This Day in Football History (Dolphins Vanquish Vikings in Super Bowl VIII)

Jan. 13, 1974—Taking its cue from fullback Larry Csonka (pictured), the Miami Dolphins ran roughshod over the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl VIII.

The 24-7 final score was not remotely indicative of just how thoroughly Miami dominated Minnesota, which had gone 12-2 in the regular season (and had given the Dolphins one of their most hotly contested victories early in 1972, in a bruising 16-14 come-from-behind win).

Vikings head coach Bud Grant had made front-page news in the run-up to the game with his complaint about sparrows in the locker-room shower at Houston’s Rice Stadium.

When it was all over, he had two more persistent headaches: how the Dolphins’ offense had pushed around his legendary “Purple People Eaters” defense, and how Miami’s “No Name Defense” had, in the words of Miami Herald sports columnist Edwin Pope, “pounded Minnesota's runners into such terror that the Vikings did not get a first down rushing for an astounding 44 minutes and 17 seconds.”

Among head coach Don Shula’s 347 career triumphs, few could have been sweeter than his Super Bowl victory at Rice Stadium.

His Super Bowl win the year before may have capped an undefeated season and at least temporarily quieted complaints that the veteran coach couldn’t win The Big One.

But this one proved that the earlier success was no fluke. It also put Shula among the elite circle of coaches who have won two consecutive Super Bowls, along with Vince Lombardi, Chuck Noll, Jimmy Johnson, Mike Shanahan, and Bill Belichick—giving the Dolphin coach a fair claim to have forged the closest thing that the National Football League has to a dynasty.

Dolphins dominate

Over the years, the surviving members of Dolphins have been justly proud of their undefeated 1972 season, particularly when the New England Patriots achieved a perfect 17-0 season in 2007 before falling to the New York Giants in Super Bowl LXII.

But, even though the Dolphins’ 12-2 record-season record in 1973 might suggest a slight falloff from their prior magical year, some observers believed that the team was stronger than the undefeated squad.

Unlike the year before, with the Dolphins’ 14-7 win over the Washington Redskins (an outcome suddenly threatened a few minutes before the end when placekicker Garo Yepremian’s inept pass on a broken play led to a Redskin touchdown), the Dolphins never loosened their choke hold over their opponents. Their advantage in time of possession (33:45 versus 26:15) tells only part of the tale.

On both sides of the ball, the Dolphins set the pace early, capitalizing on the Vikings’ inability to get momentum. Miami scored twice in the first quarter on touchdowns by Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick, a rushing pair that, like the Green Bay Packers’ Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung (“Thunder and Lightning”), had earned their own nicknames—in this case, the more colorful (and given their close friendship, more appropriate) catchphrase, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

A Yepremian field goal in the second quarter put Shula’s squad up 17-0 by halftime.

On the other side of the ball, the “No Name Defense” was throttling the Vikings. The major hope that Minnesota had to get within striking distance was crushed when, with fourth and one with a minute left in the half, Miami middle linebacker Nick Buoniconti knocked the ball loose from Viking running back Oscar Reed and the Dolphins’ Jake Scott recovered (one of two fumble recoveries that the free safety had that day).

Another, two-yard touchdown run by Csonka in the third quarter only added to the Vikings’ woes.

Head On, the title of Csonka’s 2020 memoir, tells you most but not all of what you need to know about the running back’s take-no-prisoners rushing style.

First, his initial pattern of running was even more physically confrontational—with more potential for long-term physical injury—before Shula taught him how to lead with his forearm rather than his head.

Second, “head on” doesn’t convey the sheer futility of trying to tackle Csonka. You’d have a better chance of bringing down a Sherman tank.

The Vikings’ plight in Houston, as he rumbled on 33 carries for 145 yards for a Super Bowl MVP designation, was best expressed by linebacker Jeff Siemon:

“It's not the collision that gets you. It's what happens after you tackle him. His legs are just so strong he keeps moving. He carries you. He's an immovable weight.”

