by Mike Siani
“There wasn’t much you could say when you were burned by the refs. If you got too abusive, you would end up hurting only yourself. Yes, NFL refs do hold grudges. I’ve seen refs make calls for one reason only: because they were angry at something you said. As for the anti-Raider calls, I don’t think every ref got a memo reading, ‘Screw the Raiders.’ I think it was more of an unwritten rule, and it wasn’t all the refs, there were definitely exceptions.”
But for Denver, the emotion from that game transcended time.
PITTSBURGH STEELERS
Of all the Raiders rivalries, this one was an accident. The Pittsburgh Steelers, an NFL franchise since 1933, were sent to the newly formed AFC after the NFL–AFL merger. Long a dormant presence, never having won a single league championship as part of the NFL, the Steelers came to life after the merger and built their first dynasty in the Super Bowl era.
“We were two tough, blue-collar cities against each other,” said Gene Upshaw. “You know when you play against the Steelers, you had better have your chin strap on tight.”
Pittsburgh linebacker Jack Lambert loved playing the Raiders.
“The most fun I’ve ever had in my life was playing against the Oakland Raiders. To me that was what football was all about.”
“My arms and the back of my neck would be covered in goose bumps ’cause they would boo us so bad,” said Villapiano. “It was fueled by the hatred for each other, fueled by the want of going to the Super Bowl, and it just exploded.”
The most famous of all Steelers–Raiders games was the 1972 playoff game in Pittsburgh, where the “Immaculate Reception” was born. But the match between these two competitors actually began the night before the big game.
Early Friday night, both tight end Bob Moore and linebacker Greg Slough had planned an early dinner, an early movie, and reporting back to the hotel for an early turn-in. Well, things didn’t quite work out that way.
Upon arriving at the hotel, Moore and Slough noticed a large group of fans blocking the entry to the hotel entrance. As they worked their way up to the front of the mob, they were greeted by a row of police that were stationed there to keep the belligerent fans at bay.
Moore describes what happened next.
“We go up to the front, and there are these cops. We tell them we’re with the Raiders and we want to go up to our rooms. This policeman kind of hits me and says, ‘I don’t care who the fuck you are. You’re not getting to the front of this line.’
“I didn’t think a cop with a nightstick was going to beat up an Oakland Raider in town for a playoff game, so I make a comment I regretted pretty quickly.
“I said, ‘Look, motherfucker, I’m going to my room.’
“And then, boom! This guy comes down on the top of my head with a nightstick, which is like a baseball bat. Solid wood. The next thing I know, I’m on the ground and I got a guy on my chest trying to beat the shit out of me and another guy holding my legs. I’m trying to cover up, and I get my hands pulled away, and bang! I get it again! You get hit by one of these things while you’re conscious, and you think you’re going to die.
“‘Motherfucker!’ I shouted to the cops. Then they drag me away to a paddy wagon. I get in the back. The first guy comes in. I went after him. Just attacked him. Hit him with everything I had. He goes out and they slam the door. A couple of minutes later, the driver comes back and says, ‘We’re going to take you down and book you.’
“I said, ‘Book me for what?’
“Then he sees I’m drenched in blood. He says, ‘No, we’re going to rush you to the hospital.’ Turns out it wasn’t bad. Seven stitches, cuts on both sides of my head. I was swollen like a son of a gun. I’m on the operating table and the young surgeon says, ‘You’re real lucky.’ I said, ‘You have to explain this to me. I don’t feel very lucky.’
“So he said, ‘Generally, guys who get this kind of treatment don’t come here. We pick them up at the morgue after they dump them in the river.’ I said, ‘Thanks, that’s comforting.’
“The next morning in the locker room I can’t get a helmet on. Our defensive lineman Kelvin Korver had a big head and wore a size eight helmet. They took his helmet, took all the insides out of it, and made these Styrofoam donuts strapped to the inside.
“I don’t remember a thing about the game. I wandered like a mummy off the field, knowing we lost. But I had to figure out what the hell happened.”
