Super Bowl Monday

by Adam Lazarus

  So I’m thinking to myself, I can just hear them at the press conference: “That Dan was a hell of a guy. It’s a shame that he just happened to be so much bigger than the two of us.” I’m not gonna lie . . . that was sobering.

  Another contingency plan affected far more people than those three celebrities in the broadcast booth. The Super Bowl, the quintessentially decadent American extravaganza, seemed a likely target should Hussein’s public call inspire terrorism.

  “It was pretty hard not to get the sense that we were going to have something happen,” said Dr. Ricardo Martinez, the NFL’s senior medical advisor. “Not necessarily inside the stadium, but I couldn’t believe that somebody was going to let that [game] go by without making their point. My belief was that it would be something outside the stadium.”

  In addition to patrolling the sidelines during Super Bowl XXV in order to direct any emergency responses among fire, police, medical, FBI, and the like, Dr. Martinez had another daunting task that week in Tampa. It was his job to acquire the antidote should a terrorist attack involve sarin (or nerve) gas.

  That area of Florida was known for drug trafficking: planes coming in and out all the time underneath the radar. You got an airport one hundred yards, two hundred yards away [from Tampa Stadium]. All they have to do is put some stuff in the back of a plane, fly up, and fly in. That’s a very real threat. When you talk about sarin, this is not a nuclear weapon. You can make this chemical; you can buy versions of it most anywhere. We use this type of chemical to kill roaches. . . . It’s not like this is a really hard chemical to get. You just have to have a lot of it.

  In case of such an attack—and the organophosphate poisoning that would befall victims—an atropine injection was needed to combat the poison. The NFL purchased all the available atropine not reserved for the military. Those thousands of injection pens were stored inside Tampa Stadium, or in the pockets of medical staff, security supervisors, and usher captains.

  “We tend to forget but it was a seminal moment in mass care and mass events. It transformed it,” said Martinez, an emergency room physician at Stanford University in 1991. “I thought we were going to get hit. I would have never considered a rocket coming in or anything like that. But having seen threat reports occur every day and seeing how low the threshold was to be a player . . . we were sitting ducks. With all respect to the Blackhawk [helicopter], they weren’t taking anybody down. They have a hard time taking down the guys flying [planes] with banners. To me, it was a perfect way for someone to do great damage.”

  Martinez and the other health and safety personnel were just as concerned with the chaos that would inevitably follow that type of attack. A stampede during the hysteric exodus might be just as life threatening as the chemical warfare. Evacuation plans inside and around the Super Bowl site were paramount to the safety precautions. But before the crowd of more than seventy thousand people could even get into the stadium, they had to pass through security.

  “That Super Bowl was a bit of a stand-alone situation, because the Gulf War came up, we went to war, we had to secure the stadium,” said Jerry Anderson, the NFL’s architectural advisor for the Super Bowl since 1983. “We did not go back to that level until 9/11. What it did, though, was start the thinking: what does it take to secure and then respond to a mass threat? And there were things we never contemplated before in a serious manner.”

  X-ray machines, metal detectors, and security personnel patting people down guarded each of the sixty-eight gates. Cameras, camcorders, televisions, radios, beepers, and cell phones were all prohibited. Any bags or purses brought in by spectators were searched twice: first when they entered a bag-check area, and again when presenting tickets to the game. Even upon exiting their respective buses and approaching the locker rooms, all players and their equipment bags were subject to inspection by bomb-sniffing dogs.

  “We’ve always had some presence for rapid response, but the degree of this was greatly enhanced,” said Anderson, who has also served as an advisor for several Olympics and World Cup events.

  It was a pivotal moment because I think it changed how people were thinking about a mass-event situation with the new threat of terrorism as opposed to cults, criminal activity that we’d seen in the past. . . . I found it real interesting how we had to respond after 9/11 because, fortunately, we were already plugged in with the federal government because of the Salt Lake Olympics, and what happened with the NFL came so fast and furious and it was a brilliant plan. But it was a good thing that [Super Bowl XXV] had already paved the way for that.

