Super Bowl Monday

by Adam Lazarus

  Allen’s contempt may have been extreme, but he was not alone in distrusting rookies. Jim Lee Howell, the New York Giants head coach from 1954 to 1960, would have applauded Allen’s roster maneuvering: “I really think Howell hated rookies,” Giants Hall of Fame linebacker Sam Huff wrote in his autobiography, Tough Stuff.

  Andy Russell, another great linebacker from the premerger era, echoed the same sentiment about the man who drafted him, Steelers head coach Buddy Parker.

  “He hated rookies,” Russell recalled. “In fact in the year I was drafted, he traded away the first seven picks.”

  Back then, no one could predict that, by the twenty-first century, rookies would routinely earn more money than ten-year veterans. But even in the early 1970s, Allen’s ideal vision of an NFL roster was becoming antiquated.

  A season before Allen’s rookie purge, the Baltimore Colts’ locker room could have been confused for a college dormitory. By the end of 1970, nine men on their roster never played pro football prior to that season. Perhaps the head coach was partial to them: forty-nine-year-old Don McCafferty—an assistant throughout his entire collegiate and professional coaching career—replaced Don Shula that year.

  But a rookie head coach and rookies comprising more than one-fifth of the roster did not hamper the Colts’ season. With a pair of MVP quarterbacks, John Unitas and Earl Morrall, and veterans like John Mackey, Jimmy Orr, and Billy Ray Smith, the Colts were championship-hardened. And most of them had the scars to prove it.

  “Super Bowl III was an obvious turning point in the history of the National Football League and what had been the American Football League,” Colts center Bill Curry said. “There was such disdain from the NFL toward the AFL; there was such horror at the notion that one of us might eventually lose to one of them in the game. . . . We were about to be validated as the greatest team in the history of the National Football League: 15-1 going into the Super Bowl. I swear, I don’t think we were complacent. We prepared well. We didn’t just go to Miami and go to the beach.”

  Complacent or not, at the Orange Bowl in January 1969, the Colts lost to Joe Namath’s New York Jets 16-7.

  “It was one of the best teams I ever played with,” linebacker Mike Curtis told NFL Films years later, “and we lost to somebody that we would beat eight thousand times after the Super Bowl. It was a humiliation.”

  Two years after the loss to the Jets, the Colts and their odd mixture of youth and veterans (in addition to the nine rookies, four second-year players were on the squad) cruised through the regular season, then the playoffs, earning a berth in Super Bowl V.

  “They weren’t relaxed going into the game,” Curtis said. “I wasn’t relaxed; I think a lot of it ’cause the guys put a lot of pressure on themselves, to push harder.”

  Not every Colt felt that way about the mid-January trip to Miami. Those nine rookies had been college juniors when Namath stunned the world in Super Bowl III.

  “A couple guys and I rented a convertible,” rookie kicker and fourth-string wide receiver Jim O’Brien remembered. “After being in the miserable weather in Baltimore for the past two or three months, we thought we would splurge a little.”

  Splurging also meant a fishing trip on the team’s first full day in south Florida. Rookie running back Jack Maitland’s parents lived in Fort Lauderdale, and his father’s business owned a forty-four-foot striker fishing boat. Along with veteran Cornelius Johnson and second-year player Tommy Maxwell, rookies Maitland, O’Brien, Jim Bailey, Rick Herdliska, and Lynn Larson spent hours out on the Atlantic. Late in the voyage, one of the players hooked a mako shark, and the teammates traded off reeling it in.

  “We were debating, thinking about putting it in [running back Tom] Matte’s room, which we decided against. Then we were gonna take it down and put it in the swimming pool, which we decided against,” Maitland remembered. “It was a fun time.”

  O’Brien’s week wasn’t all fun and games, however. Super Bowl V was to be the first played on artificial turf. In fact, prior to that 1970 season, not a single regular-season or playoff game had been played on a surface other than natural grass.

  The twenty-three-year-old rookie, nicknamed “Lassie” because of his long hair, who wore bell-bottoms, liked to paint with acrylics, and read the book The Sensuous Woman that winter, was surprisingly old-fashioned. He was a straight-ahead kicker (not “soccer style”) and didn’t care for the new-age playing surface.