The Immaculate Reception: December 23, 1972
It’s been over forty years since Franco Harris was involved in what’s been called the miracle of all miracles . . . and the play has been a mystery ever since.
This is the story of a play that’s lived a life of its own.
“The Immaculate Reception is a myth, a miracle, a cottage industry, a conspiracy, a crime, and a detective story.” But before it became all these things, it was just a football play: the last desperate hope of a team and a town that has always been destined to lose.
“I’m lying on the ground and I heard this roar—huge roar—definitely our roar,” said quarterback Terry Bradshaw. “I’m going, ‘You son of a gun, you pulled this sucker off.’ Then I got up and asked ‘What happened?’”
People have been asking that question ever since.
Franco Harris crossed the goal line at approximately 3:29 p.m. EST. For fifteen full minutes, referee Fred Swearingen and his five-man crew deliberated over the play.
“There was no indication as to whether or not there was a score because nobody saw what took place,” said Steelers running back Rocky Bleier. “So Fred Swearingen pulled all the other officials together and asked, ‘What happened?’”
Villapiano thought it was a touchdown.
“When I turned to our sideline, I saw Madden going crazy. And I felt like saying, ‘Coach, he caught the ball.’ I had no clue about this double hit rule.
“I was covering Franco. When they snapped the ball, Franco set up to block. Now, in the NFL, when someone sets up to block, you run in and grab them, and it’s pretty much over. I ran in and grabbed him, shoved him, and when Bradshaw rolled out to the other side, Franco just started jogging down the field. I’m like, ‘What the fuck is he doin’?’ I’m just jogging right next to him. Then when I saw Terry throw the ball, I’m gone. I just shot over downfield to help. Then the ball bounced right over my head.
“As I was sprinting towards it, it was going right over my head. See, I’m figuring Franco’s running down the field, ’cause he’s a rookie and he knows the coaches are looking at him. He’s just trying to be a good boy. I always tell Franco when I see him: ‘I was right on your inside. All I had to do was be as lazy as you and that ball would have come to me.’ If I jog with him, it’s over. Instead, I sprinted away from him. He kept running, and look what happened.”
Jack Tatum was certain of what happened.
“I hit Frenchy Fuqua in the back, and the ball had to have hit him for the ball to have come back to Franco. Back then, the ‘two-touch’ rule mandated that two offensive players couldn’t touch the ball consecutively.”
Willie Brown saw Tatum hit Fuqua.
“I was on the right side. I saw Jack hit Fuqua in the back. The ball bounced off Fuqua, and I knew it was over right there. I knew the ball was dead. He hit the guy from the back. When you hit a guy from the back, it means you’re knocking him forward. So how could Jack have touched the ball? I mean, come on, the laws of physics and the laws of common sense say there’s no way Tatum could have hit it if he knocked Fuqua into the ball.
“He hit Fuqua, and Fuqua hit the ball. And I thought the game was over.
“When I saw the referees get together I knew something was going on. So the next thing I know, since I’m the captain, and so is Upshaw, we’re running up to them and saying, ‘The game’s over.’ They say, ‘We don’t know yet.’ They kept saying ‘We don’t know yet.’ I’m saying, ‘Bullshit. It’s over.’
“Then I hear one of the referees say, ‘Do we have security on the field? If
you do, I’m going to make this call in favor of the Raiders.’ So someone says, ‘Well, we’ll get you out of here as fast as we can.’
“If they’d ruled in our favor, they would never have gotten out of there alive. That was the reason they changed the call.”
Pittsburgh defensive end L. C. Greenwood was headed back to the locker room while the refs deliberated.
“I was actually headed for the locker room then I heard the crowd cheering. I was actually running to the locker room to get off the field before people got carried away, as I expected them to anyway. They would have been upset if we had lost. Pittsburgh fans are pretty energetic fans. They don’t like losing.”
Raiders safety George Atkinson was on the other side of the field.