  The extra screening may have been a hassle and a reminder of the danger—“Usually, Americans don’t take to being searched or stopped,” Tampa policeman Brian Seely said on game day—but it was also a comfort.

  “I’m real glad to see all the security,” said Harold Arlen of Bridgewater, New Jersey. “The more the better. I was kind of worried about coming to the game in the beginning. This may be the safest place in the world today.”

  Eventually, the lines became extremely long, and the men and women in bright yellow jackets reading “Security” hurried their pace.

  “It’s just taking too long,” a Tampa officer said an hour into working the gate. “They’d never get the crowd in on time, so they just stopped being as thorough with the metal detectors.”

  Roughly an hour before kickoff, most of the spectators who paid $150 face value for their tickets had entered the stadium. And for their patience (few incidents between irritable fans and security personnel were reported), each spectator was given a small reward upon passing the turnstile: a four-inch-by-six-inch American flag.

  As the tens of thousands began to settle into their seats, at precisely 6 p.m., the Bills players and coaching staff vacated their locker room—presumably, Jim Kelly had already thrown up— then stopped at the base of the opening adjacent to the field.

  Introduced by Al Michaels, a cluster of Bills sprinted onto the field to an equal chorus of boos and cheers. They were followed by the team’s starting defensive lineup and head coach Marv Levy. One by one, they jogged through a channel formed by the Bills’ cheerleaders (the Buffalo “Jills”). Next, the Giants’ eleven offensive starters and head coach Bill Parcells were announced.

  “Running out of that tunnel [sic], fellas, I can’t explain it,” said Parcells, “but it’s euphoria.”

  Kickoff was now only minutes away. But for Parcells and his Giants, Levy and his Bills, the 73,618 people in their seats, and the millions more watching at home, the euphoria of Super Bowl Sunday was momentarily preempted.

  “And now to honor America,” Frank Gifford called into the public address system, “especially the brave men and women serving our nation in the Persian Gulf and throughout the world, please join in the singing of our national anthem.”

  Along both sides of the field’s twenty-five-yard lines, American soldiers and sailors stood, either holding giant flags of foreign allies or, at attention, saluting their Stars and Stripes. At midfield, a group of children and teenagers waited to unfold umbrellas that, once opened, would form an enormous American flag. And in front of the umbrella-toting flag bearers, the Florida Orchestra, under the direction of Maestro Jahja Ling, held basses, cellos, violins, and other instruments.

  There were hundreds of people down on the football field, including more than two hundred players, coaches, trainers, and executives, aligned across their respective sidelines. But the eyes of everyone were locked on the woman at midfield.

  “It was the most electric moment that I’ve ever seen in sports,” Frank Gifford later said. “We come together like no other country in the history of civilization. We’ve proven that over and over.”

  Dressed in a white sweatsuit with a touch of red and blue fabric, Grammy Award–winning singer Whitney Houston stood atop a small wooden platform. And over the next one minute and fifty-five seconds, Houston delivered the most graceful, inspiring, goose bump–inducing rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” of all
time.

  “I keep pride inside when I think about the day that I saw Whitney Houston singing the national anthem when our son was so far away,” remembered Martha Weaver, the mother of a navy man at sea. “Pride that he was part of what she was singing about: freedom for our nation, and not only for our nation, but for our nation helping other people who are in need.”

  Just as Houston belted out the final note of the performance, four F-16 jets—out of the Fifty-sixth Tactical Training Wing at MacDill Air Force Base—soared above the crowd.

  “We were in white with blue numbers and red helmets. The Giants had blue jerseys and with white pants and red piping on their helmet so everything was red, white, and blue,” Steve Tasker recalled. “She hit the last note of that anthem, then I turn around and the official I’m standing next to is in tears. Marv is wiping tears, and Jim [Kelly]. I look around and everybody in the stadium has got a flag in one hand, is wiping tears out of their eyes with the other.”