The Vikings’ Fran Tarkenton could take only meager satisfaction in becoming the first quarterback to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl. The score came in the fourth quarter with his team down 24-0. With the running game going nowhere, he was under continual pressure all day, dumping off short passes to tight ends and running backs who were immediately surrounded and stopped by a sea of green uniforms.

My rooting interest in the Dolphins

You might wonder how I became interested in this game and this team.

Well, in the early 1970s, when I started watching pro football on a regular basis, the Green Bay Packers had fallen off the high standard set under Vince Lombardi. My area’s New York Giants were even worse, still less than halfway through a 17-year absence from the playoffs. I abominated their divisional rivals, the Dallas Cowboys.

I ended up gravitating to the up-and-coming Dolphins. Their thrilling double-overtime victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in the 1971 Championship game sealed the deal for me.  Their loss to the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl VI only made me pull all the harder for them to surmount their last hurdle to glory.

I was glad beyond measure when the Dolphins break through against the Redskins, then again against the Vikings. Great times seemed to stretch far into the future.

The Dolphins didn’t have long to enjoy their victory. Less than a month later, Csonka, Kiick, and receiver Paul Warfield announced that they would be jumping to the upstart World Football League for the 1975 season.

That left only one more season when quarterback Bob Griese could count on his chief rushing and receiving threats. The Dolphins’ loss in the divisional playoffs to the Oakland Raiders, on Dec. 31, 1974—the famous “Sea of Hands” game in which Clarence Davis snared a Ken Stabler TD pass in the final seconds—was dismaying and, in terms of their period of dominance, final.

Changes since Super Bowl VIII

Younger readers who come across this post may have no idea what pro football was like a half century ago, while older ones might have forgotten some details. I can tell you that the Super Bowl was far different then from now, both in how it was played and how it was viewed by a mass audience.

Even by 2004, the ambiance of the “ultimate game” as we know it now was set. So here are the major contrasts between Super Bowl VIII and Super Bowl XXXVIII. (God, save me from this plague of Roman numerals!):

*Passing is a more central part of the game. Testifying to the respect in which he was held across the league, Griese was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but in Super Bowl VIII he attempted only seven passes, completing all but one. Bill Walsh’s implementation of the “West Coast offense” with the San Francisco 49ers and NFL rules protecting quarters gave passers more room to operate—and, in parallel fashion, decreased the importance of running backs. The last back to be named Super Bowl MVP was the Denver Broncos’ Terrell Davis, back in January 1998.

*Players grew in size. The biggest man on the Dolphins’ offensive line, Hall of Famer Larry Little, weighed 265 pounds. Thirty years later, the heaviest offensive lineman for the Patriots, Wilbert Brown, tipped the scales at 320 pounds.

*The game occurs later in the year. With 17 regular-season games starting in 2003 versus 14 in 1973, along with an additional round in the playoffs, the season is longer. The 2004 Super Bowl, featuring the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers, was the first to take place in February. The additional games increase the possibility of injuries that can affect the outcome.

*The game occurs later in the day. Kickoff time for Super Bowl VIII was 3:30 pm ET; 30 years later, it was 6:25.

*The game has become a de facto secular national holiday. Over time, the NFL has realized that, to increase viewership, the inherent drama of the game would not be enough, so it added entertainment elements. The halftime entertainment at Super Bowl VIII, "A Musical America," featured the University of Texas band, along with Miss Texas Judy Mallett. In contrast, the entertainers at Super Bowl XXXVIII were P. Diddy, Nelly, Kid Rock, and the controversial pair that ended up giving rise to the phrase “wardrobe malfunction,” Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson. Even ads from America’s biggest companies made the game “must-see TV” for more casual football fans, and the average cost of these 30-second commercials skyrocketed, from $103,500 in 1974 to $2.3 million in 2004.

There is one other major difference in football—certainly not apparent in 1973, and only starting to surface in 2003: the danger that players faced with concussions. The NFL first released the results of a five-year study on mild traumatic brain injuries in October 2003.

It was already too late for several members of the 1974 Super Bowl champions. Kiick, Scott, Buoniconti, Bob Kuechenberg, Bill Stanfill, and Earl Morrall were identified as having C.T.E. (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy). 