  “To my recollection, we had played one game in our history on artificial turf,” said Ernie Accorsi, Baltimore’s young public-relations director and scout.

  So we’re down at the practice the day before the game, which is nothing but a walkthrough. And O’Brien did not have a good day of practice. He said to me, “I hope they’re not counting on me Sunday.” I said, “Why?” He said, “I can’t kick on this stuff.” He was a straight-ahead, conventional kicker. He said, “I take a divot like a 7-iron. The way I kick, my foot’s bouncing into the ball; I’m kicking the top half of the ball.”

  You can imagine what my feelings were the rest of the day about the kick coming down to Jim O’Brien.

  On Sunday, Accorsi’s fears mushroomed. At the start of the second period, Baltimore scored the first touchdown. To attempt the extra point and give the Colts a 7-6 lead, Jim O’Brien marched onto the Orange Bowl’s new PolyTurf surface.[1]

  “I didn’t have the experience,” O’Brien said. “I’m thinking ‘Oh, shit, here we are in the Super Bowl’ . . . as opposed to concentrating and thinking about what I do and going through my routine. If I had gone through my routine like I should have, I wouldn’t have been nearly as nervous.”

  Without that perfect concentration, O’Brien’s timing was off. He hesitated in his approach and kicked the ball too low. So low that it hit Dallas’ Mark Washington in the chest.

  But by then, O’Brien’s blocked extra point was just another wacky play in a game that would later earn the nicknames the “Blunder Bowl” and the “Stupor Bowl.” In the first half alone, there were two interceptions, two fumbles, and ten penalties, two of which were personal fouls.

  “According to the advance billing this was the Super Bowl, a titanic contest between two super teams playing super football,” wrote Arthur Daley of the New York Times, “But this one came up strictly from hunger, a sandlot exhibition between a couple of ball clubs of Lilliputian dimensions and miniscule skills. . . . At least the TV watchers could have escaped if they so desired. The folks here were trapped.”

  Even the Colts’ lone score had come on a fluke. A pass from Unitas was tipped by Colts receiver Eddie Hinton and Dallas safety Mel Renfro, then hauled in by John Mackey. The Hall of Fame tight end galloped the rest of the way for a bizarre seventy-five-yard touchdown, the longest play in the Super Bowl’s five-year history.

  Still, for all the absurdities, the contest emitted a palpable intensity.

  “A lot of the turnovers had a lot to do with that damn turf. People were slipping all over the place. It was a crazy game,” Accorsi said. “But we played that game in a panic; it was desperation. I was on the sideline for most of the game; to this day, it was the most vicious football game. So they can talk about it being the ‘Blunder Bowl’ all they want. It was a vicious, physical battle.”

  “I think [Cowboys linebacker] Chuck Howley still wears my number on his forehead,” rookie running back Norm Bulaich said years later.

  The less-than-refined football didn’t cease with O’Brien’s botched extra point. After a grand total of nine turnovers and fourteen penalties, the score stood even at 13-13 with one minute to play in the fourth quarter. One final blunder remained. At his own twenty-seven-yard line, Dallas quarterback Craig Morton rolled out of the pocket and lobbed a pass over two rushing defenders, intended for running back Dan Reeves. The wobbly football fluttered above Reeves, who jumped for it but could not make the catch. It bounced off Reeves’ fingertips directly into linebacker Mike Curtis’ grasp.

  Curtis’ interception gave t
he Colts fantastic field position. Two Norman Bulaich runs—“just don’t fumble,” the offensive linemen told him—picked up a few yards, and with nine seconds to play, the field goal unit took the stage.

  Although Jim O’Brien was admittedly a bit nervous, he wasn’t nearly as flustered as some of his teammates would like to believe.

  “Earl Morrall [says] I was trying to pick AstroTurf off the field to see which way the wind was blowing,” said O’Brien.

  But I did pick up wind because the AstroTurf fields aren’t like the pure turf fields of today. They’re pretty bristly and they catch a lot of lint off people’s uniforms. So I would always pick up lint on an AstroTurf field to see which way the wind was blowing. That’s all I really did. But Earl kinda embellishes, likes to make it more than it is. He uses that when he goes to all the speeches he gives. . . . It’s half true, except it makes me look like an imbecile for trying to pick AstroTurf out, because you can’t. You’d need a pair of pliers or a knife. Anyway, it’s a funny story; we always laugh about it when we see each other.