  All week long, stark contrasts between the Bills and Giants consumed the media’s attention. Buffalo’s offense was quick, explosive, and fast; New York’s was traditional, methodical, and patient. Kelly, Thomas, Bruce Smith were all new Super Bowl faces; the Giants had been here before.

  Off the field, the franchises projected very different personas: seven-point favorites, the Bills emitted a brash, even cocky, attitude; the Giants relished the role of the underdog lying in the weeds. Despite residing in the same state, even the cities represented by the franchises seemed to be polar opposites.

  But for all the differences, in the final moments leading up to the kickoff of Super Bowl XXV, nothing separated the two teams.

  “Here we are big football players,” Stephen Baker remembered, “I had to look around and see if it was OK to cry. And I saw [Giants guard] William Roberts—one of the biggest guys on the team—he was crying. Now, I was like, ‘It’s OK to cry.’”

  “It just made you proud to be an American, knowing that here we are, playing this big game, and our troops are over there fighting for us. When those F-16s flew over, it just made you feel good. Everybody shed a tear. And then after that, it was time to play.”

  7

  The First Thirty Minutes

  The surreal, patriotic scene of Whitney Houston and the jet flyover having disappeared in a matter of minutes, football returned to Tampa Stadium. Just after 6:15 p.m., Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks stood on one side of the freshly painted Super Bowl XXV logo at midfield. Buffalo captains Mark Kelso, Kent Hull, Steve Tasker, Andre Reed, and Darryl Talley waited opposite them.

  Walking out to join the group of Pro Bowlers and future Hall of Famers was a sharply dressed elderly gentleman. His hands crossed, resting at his waist, the sixty-four-year-old looked modest, even uncomfortable, standing center stage with the eyes of the world upon him. But the opening moments to the Super Bowl’s quarter-century celebration deserved the presence of Alvin Ray “Pete” Rozelle.

  From the game’s bold moniker to the grand and occasionally gaudy halftime performances, Rozelle invented the Super Bowl. As commissioner for twenty-nine years, he expanded the NFL financially and geographically far beyond anyone’s imagination. With the proclamation of the annual late-January holiday, the Super Bowl became the most important event on the annual sporting calendar.

  In November 1989, Rozelle stepped down as league commissioner, a post he had held since 1960. So when San Francisco crushed Denver in Super Bowl XXIV, for the first time ever, Rozelle was not inside the winning locker room to present the Lombardi Trophy. Fittingly, for the silver anniversary, he returned to participate in another ceremonial moment: the pregame coin toss. Later that evening, the game’s Most Valuable Player would receive the recently renamed Pete Rozelle Trophy. Super Bowl XXV would begin and end with a nod to the sport’s greatest visionary.

  “No name is more synonymous with the Super Bowl than Pete Rozelle,” Commissioner Tagliabue said that week. “It was Pete’s imagination and foresight that made this great event a reality.”

  Nurturing the Super Bowl from a matchup between two football teams into a worldwide event was Rozelle’s crowning achievement as NFL commissioner. But all week long in Tampa, Rozelle was reminded of his greatest regret.

  On the day after President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Rozelle spoke with a former classmate at the University of San Francisco: Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary. Salinger urged the commissioner to continue on with Week Eleven of the 1963 NFL season. As Rozelle stated, “It has been traditional in sports for athletes to perform in times of great personal tragedy. Football was Mr. Kennedy’s game. He thrived on competition.”

  The NFL played its full slate of Sunday games.

  In an interview around the time he announced his retirement, Rozelle was asked what his biggest mistake was as league commissioner: “Playing the game on Kennedy Sunday,” he answered.

  Three decades after being soundly criticized for the decision to play on “Kennedy Sunday,” Rozelle still believed sports possessed some sort of healing power.

  “President Roosevelt urged sports to continue [during World War II],” Rozelle told the New York Times when the Gulf War broke out. “And they did. He felt that people needed diversion because if they brooded about war, all their waking hours, they would be very depressed people.”