These cases, as well as so many others from the era when I watched football avidly week to week, have made me reevaluate how I think about the sport and its ultimate game.

In reading Homer’s Odyssey in college, I don’t think that I properly appreciated the traumas experienced by Odysseus and his comrades in arms as they made their way home after the greatest battle of their lives. 

Now, thinking of them in relation to the Dolphins, it all seems far more understandable to me.

After all, who can bear to watch aging warriors as they prove all too mortal far from the site of their greatest victory?

This Day in Football History (Columbia Begins Stupefying, Epic Non-Winning Streak)

Oct. 22, 1983—Facing Bucknell in front of a mere 3,800 fans at Hofstra Stadium, Columbia University’s football team managed a 31-31 tie. 

The outcome, though not all they could have wished, left the Lions looking forward to their opponent the next weekend, Holy Cross, with a losing but still not disastrous 1-3-1 record. But that would change quickly.

The not-disastrous part, I mean.

Seven days on, Columbia was annihilated in Massachusetts by Holy Cross, 77-28, and the following weekend tied again, this time with Dartmouth, 17-17. Those two ties in the space of three weeks was the closest the squad would come to winning over 47 games. 

In fact, the penultimate game of the season, a crushing 31-6 loss to Cornell in Ithaca, began a then-record 44-game losing streak that left fans shaking their heads and the rest of the nation simply astonished that this could be happening.

That Lion you see in the logo accompanying this post? During those years, it was a toothless creature that scared few if any opponents in their right minds.

Let me put this another way that might help you better understand the frustration of the Columbia  players: Those who began playing in the 1984 season would graduate without winning a single game.

Like most of the student body in the late Seventies and early Eighties, in the time preceding what alumni still call "The Streak," I had followed the team’s (mis)fortunes at something of an emotional remove. During my four years, I didn’t attend games—a part-time job occupied my time on weekends instead—and had gotten used to hearing about its misfortunes. 

Most of my friends saw the team’s 6-31-1 record during that time as regrettable, but they had their minds on other matters: handling a demanding academic workload, participating in their own extracurricular activities, and/or simply surviving New York City when it was only slowly emerging from its mid-Seventies trough.

That nonchalant attitude couldn’t have been more different from my high school in Northern New Jersey. We had experienced our own season without a win my season year, but it was regarded as an aberration from a tradition of winning and even championships that began when Vince Lombardi started his coaching career there in 1939. Athletes were the gods of the school, with academics hardly so stringent as to hinder football participation.

Columbia had its own tradition of gridiron glory—the third school to play intercollegiate football, back in 1870; a legendary 1934 Rose Bowl victory over Stanford; a 1961 Ivy League championship. But in recent years, the stench of failure had grown stronger and harder to eradicate, with only two winning seasons since the latter title.

The team appeared to have turned a corner when I arrived on campus in 1978, jumping off to a 3-1-1 start under its young, charismatic head coach, Bill Campbell. Then, after it was blown out by Rutgers 69-0 at Giants Stadium, things were never the same. 

It did not win another game that year, and midway through 1979, after the losing continued and Campbell was briefly hospitalized for exhaustion, the coach announced he would be stepping down at the end of the season.

The following years would prove that the failures of the program were hardly Campbell’s fault. “Coaching a Columbia football team may be the most frustrating job in the Ivy League or possibly in all of college football,” noted New York Times reporter Gordon S. White Jr. in his discussion of Campbell’s resignation, citing a home field considerably distant from its Morningside Heights campus and difficulties recruiting athletes.

White might also have mentioned another turnoff to prospective athletes: Baker Field, a 32,000 wooden-seat stadium that had been around for a half century. 

At that structure’s final game in the 1982 season, fans tore out the seats (with some even having smuggled saws into the stands for that purpose) and carried off their booty onto the nearby subway station after—need I say it?—another loss for the home team.

It was a sign of the team’s continuing struggle to escape from oblivion, though, that even the opening of new, gleaming Lawrence A. Wien Stadium didn’t mark a turnaround in the program’s fortunes. In other words, "The Streak" continued unabated.

