by Adam Lazarus
Less than an hour before Sunday’s kickoff, the team was introduced, one by one, to the crowd during the pregame festivities. Video of each player’s individual Super Bowl highlights appeared on the Sony JumboTron at Tampa Stadium.
“I was moved by my selection to this Silver Anniversary team because of the way we got here—through the fans,” Steelers defensive tackle “Mean” Joe Greene said. “This is probably the most special recognition I’ve ever gotten for my football skills because fans took the time to go out and vote.”
Several of Greene’s former Pittsburgh teammates stood with him during the ceremony, including five from the fabled “Steel Curtain” defense: L. C.
Greenwood, Jack Lambert, Jack Ham, Mel Blount, and Donnie Shell. In total, eight members of the 1970s Steelers dynasty (far more than any other franchise) were chosen for the silver-anniversary team. But only one of them actually came to Tampa Stadium that day to work.
Two wide receivers had been named to the all-time team. Although San Francisco’s Jerry Rice had played in just two Super Bowls, he owned both the single-game and career record for receiving yardage and touchdown catches. The MVP of Super Bowl XXIII was an easy choice for the all-time team. So was the other wide receiver selection, the Steelers’ Lynn Swann.
In Super Bowl IX, Pittsburgh faced the Minnesota Vikings at a chilly Tulane Stadium in New Orleans. A rookie from the University of Southern California, Swann did not catch a pass in the Steelers’ 16-6 victory. Neither did most of his teammates. Quarterback Terry Bradshaw completed just nine attempts, as running back Franco Harris and the Steel Curtain defense claimed their first-ever NFL championship.
The following season (1975), Swann emerged as one of the league’s premier receivers and a focal point of the Pittsburgh offense, leading the team in touchdowns, receiving yardage, and receptions. But when Pittsburgh repeated as conference champions the following January, it seemed likely—even before kickoff—that again Swann would go without a reception in the Super Bowl. He left the AFC Championship Game two weeks earlier on a stretcher: a concussion resulting from a defensive back’s crushing hit.
“I did not think I was gonna be able to play,” Swann told NFL Films in 2007. “I was certainly unsure. I had never sustained a concussion of that level. I was in the hospital for two or three days—wasn’t catching the ball extremely well at practice. Frankly, my confidence was a little bit low. And the doctors essentially left it up to me as to whether or not I felt that I could play the game.”
On game day, he elected to play, and in the Super Bowl’s tenth anniversary showdown, Swann stole the show. He caught four passes for 161 yards, and it was his fourth-quarter touchdown that proved the difference in Pittsburgh’s 21-17 victory over the Dallas Cowboys.
Swann’s statistics, impact on the victory, and return from injury earned him the Most Valuable Player Award. But it was how he caught those passes that forged an indelible place in American sports history. Each reception was a mesmerizing display of concentration and grace.
The first came adjacent to the sidelines, where he twisted high in the air and inconceivably brought both feet down in bounds. Next was the most famous: leaping over a defensive back, juggling the ball midair, and sprawling out to make the grab. But the pièce de résistance was a sixty-four-yard bomb down the middle that Swann settled under and made an over-the-shoulder grab with three minutes remaining in the game.
“I never had a day when I felt as loose as this in my life,” he told the press in the locker room afterward.
The Steelers returned to win another pair of Super Bowls at the end of the 1978 and 1979 seasons. In those two victories, he combined for twelve catches, 203 yards, and two touchdowns. Until Jerry Rice came along, Swann owned or shared the Super Bowl record for career catches, receiving yards, and touchdowns.
But Swann would have been on the field at Tampa Stadium for Super Bowl XXV even if he had not been selected to the silver-anniversary team. He was also chosen to fill a key position on another celebrated roster: ABC’s Super Bowl broadcast team.
During his playing career, Swann participated in ABC’s Wide World of Sports and The Superstars challenges, and delivered sideline commentary during one of the network’s Pro Bowl broadcasts. Upon retirement, the thirty-year-old joined ABC full-time in January 1983.
