title.

  “In 1988, we finished 12-4 and New England finished 10-6,” Bills special teams coach Bruce DeHaven recalled. “If he doesn’t hit those field goals, New England finishes 12-4 and we’re 10-6, and they go into the playoffs.”

  That string of clutch performances, along with an NFL-best thirty-two field goals and 129 points, earned Norwood a spot on the all-pro team and a trip to Honolulu for the Pro Bowl. The following season, Buffalo repeated as division champions, and again, Norwood finis
hed among the league’s best in points and field goals. That year, he surpassed O. J. Simpson as the team’s all-time leading scorer.

  But punter John Kidd’s off-season departure meant a new holder for Norwood: backup quarterback Frank Reich. For a meticulous and nuanced person like Norwood, the drastic change had a tremendous effect. He missed six field goals and two extra points in the first six games of the 1990 season.

  With the help of his father, who attended all his games to observe his son’s technique from the stands with a pair of binoculars, Norwood recognized and corrected a flaw in his approach.

  “You set yourself up for failure if your angle is too shallow, if you’re not out far enough,” he said. “If you start out straight, your hips have only one way to go, and it sets you up for a hook, whereas if I’m over more, the hips can’t go through that far. It takes a few misses like that to come up with such an evaluation.”

  It was no wonder that he had such an elaborate explanation for his struggles: Norwood was a perfectionist. Teammates playfully teased him for a few of his habits. He brushed his teeth religiously, three, four times, at the stadium on game day. He also shaved and combed his hair before each practice and carried a detailed appointment book everywhere he went.

  “He’s always right on time for team meetings, and he’s so organized and clean,” Steve Tasker said. “I roped his locker off one day with tape and put a sign on it that said, ‘A clean locker is a sign of a sick man.’ I’m all over him about that. You look at him and think ‘Now that’s a guy my mom would really be proud of.’ His mom has to look at him and just beam.”

  And his exactness translated onto the field.

  “He’s very picky about things,” Frank Reich said, “especially the way I hold for him. It’s like if you put the ball down and you miss the spot by an eighth of an inch, it’s like ‘Frank, you missed the spot by an eighth of an inch.’ But that’s good. You shoot for perfection and then your margin for error, I think, becomes less if you really focus on those things.”

  Despite the inconsistencies, his teammates and the coaching staff showed endless confidence in their kicker.

  “If I had to have someone in the NFL kick a field goal to get us into the play-offs tomorrow,” DeHaven said in October 1990, “Scott Norwood is the guy I’d want kicking it, regardless of what’s happened in recent weeks. There isn’t a kicker in the league who hasn’t had a time when he’s struggled a bit.”

  DeHaven knew that a few misses wouldn’t affect his veteran placekicker.

  “He had the perfect personality for a kicker,” DeHaven said in 2010.

  He just never gets very high or very low. I remember him telling me one time, we’d been someplace and he noticed how the other kicker was setting his tee up on kickoffs, that he was somehow managing to get just a little bit extra height out of placing the ball there. [Scott] said, “I can’t tell you how excited I am about that.” I said, “Well I’m glad you told me that,” ’cause I couldn’t have told. When Scott was really excited, you wouldn’t have noticed. And I think that always helped him as a kicker—that he had such a level emotional state about him.

  Having analyzed and resolved his early season kicking woes, Norwood returned to his reliable form. Beginning in Week Eight, he made thirty-four consecutive extra points and ten field goals in thirteen attempts. He didn’t miss a single kick in the Bills’ last three regular-season games and the playoff victory over Miami—all but one of those was played outside in cold, wintery Buffalo.

  “I was in a little slump. I missed some early in the season, and the fans got on me. When I started making my kicks again, the fans got behind me. They know I can do the job. Things like that just happen in this game,” Norwood said. “It was never anything mental. It was just mechanics. With a new holder, it takes a little while to gel, to get to know each other and to communicate. It’s not something that happens overnight.”

  When the Bills arrived in Tampa, Norwood had solid kicking workouts on the natural grass at the Buccaneers’ practice facility. And in sharp contrast to Matt Bahr, his Super Bowl counterpart, Scott Norwood approached the greatest challenge a kicker could possibly face, with his customary confidence.

  “Now that I’m in the Super Bowl, I’ve had a mental picture of winning the game. It could happen,” Norwood said during Super Bowl week. “It would be an exciting opportunity. I’m confident in any situation. I’m prepared to take advantage of any opportunity I’m given. I look forward to a chance to win the game, but I don’t want to make it too nerve-wracking for my teammates.”

  [1]A day after making that statement, Talley was added to the Pro Bowl roster: Art Shell, the head coach of the AFC squad, added Talley as a “need player,” an appointment made at the coach’s discretion.