“I unsnapped my helmet. I’m headed to the locker room. It never hit me that it counted. When Jack hit Fuqua and the ball ricocheted, I thought it hit the ground from my angle. I also registered the two offensive players rule. So I thought, Even if Franco has it, it’s dead. The officials knew it was dead, too, but they couldn’t reverse that call, man. In Pittsburgh?”
The then director of officiating, Art McNally, defined Rule 7, Section 5, Article 2, Item 1.
“The first player to touch the pass, he, only, continues to be eligible for A—in this case, for the Pittsburgh Steelers.”
Atkinson continues. “You could not have a double touch. If Fuqua touched the ball, as soon as the second player on his team touched the ball—incomplete pass. That’s the end of it.”
Madden knew that the officials didn’t know what had happened.
“In the history of football, when a guy crosses a goal line, it’s either a touchdown or it’s not. They didn’t call a touchdown because they didn’t know if it was a touchdown.
“I ran out on the field. They said, ‘Get away. We don’t know what happened.’ I said, ‘I know you don’t know what happened.’ So I went off the field, and then they talked and talked and talked, forever.
“So now the referee leaves that huddle and goes into the Steelers sidelines. He gets on the phone and makes a call to somebody, hangs up, then walks out onto the middle of the field and signals touchdown. This is five or ten minutes later.
“I mean, that’s not the way you call a touchdown! My thing, to this day, is if they knew it was a touchdown, why didn’t they call it a touchdown? In the history of football, a touchdown is a touchdown! You don’t have to go talk about it.
“And he calls it a touchdown. Well, what didn’t you see before that, and what did you see after that? That was my argument. If you knew it was a touchdown, call it a touchdown.
“They said that they didn’t look at replays. They didn’t do anything.
“That’s a hell of a damn game that has to go down to someone up in the press box.
“I still don’t know who he made the call to because he won’t admit it. No one knows. Of all the investigations and investigative reporters, no one knows who that guy talked to and what was said on that telephone call. That question has never been answered to this day.”
The play had lasted for just seventeen seconds. Tens of thousands had witnessed it, but nobody saw it, and people are still talking about it today—over forty years later.
“I don’t know if I got knocked down or what,” said Bradshaw. “But I looked up and Franco was taking that Italian army right down the field.”
The mythologizing of the Immaculate Reception began shortly after the final gun in the Pittsburgh locker room.
Steelers linebacker Andy Russell corrected Fuqua’s answer to the media.
“The press was wild. Some of them were smart enough to come over and talk to Frenchy. They said, ‘Well Frenchy, could you explain what happened exactly?’ Frenchy said, ‘Well, the ball bounced off my chest.’
“I knew that that was not the right answer. Frenchy didn’t know the rule. He didn’t know what happened because he got hit in the head. I grabbed him and said, ‘Frenchy, what you meant to say was . . .’”
Frenchy Fuqua stopped by the Raiders locker room and whispered in Raymond Chester’s ear.
“After the game, Frenchy came into the locker room, leaned over to me, and said in my ear, ‘You know the ball hit me.’ I said, ‘Yeah I know the ball hit you.’ He said, ‘Yeah, it did hit me, but that’s the way it goes.’ And that’s a true statement.”
Seven days later the plot thickened when a new angle of the play emerged on the nationally syndicated NFL Game of the Week.
The iconic image captured by Ernie Ernst’s camera in the north end zone, when spliced together with the camera of Jay Gerber who had been positioned at midfield, created the enduring image of the play—an image that would be replayed millions of times.
Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, sees this piece of film as the “Zapruder film” of sports.
“The Immaculate Reception and the film of it became the Zapruder film of sports. The Zapruder film was the film of the Kennedy assassination shot in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Conspiracy theories being what they are and the assassination of a president being what it is, that film has been analyzed and dissected and argued about more than any other short piece of film in history.
“Similarly, the film of the IR has been pored over the same as the Zapruder film. Frame by frame, image by image, idea by idea to look for incontrovertible proof that the play was not legitimate.”
Franco Harris’s touchdown was shrouded in mystery and had an image that would become iconic. But to become a play for the ages, it would need a name.
Steeler fan Michael Ord coined the term Immaculate Reception in a Pittsburgh bar.