Throughout the decade, he served as an on-site reporter for the Olympics, United States Football League games, Triple Crown horse races, as well as the network’s weekly college football games. And as the sideline and halftime commentator for Monday Night Football, Swann appeared on prime-time television each week of the NFL season.
Not long before hustling over to midfield to be introduced as part of the silver-anniversary team, Swann delivered a live report for the Brent Musburger–hosted pregame show.
But ABC’s broadcast on Sunday would feature the voices of more than just one of the sport’s legends. Two more NFL greats—along with an iconic broadcaster—occupied the broadcast booth.
A twelve-year playing career with the Giants—highlighted by five appearances in the NFL title game and the league MVP during New York’s 1956 world championship season—earned halfback Frank Gifford a place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Gifford retired from football after the 1964 season, three years before the advent of the Super Bowl. Still, when the Packers and Chiefs met for the inaugural AFL-NFL title game (aka, Super Bowl I), Gifford was there as a play-by-play voice for CBS’ telecast. In 1971, he switched to ABC and became one-third of the famous Monday Night Football gang that featured Howard Cosell and Don Meredith.
Fifteen years after Gifford joined Monday Night Football, ABC revamped a lineup that had undergone several changes in recent seasons. Joe Namath and O. J. Simpson were replaced, and Gifford was paired with forty-two-year-old Al Michaels. Best known for coining the phrase “Do you believe in miracles?” to punctuate the U.S. Ice Hockey team’s victory over Russia in the 1980 Winter Olympics, Michaels was a versatile broadcaster who eventually became the only man to deliver play-by-play for the World Series, Super Bowl, NBA finals, and Stanley Cup finals. Beginning with the 1986 NFL season, he brought his customary enthusiasm to Monday Night Football.
A year later, ABC returned to the familiar three-man format. Dan Dierdorf, the perennial Pro Bowl lineman for the St. Louis Cardinals (and a Hall of Fame selection in 1996) joined Gifford and Michaels in the booth.
The three very different personalities eventually gelled, boosting television ratings.
“I think it took a little while for the three-announcer booth to come together,” the show’s producer, Ken Wolfe, said prior to Super Bowl XXV. “The three guys really enjoy each other now, and it comes across on the air. We’ve all grown.”
The trio passed their first Super Bowl test in January 1988: they kept viewers awake during the unwatchable second half of Washington’s 42-10 rout of Denver. Three years later, they eagerly awaited the next Super Bowl broadcast and hoped the game would be more competitive.
But when they arrived in Tampa to prepare for the Giants-Bills matchup, ABC’s star-studded broadcast team—just like everyone else that week—faced an extraordinary landscape.
“I’m having a hard time going to sleep every night,” Gifford said. “You’re holding your breath. I think that’s the feeling here. It is the Super Bowl. It is important. It’s important to play it and go on with our lives. But there will be a cloud hanging over the game. I feel a little peculiar, more than any game I’ve ever done.”
Almost immediately, once Super Bowl week began, whispers spread that—because of the Gulf War—perhaps the game should not be played.
On Monday, the annual commissioner’s party, two days before the game—which by 1991 cost more than $1 million—was canceled. So was Anheuser-Busch’s “Bud Bowl” party. Instead of chauffeuring celebrities and executives around town, limousines in Tampa Bay sat on lots. Postponing the game seemed to be the next logical step.
“[The] game ought to be canceled as a grand a
nd grave gesture of concern, of a spreading war in an age of nuclear weapons,” St. Petersburg Times columnist Mary Jo Melone wrote. “Maybe if we halted this thing America loves so, just once, the world could stop and ponder what it was doing to itself.”
Virtually anyone asked, at least by the press, whole-heartedly disagreed. Especially the principles: fans, players, coaches, league officials, even the president of the United States.
“Somebody asked me a while back about the Super Bowl. You think we ought to cancel the Super Bowl because of this situation?” President George H. W. Bush said at a White House press briefing four days before the game.
One, the war is a serious business and the nation is focused on it. But two, life goes on.