  Dallas called a time-out prior to the kick. And while the Cowboys players taunted him from across the line of scrimmage and the sidelines, the rookie barely noticed. For weeks, one of Baltimore’s grizzled veterans had been hardening the mettle of the long-haired “child of the 1960s.”

  “Billy Ray Smith was inclined to want to cut my hair,” said O’Brien. “All during that week in practice, he said, ‘If we don’t win this game, you’re gonna get your hair cut.’ . . . He did help me relax. From the time I got in camp to that last field goal, in practice, he was always talking and making it like the other team would do it: he would call time-out at the last second; he would yell stuff at me. So he trained me basically . . . to ignore the other team in that situation. And it paid dividends.”

  O’Brien’s heightened concentration notwithstanding—this time, he fully went through his pre-kick mental routine—the short, championship-deciding kick remained in doubt even though it was only a thirty-two-yard attempt. After fifty-nine minutes and fifty-one seconds of a game that was supposed to showcase the elite of a newly merged league, not a single play could be considered routine.

  “It was such a weird game, such a sloppy game,” recalled Ray Didinger, the sportswriter covering the first of thirty-four consecutive Super Bowls.

  What was going through my mind was, given the way this game has played out, I’m expecting a low snap, I’m expecting Morrall to drop the ball, or I’m expecting O’Brien—who’s this rookie, who had been anything but consistent all year—he’s gonna miss.

  I was looking at it from the wrong perspective. I should have turned it over to the other side and said, “Everything has gone the opposite of what we expected it to go today; nothing’s gone right. So O’Brien should miss this kick. But given the nature of the day it’s been, I guess he’s gonna make it!”

  While his teammates prayed on the sidelines, O’Brien readied for the kick. Quarterback Earl Morrall gave him a final set of instructions—“Keep your head down and kick it straight”—then knelt at the thirty-two-yard line, O’Brien three yards directly behind him. Veteran Tom Goode fired the snap back to Morrall, who spotted the ball. O’Brien, his chin strap inexplicably unsnapped, leaned into the hold and swiped through the ball. The perfectly straight kick sailed directly through the uprights. As soon as he kicked the ball, O’Brien knew it was good. The rookie repeatedly jumped up and down, then ran toward the Colts’ sideline to rejoice with his teammates.

  The Cowboys would have one last-second chance to score, but a desperation Craig Morton pass was intercepted, and shortly after, the Colts returned to the Orange Bowl locker room to celebrate.

  “I remember Cornelius Johnson, offensive guard, number 61, he was just kinda bent over on a stool, actually crying,” Jack Maitland said.

  He finally looked up in the air like he was praying and said, “Finally got the f-ing ring.”

  But it was like the ring meant so much to a lot of those guys because many of them retired after that season. That was kinda their swan song. It was obviously a lot of joy and elation, but it was a tremendous amount of relief, it was kinda a sigh of relief. I don’t remember popping champagne corks or anything like that. It wasn’t a crazy celebration. The veterans, they finally made amends for that debacle two years prior. The rookies were obviously pretty ecstatic. For us, it wasn’t a big deal: our rookie year we win the Super Bowl, no big deal. The longer you’re around it, you realize how tough it is.

  For the Colts’ greener players—those who hadn’t suffered through the Super Bowl III debacle—the victory was more enjoyable than poignant, especially for the Super Bowl hero, Jim O’Brien.

  During the regular season, Ernie Accorsi had approached two of the lesser-known Colts players to represent the team at a series of charitable events. The gig paid a few hundred dollars per appearance. One of those players who Accorsi hired was Jim O’Brien.

  “He wasn’t any star at that point; he was a reserve receiver and a placekicker, not a famous placekicker by any means,” Accorsi said.

  When Accorsi walked into the winners’ locker room after Super Bowl V, he quickly learned a replacement for O’Brien would be needed.