  6

  Super Sunday

  Two late-night pieces of key lime pie probably were not responsible for keeping Stephen Baker awake past midnight on Sunday morning January 27, 1991. He had eaten the Hyatt’s room-service dessert every evening since arriving in Tampa as a reward for sharp practices each day. Rather than sweets, butterflies in his stomach (like many of his teammates) prevented the Giants’ four-year veteran from falling asleep.

  Waiting to digest the traditional family vice—“My name is Baker, so I like baked goods”—he found ways to keep occupied. For the long road trip, the twenty-five-year-old had packed his Sega Genesis and a popular video game, the original John Madden Football.

  “That video game is big now, and it was big back then. Graphics weren’t as good, but I used to take my video game on the road with me,” Baker said two decades later. “I played Giants versus the Bills on there. Of course we won.”

  Baker eventually caught some sleep the next morning: with kickoff not until 6:18 p.m., he could afford to. He awoke several hours before the team bus left for Tampa Stadium and phoned his Alexander Hamilton (Los Angeles) high school football coach and his West Los Angeles junior college track coach, each a major influence in his career.

  “It just makes you reminisce, like what it took to get to that point,” he said. “You thank a lot of people for getting you there.”

  While Baker took advantage of the hotel’s complementary long-distance calls, the rest of New York’s roster and coaching staff tried to fill the morning as well. The team bus didn’t leave the Hyatt until roughly noon.

  “I hate waiting,” Bill Parcells told a reporter, while sipping coffee in the lobby with his high school basketball coach Mickey Corcoran and Giants veteran Matt Cavanaugh. “Every game should be at 1 o’clock in the afternoon.”

  Three miles down the road at the Hilton, Bills players attended chapel services, mingled with friends and family, or just killed time before eating their pregame meal of “spaghetti, baked potatoes, and other foods high in carbohydrates.” Late in the morning, their team bus left.

  “The ride to the stadium was unbelievably moving,” Bill Polian remembered. “We took that same route and had a police escort, obviously, and we were moving slowly. And both sides of Dale Mabry Boulevard were lined with Bills fans who, it was obvious after a little bit, had come out to watch the buses go by. Now they weren’t tailgating; they weren’t in the parking lot; they were out there to watch the buses go by. And they had signs, and they were waving and cheering; it was just incredibly emotional.”

  Giants (several wearing white tee shirts that read “Show No Mercy”) and Bills players got off their respective buses and headed into the locker rooms to relax, tape up, and suit up. Others walked across the grass at Tampa Stadium, in an attempt to burn off nervous energy.

  As players dressed, members of both teams’ coaching staffs—such as Bill Belichick and linebackers coach Al Groh—surveyed the field and discussed last-minute details.

  “I told Charlie and Rac that we’ll get together and go in there and go over it,” Belichick said to Groh.

  “I talked to Banks and Lawrence, and I’m gonna talk to Pepper here in a minute that we’re probably gonna open in
the dime,” said Groh. “What I want to make sure of is that those two inside guys have the proper pad fit, ’cause they have the gap all by themselves this week.”

  “Right, okay,” Belichick acknowledged.

  While Belichick, Groh, Rac (defensive line coach Romeo Crennel), Charlie (special assistant Charlie Weis), and the rest of the defensive staff met in the locker room, a few Giants and Bills exited the players’ tunnel: kickers and other specialists at 4:45, the full team ten minutes later.

  Their forty-five-minute warm-up and run-through finished, all players and coaches were ordered off the field at 5:35 so the pregame entertainment could begin: Up with People, and members of The Temptations and Three Dog Night, performed for ten minutes.

  For the millions at home that tuned in to ABC to see football, not a concert, the next segment of the pregame show was for them.

  Long before the Bills and Giants earned the right to play for the world championship, one team had already been invited to appear that day at Tampa Stadium.

  The twenty-fifth installment of the Super Bowl was a ready-made milestone. To celebrate the first quarter century of the championship, an all-time Super Bowl team was selected, beginning in the summer of 1990. A group of media members and league officials who had witnessed every Super Bowl named 105 of the game’s greatest players and coaches for the honorary squad. Over one million fans voted on the nominees throughout the NFL season and in the end, 25 players were chosen.

  “First of all, this was very surprising to me,” said Willie Wood, the Packers great safety. “I didn’t think we old-timers had a chance to be on a team like this. I figured people kind of forgot about us.”

  On the day before Super Bowl XXV, the team was honored during Tampa’s annual Bamboleo Festival, an African-Cuban themed celebration featuring floats, bands, and dancing. Roughly 150,000 people stood in cold weather and light rain to watch the two-and-a-half-mile parade down Bayshore Boulevard. Canceled appearances by Miss USA, Chuck Norris, and Chita Rivera went unnoticed by football fans thrilled to see Larry Csonka and Mike Singletary pass by in Buick convertibles.