[The] boys and men and women in the gulf, they want to see this game go on . . . and this is priority: getting this war concluded properly. But we are not going to screech everything to a halt in terms of our domestic agenda. We’re not going to screech everything to a halt in terms of the recreational activities, and I cite the Super Bowl and I am not going to screech my life to a halt out of some fear about Saddam Hussein.
American soldiers and sailors serving in the Gulf wanted the game to continue as well.
“I don’t think at all that it was inappropriate to play the game,” said Air Force Master Sergeant Rick Fuller, who watched the kickoff from a military base at Dhahran International Airport in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. “A lot of people over there saw it as a real morale booster because it was something they could identify with—something that they were very familiar with and they were used to doing at that particular time of year.”
Many vowed to watch the game. And those few thousand soldiers and sailors would be doing so—as ABC News’ Judd Rose noted—into early morning, January 28, 1991: in the Arabia standard time zone (several hours ahead of eastern standard time), Super Bowl XXV kicked off Monday at 2:18 a.m. local time.
“Saddam has a history of hitting us right in the middle of something good,” one solider told Judd Rose at Camp Jack, an air base in Saudi Arabia.
“What happens if that happens?” Rose asked during a taped segment aired during halftime.
“Oh, put on our [gas] masks and hopefully just keep watching if it’s not too bad.”
By the time soldiers at Camp Jack or troops on patrol throughout the desert tuned in to the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network to hear the game, such threats had become commonplace. On Tuesday, one of Iraq’s Scud missiles slipped past the American Patriot missile system and hit an apartment building in Tel Aviv. Three Israelis died from heart attacks. American fighter jets shot down Iraqi planes and knocked out several bridges in Iraq, cutting off supplies. A few days later, Patriots intercepted seven Scuds launched at Tel Aviv and Haifa. It was the fifth attack in eight days.
Hussein’s strategy expanded beyond random, isolated Scud launchings. In the Kuwaiti city of Mina Ahmadi, Iraqi soldiers began pumping oil into the Persian Gulf. By game day, more than one hundred million gallons of oil filled the Gulf: the goal was to shut down Saudi Arabian desalinization plants and thereby ruin the American ally’s drinking water. The ten-mile-wide, thirty-five-mile-long oil-covered water also hindered U.S. naval operations in the region. During a conflict between the Iraqi patrol boats and U.S. vessels, the oil caught on fire. On Friday, American F-111s bombed the supply pipes in order to cut off the flow.
A ground war was not expected to commence for weeks, but U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers fired at one another along the Saudi Arabian–Kuwait border. Given that Hussein’s military owned more land mines than any other military in history—roughly five hundred thousand had already been laid according to U.S intelligence—soldiers on patrol lived in constant danger.
Respect for Americans risking their lives was a major part of the concern in the Super Bowl postponement debate—but not the only reason.
Across the country, citizens worried about the danger reaching the United States. Chemical warfare was a significant threat to the troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait: Iraqi Scud missiles might include warheads filled with biological hazards. But the Scuds could not reach across the Atlantic Ocean to hit the United States. Instead, Hussein extended the conflict beyond conventional boundaries.
Terrorist groups (it remains unclear if they were working in conjunction with Hussein) set off explosions at American and British banks in Greece. On January 19, a plot to bomb an American cultural center in Manila was thwarted. And although he spoke of a low-level threat within the United States, Assistant Director of the FBI William Baker acknowledged that “various terrorist groups have infrastructures in the United States” and that “all of these organizations have the capability of having contact from abroad and could carry out activity in our country.”
“At the time it was a very considerable fear,” said David Isby, a Washington-based defense and foreign-policy consultant.
It became much more so after the World Trade Center bombings some years later, even more so after 9/11. But there was a very real concern. The most important thing was that Saddam Hussein had some months before put out a public announcement, a call for acts of terrorism worldwide. And that’s not an inconsequential thing. . . . Saddam basically put his credibility at stake. To be a third-world dictator, if you call for worldwide terrorism in solidarity and the terrorists of the world blow you off, that doesn’t add to your credibility. So, the fact that he had gone up and done this, there was a great deal of expectation.