By this time, as an alum with weekends now blissfully free, I was attending home games when I could. It was just my luck that this took place as losing became more entrenched.

Fans attempted to cheer themselves with halftime entertainment provided by the team’s irreverent marching band and gallows humor of their own. In one contest, as the opposing team marched up the field on an offensive drive, several alumni around me shouted blitz suggestions to the coaches:

“Send the linebacker!” yelled one.

“Send the end!” screamed another.

“Send in the clowns!” my friend Alan offered.

“Don’t bother, they’re here!” countered another Sondheim aficionado.

The nadir of the losing struggle may have been reached after the opening game of the 1985 season, courtesy of head coach Jim Garrett. The Columbia administration may have hired this former WFL and Boston College coach to adjust the team’s attitude. It never reckoned that what needed to be reset was the coach’s volatility rather than any defeatism on the part of his players.

The team was leading 17-0 toward the end of the third quarter against Harvard when the Crimson scored 49 unanswered points in a mere 20 minutes. In an angry post-mortem delivered to a New York Times reporter, Garrett used the words “drug-addicted losers” and singled the team’s longtime punter out for special criticism, in remarks that spiraled into hysteria:

''Don't tell me it's a college atmosphere. This is an atmosphere that creates people for the future. I want to see him when he graduates and goes to work downtown on Wall Street and does three things that he did today. See how long he is gonna work for that company, how long Merrill Lynch or Smith Barney is gonna have him around.”

To be fair, even after his quick, ignominious exit at the end of that inglorious season, Garrett had his defenders. A 2018 post on “Roar Lions,” “the unofficial fan blog of Columbia University football,” featured comments from former players noting that he had been misquoted (the coach claimed he had said the team was like drug-addicted losers rather than they were), that they didn’t want him to go, that the real problem lay with a university administration that did little to support the program, that he was at heart honest and a better person than his successor, and that the team would have thrived if Garrett’s sons (including future Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett) hadn't left with their father.

All these claims may have been true. But whatever hypothetical success in strategy or motivation that Garrett might have achieved, with or without his talented progeny, doesn’t get around the fact that after a certain point, it doesn’t matter if athletes accept mistreatment as part of the program: abuse, whether physical or otherwise, is still abuse.

And, by telling the squad that the punter would never play for him again, then publicly trashing him in such a ridiculous and unwarranted fashion, Garrett had humiliated one individual and made the university’s sports program a subject of nationwide ridicule.

Too bad that the replacement of Garrett as head coach did not mark a swift upturn in the team’s fortunes. Yet I continued to attend home games loyally.

Until, that is, October 8, 1988. I listened to the weather reports carefully that day: windy, cold, maybe even rain, with gray skies not helping matters. And the Lions would be facing Princeton, which had a 2-1 record and Jim Garrett’s quarterback son Jason itching to avenge his father's termination.

What were the odds that this afternoon contest would turn out well? I decided to spare myself a strong chance of a cold on the slim possibility of a Lions win.

Wouldn’t you know that Columbia beat the Princeton Tigers that day, 16-13, in front of 5,400 flabbergasted but delighted spectators?

During the team’s streak, I had tried to make every home contest I could—but I chose to sit out The Big One. The story of my life, I guess.

As George Harrison had philosophically advised me and other Baby Boomers nearly two decades before, all things must pass. And so it turned out for Columbia University’s dubious NCAA losing-streak record, surpassed by Prairie View A&M, which lost 80 consecutive games from 1989 to 1998. 

This Day in Football History (Death of Tim Mara, A Giant Among Owners)

Feb. 16, 1959—Tim Mara, a bookmaker who parlayed a $500 investment into multigenerational family ownership of the pro New York Giants football team, died in his native New York at age 71.

Himself a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame (posthumously elected in the Class of 1963), “Big Tim” (a reference to his 6-ft., solid 205-pound frame) was the father of another Canton inductee, son Wellington. He was a cornerstone of the National Football League, as his payment for the Giants franchise gave the fledgling league a showcase in the nation’s largest city.