“At the bar, I climbed up on the table and said, ‘I would like to suggest that from this day on, we refer to this day as The Feast of the Immaculate Reception. That night my girlfriend called Myron Cope, a local sportscaster, and he pronounced Franco’s catch as Immaculate that night on the eleven o’clock news.”
None of Pittsburgh’s newspapers referred to the play as the Immaculate Reception until September of 1973, and reporters outside of Pittsburgh didn’t know what to call it.
Art Rooney was against the name because he felt it was sacrilegious.
Joe Gordon, former Steelers PR director, said “It was a stroke of genius. Once it was dubbed the IR, it took on a life of its own. You saw it everywhere.”
NFL president Steve Sabol called the Immaculate Reception “the most important play in NFL history.”
“‘The Catch’ was a great play,” said Steelers halfback Rocky Bleier, “but it doesn’t have the pizzazz, it’s not marketable. The Immaculate Reception is so apropos.”
“That play, if you were a Steelers fan, you believe it; if you’re a Raiders fan, you’ll never accept it,” said Fuqua. “So it’s almost like a bible and a faith to others.”
Like Al Davis says, “Winning Is Everything.”
Unfortunately, in our culture, there is only one thing that matters: who wins. The winner writes the history books, the winner gets the Super Bowl trophy, the winner is the genius. You have to win. It’s one of the great moments in NFL history, but it’s not a great moment in Oakland Raiders history.
The Immaculate Reception changed the Raiders forever. And the silver and black erected a myth of their own.
George Atkinson has a different name for the Immaculate Reception.
“We don’t call it the Immaculate Reception. We call it the Immaculate Deception. The public was deceived, the officials were deceived, and we were deceived.”
Raiders tight end Raymond Chester describes the anger and frustration of that loss.
“If you could have packaged all the anger and frustration, it would have probably been nuclear. It probably would have been equivalent to a nuclear bomb.”
More than forty years later, emotions are still painful, especially for John Madden.
“That play bothered me then, it bothers me today, and will bother me till the day I die.”
Every person who experien
ced the play was scarred by it. The Raiders were able to use it as a motivation which led to the next ten years in which no team won more games. And that all started in the seconds after the Immaculate Reception.
George Atkinson believes that there was some kind of conspiracy theory.
“There was a vendetta against the Raiders. Here’s what the truth and the facts of the matter are. There were three infractions that were never called that leads to a conspiracy theory.”
The Fuqua Theory
According to Rocky Bleier, “The story that needs to be unraveled, if it ever can be, is the story from Frenchy Fuqua. Did it touch him or didn’t it touch him? Only he knows.”
When Fuqua was asked if he touched the ball, his response was, “Maybe, maybe not.”
George Atkinson saw Fuqua knocked into the ball.
“Jack Tatum hit him from behind into the ball.”
“I saw it with my own eyes,” said Villapiano. “I saw Jack Tatum hit Fuqua right in the back. I saw the whiplash. It definitely, definitely hit Fuqua.”
But Andy Russell disagrees.
“That has been proven to be wrong. The film clearly shows that it was off of Tatum’s body, not Frenchy’s.”
“Did Jack Tatum hit the ball?” asked Willie Brown. “It clearly shows that the ball hit Frenchy’s shoulder pads and bounced off of that.”
“Look at the tape!” said Bradshaw.
He continued: “If you look at the tape, Frenchy’s hands are stretched out to catch the ball. There’s no way it hit his hands and then bounced back twenty feet.”
The Trap Play Theory
Author Stephen Dubner talks about what we didn’t see.
“Let’s be honest. We never see the bottom tip or half of the ball and whether or not it touches the turf. That seems to be the most legitimate conspiracy theory objection. I asked Franco about it, and Franco doesn’t give a straight answer.
“When asked if the ball hit the ground before he plucked it out of the air, Franco’s answer is: ‘I can’t say. From the time that Bradshaw threw the ball, it was like I lost all sense of consciousness and before I knew it I was up and running. Before that everything else is just a blur.’”