Many Americans were hesitant to attend churches and synagogues, open Federal Express packages, or go to public places like malls and shopping centers. On Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive, in front of the Louis Vuitton store, a bomb squad swooped in to defuse a suspicious-looking bag. (They were relieved to discover that the package contained a pillow.)
Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, prohibited both curbside check-ins and unattended vehicles. Only people with boarding passes were allowed access to the gates. At O’Hare and Midway in Chicago, all mailboxes, coin-operated newspaper racks, trashcans, and even ashtrays were removed. International travel fell drastically.
Non-metropolises also feared the worst. In North Carolina, some people flocked to G.I. Joe’s Army Surplus and the Quartermaster Company, as did many in Brentwood, Pennsylvania’s Bonn’s Outdoor Army and Navy Surplus Inc. There, they stocked up supplies; gas masks were the most popular item.
“Probably not since the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 have Americans felt a keener threat of calamity on American soil, a fear reinforced by televised images of Federal agents in gas masks practicing how they would combat terrorists at the Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., this Sunday, of armed guards closing off public access to the Birmingham Water Works in Alabama, and of new security rules at airports,” the New York Times reported that week.
According to a CBS/New York Times poll, 63 percent of Americans were “very concerned” about an impending terrorist attack.
The NFL and those in charge of preparations for Super Bowl Sunday could not ignore the growing concerns. Extreme security precautions were implemented throughout the week. A six-foot-high fence and concrete barriers surrounded the stadium to keep any truck or car loaded with explosives from crashing into the stadium.
“We really didn’t hear any threats until about the third day before the game,” recalled Jim Steeg, the NFL’s executive director of special events for twenty-six Super Bowls. “Then we heard through one of the intelligence security sources that somebody was going to steal a police car and load it with bombs and drive it into the side of the stadium. Everybody was kinda skeptical. And then on Saturday afternoon, a St. Petersburg police car was stolen.
. . . You didn’t hear a lot, but the people were concerned.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s antiterrorist SWAT team—armed with machine guns—patrolled around and atop the stadium. In total, more than twenty-five hundred police and private-security personnel also stalked the area. Tampa Police, U.S. A
rmy, and U.S. Coast Guard helicopters waited near the stadium in case unauthorized aircraft flew by the area. So did a U.S. Customs Blackhawk helicopter, the same model that soared across deserts in the Middle East. Even the Goodyear Blimp was denied access to all airspace within five miles of the game.
“A black helicopter came out of the north sometime in the second or first quarter,” recalled Steeg. “Everybody was worried about what it was and they couldn’t get ahold of the pilot to identify what it was. The story that I was told is that the SWAT guys zeroed and were ready to shoot the guy and all of a sudden the door opens up and they realize it was a guy with a camera. Or else they would have shot the guy down. They were deadly serious to say the least.”
Inside Tampa Stadium, as the broadcast team of Al Michaels, Frank Gifford, and Dan Dierdorf learned after a relaxing Saturday evening dinner together with their wives, the safety measures in place bordered on morbid.
“The three of us go into this room, and there’s some representative from the Tampa Police there,” Dierdorf recalled. “There’s also representatives of the FBI and one of the people there was from the Tampa SWAT team.”
The joint security team informed Gifford, Michaels, and Dierdorf of the FBI’s plan should terrorists attempt to take them hostage and hijack ABC’s live coverage. Throughout the entire game, atop the luxury boxes at Tampa Stadium, snipers were in position, aimed directly at the broadcast booth.
“They proceed to give us a little mini-lesson on how to be a hostage,” Dierdorf said.
On how to let all the air out of your lungs, collapse your shoulders, and shrink and try to make yourself as small as possible. It was during the middle of that that I’m looking at Al, and I’m looking at Frank and well aware that I am noticeably bigger. You can give me all the lectures in the world about how to make yourself smaller, there’s a limit there.