  “After the game, they did not have press conferences with big tables and big rooms like they do now,” Accorsi continued. “Everybody was in the locker room. It was a small locker room, and, obviously, everyone had surrounded [O’Brien]. They usually came to your locker. He wasn’t at his locker; he was in the middle of the room, surrounded. And he spotted me, and he said, ‘Ernie, I quit, I quit the job!’”

  A couple hundred dollars for local charity events gave way to the national spotlight. With the headline “Jim O’Brien’s Super Kick,” a photo of the game-winning play appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, although O’Brien was barely visible in the image. Following a celebratory team vacation to the Bahamas, on Sunday he flew to New York City and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. A month later, he was traveling across the country, promoting candy: for his Super Bowl winning kick, the Life Savers Company presented him with their first “Life Saver of the Month Award.”

  The newly crowned sports icon soaked up the spotlight for months.

  “Counting my $15,000 from the Super Bowl, that one kick has been worth $30,000 to me,” O’Brien said in July 1971. “I made more money in two months than a lot of people make in a year. I want to make it now, so I can do the things I want to do later on. Society will get it back. I like playing football because it beats working, you know?”

  On the field, the future turned out to be far more productive for O’Brien. Accounting for ninety-five points on field goals and extra points, he helped the reigning world champions reach the AFC Championship Game in 1971. The next season, O’Brien began to crack the lineup as a Colts wide receiver.

  During an October Sunday afternoon at Shea Stadium, he caught five passes for ninety-one yards, and kicked two field goals and a pair of extra points. The second extra point came after he nabbed a thirteen-yard touchdown pass that gave Baltimore a 20-17 fourth-quarter lead over the Jets. He finished the 1972 season with eleven receptions, 263 yards, and a pair of touchdowns.

  O’Brien retired after the 1973 season and eventually became a successful real estate and construction developer in California. Still, over the years, the image of the rookie kicker bounding through the air would be forever burned into sports history and into the minds of America’s sports fans.

  “People don’t ask me how many touchdowns I had in college or how many whatevers in pro,” O’Brien said forty years later. “It’s basically, Super Bowl V and the game-winning kick. That’s defined my whole career.”

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  “I remember Jim coming in [to the huddle] and saying, ‘Alright boys, we gotta get to the thirty, at least.’ And I remember thinking, ‘God, I hope we get to the twenty-five,’” said Bills left tackle Will Wolford. “I had very little doubt that we weren’t going to go right down the fie
ld, because our offense, it hadn’t really been stopped in a while in that game. We had a lot of confidence.”

  Equipped with four receivers and the option of Thurman Thomas running a short route into the flats, Jim Kelly surveyed his options on first and ten. Against just three rushers, five Bills linemen surprisingly could not protect him. At the three-yard line, nose tackle Erik Howard almost brought down Kelly, who avoided Howard, found room to run, and by freezing linebacker Carl Banks with a ball-fake, gained eight yards. Pepper Johnson pulled him down from behind, and the clock continued to run. The clock soon stopped for the two-minute warning.

  While ABC’s television audience watched the gripping finish to Bud Bowl III—an homage to the Stanford-California “band on the field” play from 1982 featuring animated beer bottles in helmets—which gave Bud Light the win, Kelly, Marv Levy, and Ted Marchibroda contemplated the next play. Despite the long discussion about a second-down strategy, the play produced roughly the same results as their first-down performance. Kelly could not find anyone open, a trio of Giants defenders neared him, and he was forced to vacate the pocket. Erik Howard brought Kelly down, limiting him to one yard.

  That brought up third down and less than one at the Buffalo nineteen. The frantic pace of the no-huddle allowed Kelly to try and sneak in a run. Given that the Bills had been zero for seven on third-down conversions—and each of those failed attempts came on passing plays—it was a welcomed change.

  Kelly placed the ball in Thomas’ stomach. The all-pro headed for the right side—his blockers had all crashed down that direction—but Pepper Johnson squeezed through a small hole and would have slammed right into him. Thomas’ great instincts and tremendous change-of-direction abilities allowed him to shuffle to his left, where an enormous hole opened up before him.

  Tackle Will Wolford’s cut block held up Gary Reasons just enough for Thomas to run by the Giants linebacker. As the clock dipped below one hundred seconds, Thomas was sprinting down the field with seven Giants in pursuit. Only cornerback Everson Walls was ahead of him