  After a week of watching Commissioner Tagliabue address unprecedented security measures and speculation about postponing the game, both Rozelle and his successor reaffirmed their belief that the game should go on.

  Asked why, during stressful times, Americans found comfort in professional football, Tagliabue replied that “the Super Bowl is the winter version of the Fourth of July, an event without parallel.”

  Clearly, the new commissioner intended to link a distinctly American game with the chief American holiday: the Fourth of July is an annual celebration, when Americans come together, eat way too much food, and cheer and shout over explosive violence. So is the Super Bowl.

  “It’d be like cancelling the Fourth of July to cancel [the Super Bowl],” fan Bill Urseth said. His wife, Cathy, agreed: “And if you did, Saddam wins.”

  With the flick of his right thumb, Pete Rozelle officially began Super Bowl XXV.

  “Commissioner Rozelle, will you please toss the coin,” head referee Jerry Seeman asked.

  Standing in the eye of the hurricane that he brought to America, Rozelle flipped the specially minted commemorative coin into the air.

  “Heads,” called out Reed, a member of the so-called visiting team.

  The coin landed heads up. Buffalo elected to receive; the Giants chose to defend the north end zone. The pregame pageantry now over, both teams’ special teams units readied to take the field.

  “Don’t be offsides, let’s start it off right!” one member of the Giants’ kickoff team shouted in the sideline huddle with special teams coach Mike Sweatman. “Hit somebody!”

  The Giants’ kickoff team dispersed across their own thirty-yard line. Kicker Matt Bahr teed up the ball from his own thirty-five-yard line, then sent a booming end-over-end kick into the seventy-one-degree night air. Returner Don Smith accepted it at the fourteen-yard line and charged upfield before Bahr, the smallest, slowest, and oldest man on the field, wrapped two arms around Smith and wrestled him to the ground. Curiously, a kicker starred on the first play of Super Bowl XXV.

  Sans huddle, ten Bills assembled along the thirty-four-yard line. All alone in the backfield (Thurman Thomas split out as a receiver), Jim Kelly stood in the shotgun, four yards behind his center, Kent Hull. To no one’s surprise, the Bills would come out throwing.

  On the opposite side of the line of scrimmage, there was a surprise. As Kelly peered past his offensive line, he saw a bizarre defensive alignment: only two Giants down-linemen.

  Years later, in his acclaimed biography, The Education of a Coach, the brilliant author David Halberstam summed up Belichick’s Super Bowl XXV game plan.

  “He did
not want Jim Kelly throwing on every down. The Bills were less dangerous, he thought, given the superb abilities of the New York defense, if they went to their running game, which also had the advantage of taking more time off the clock. He thought the Giants could stop Thurman Thomas, even though he was an exceptional back, if and when they needed to, because they were so good against the run,” Halberstam wrote. “What Belichick really hoped was, in effect, to tease Kelly, to offer him the running game in the second half and then at critical moments take it away from him.”

  Though counterintuitive, Belichick openly welcomed a Thurman Thomas–led offensive attack and used a peculiar two-man defensive line (most teams have four or, at least, three) to encourage Buffalo’s running game. By using more speed-oriented defenses—variations on the dime and nickel packages—Belichick believed the Giants would be in a better position both to saturate Kelly’s passing lanes and bring down Thomas in the running game.

  The “Big Nickel” package featured only two defensive linemen; linebackers Lawrence Taylor and Pepper Johnson rushed the passer as stand-up defensive ends. Along with Carl Banks, six defensive backs patrolled the passing lanes. In the “Little Nickel,” a defensive back was swapped out for one linebacker. In short, the Giants were rushing four men, dropping seven.

  “We went into the game thinking we gotta stop the passing game. We felt like they would have a lot of respect for our run defense. So we put our best pass defense out there,” Belichick said in 2011. “They wouldn’t expect us to play a small group to start the game so what we tried to do was get our best pass rushers out there and get our best pass defenders out there and really try and take away the middle of the field.”

  The fresh game plan was also intended to catch the Bills off guard.