Over the years, Mara and the league had to endure several stiff challenges, including bearing the brunt of the fight against rival AFL in 1926; helping to keep the team and league together at all during the Great Depression (when he transferred ownership to sons Jack, 22, and Wellington, 14) and WWII (when some teams, with players off fighting, could not continue in their current form); and enduring another upstart league, the AAFC, from 1946 to 1949.

But Mara built Giants into a perennial powerhouse with three NFL championships and eight divisional titles, And only a few months before his death, the NFL’s first “sudden death” playoff game—between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts—became known as “the greatest game ever played,” finally establishing the league’s popularity.

In a number of ways, Mara’s story resembles that of fellow NFL owner and good friend Art Rooney. Both were devout Irish-Catholics who earned the wherewithal to buy their teams through their bookmaking; both created great franchises (in Rooney’s case, the Pittsburgh Steelers) that have won multiple championships; and both passed on their stake in the teams to their descendants, now in the third generation of ownership.

 

For all the money that Mara amassed by the end of his life, his beginnings were distinctly humble. Growing up in Greenwich Village, he quit school when his policeman father died in order to help his mother and brother survive, according to his friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Arthur Daley.

Mara began running bets when he was a 12-year-old newsboy, since his route—along Broadway, from Wanamakers to Union Square—was filled with bookmaking joints. Fortunately for him, many customers were lower- and middle-echelon Tammany Hall figures who, as they rose, remembered him fondly, including Governor Alfred E. Smith (who incorrectly predicted that pro football would never compete with college football) and Jimmy Walker, the dapper “Night Mayor” in the Roaring Twenties.

Before long, Mara began booking bets himself, becoming a “wagering commissioner” when this was still legal, up to the ‘30s. Never gambling himself, he eventually branched out, with side ventures in bookbinding, coal, liquor, scotch, and boxing promotions.

Success with his NFL venture was hardly assured for a long time. Mara experienced stiff financial losses until Red Grange’s debut in the Polo Grounds for the Chicago Bears on Dec. 6,1925, turned the tide, converting a $40,000 deficit into an $18,000 gain.

By this time, Mara’s childhood associates had drawn him into Tammany Hall’s “Tiger Room” at 23rd Street and Fourth Avenue, where they could relax and help each other out. His loyalty (a trait that evidently still runs in the family) led him to help out these associates, even when it brought unwanted attention.

One was Walker, who in 1930, when the Great Depression was taking hold, got Mara to promote a game benefiting the city’s unemployed. The contest; against the Knute Rockne-led Notre Dame, ended up netting $116,000. (Mara was such a good friend of the mayor’s that, at the latter’s funeral in 1946, he led the entire Giant team en masse into St. Patrick’s Cathedral only moments before the service was to begin, according to Donald I. Miller’s Supreme City.)

While Mara remained friends with Walker to the end, he was not so lucky with Smith. Their falling out stemmed from the 1928 Presidential race. Late in the campaign, the governor’s campaign manager, John J. Raskob, sought to keep his Presidential campaign through loans meant to evade campaign-finance laws. Friends such as Mara were assured they would not be responsible for the loan, but after the election that proved not to be the case. In 1934, he and another member of the Tammany group, Patrick Kenny, became involved in litigation for recovery of the loan.

Overwhelmingly, however, in other areas of his life, Mara managed to avoid such difficulties, in part because of his winning personality. This excerpt from a 1937 profile of him in Turf and Sport Digest conveys quite well the impact of can-do optimism:

“Atop that high stool he is the very picture of beaming good humor. His big, rosy, happy face is topped by a crop of wavy reddish hair. Contrasting with the nervous secretive taciturnity of most of the clubhouse bookmakers Mara’s joyful mien and robust voice, calling out hearty greetings and poking weak fun at all comers, is refreshing. You like the fellow. He looks as though he’d give you a break.”

This Day in Football History (‘Immaculate Reception’ Heralds Steeler Dynasty)

December 23, 1972—Franco Harris’ late-game, 42-yard run following a Terry Bradshaw pass—immortalized as the “Immaculate Reception”—became more than just one of the most controversial plays in the history of professional football. It also marked the moment when the Pittsburgh Steelers, a venerable but vulnerable National Football League (NFL) franchise, indicated that its doormat days were over, and that they were only a step away from becoming a dynasty.

Most of their 13-7 victory in the AFC divisional playoff that Saturday 40 years ago was a titanic defensive struggle with the Oakland Raiders. The first half was scoreless, and the Steelers’ offense had only eked out two field goals by Roy Gerela by the start of the fourth quarter. That appeared to be enough for a while, as what would come to be called the “Steel Curtain” managed to bottle up, throttle, and bamboozle flu-ridden Raiders quarterback Daryle “Mad Bomber” Lamonica.

But when Lamonica's replacement, Ken Stabler, exploited rookie defensive end Rookie Craig Hanneman to make an uncharacteristic 30-yard touchdown run, and the Raiders kicked the point-after attempt, the day appeared to have become colder and lonelier for the Steelers.

Even the grand old man of the franchise, owner Art Rooney, slipped down the stairs, expecting he’d need to console his players. It wasn’t enough that they’d compiled an 11-3 regular-season record, capturing the AFC Central title. The only playoff appearance the team had made since first joining the NFL in 1933 was a loss in 1947, and this appeared to be a case of the “Same Old Steelers” (a nickname inadvertently supplied years ago by Rooney in answer to a reporter’s question about new uniforms).

For one of the few times in his life, the devoutly Catholic Rooney displayed lack of faith and disbelief in luck. He couldn’t have imagined that he had already supplied the answer to an entire city’s prayers.

Most explanations of the team’s good fortunes that day 40 years ago point to personnel, a missed call, or a good old-fashioned Oliver Stone-like conspiracy by referees to hush up the truth. Faithful Reader, I would call your attention to something more elementary.

The Rooney sons had bonded with a prelate from their ancestral homeland, Fr. John Duggan, studying for a degree in the United States. The 71-year-old owner, who had once made such a killing at the racetrack that he was able to contribute sizably to an orphanage, knew a good-luck charm when he saw one, and he invited the priest to attend the team’s games as an "unofficial chaplain" of the team. Of the subsequent dozen that the lucky padre attended, the team won all but one.

Fr. Duggan had even hung around Three Rivers Stadium practices. One of these turned out to be the week of the playoff game, involving the Raiders. Their coach, John Madden, believed that the priest, harboring evil intentions, was reporting what he saw to the Rooneys. He ordered the prelate off the field.

Madden shouldn't have wasted his time. The Kilkenny-born priest wouldn't have been able to report anything because he knew absolutely nothing about football and admitted, even after seeing a number of games, that the American game confused him. It must have distressed him no end, then, that he had been dissed by another person of Irish descent, because he warned the Raider coach that he would be consulting “my superiors about this.”

If “my superiors” had consisted simply of the good reverend’s religious order, Madden might have been able to handle it. But he was powerless against the real source of these “superiors”—i.e., Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints and angels in Heaven.

With 22 seconds left in the game on the Steelers’ own 40-yard line, on fourth down with 10 yards to go and no timeouts, this heavenly host made their presence felt indelibly.

Bradshaw, under intense pressure from the Steeler defense, scrambled just out of their reach. His principal passing option for the play, rookie receiver Barry Pearson, was open in midfield, waving his arms, but Bradshaw, out of the pocket and his comfort zone, flung the ball toward the second option, running back John “Frenchy” Fuqua.

A figure that Steeler fans over the years came to regard as demonic, Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum, sensed the ball going in Fuqua’s direction. For the third play out of the last four, he was involved in the outcome. As with the prior plays in the series, he made his presence felt.

In the many accounts that followed, the testimony of both Tatum and Fuqua would have to be regarded in a court of law as impeachable. Tatum, whose nickname was “Assassin” (and whose later hit on the New England Patriots’ Darryl Stingley left that receiver paralyzed), would earn a jury’s venom. Unfortunately, Fuqua, on this same play, had just had his bell rung by Tatum, so he was in no position to state conclusively what transpired next.

On the YouTube replay I saw, the one thing you can notice clearly is Tatum’s emphatic gloating that he had disrupted the play. Some (including this writer) believe that he could easily have been called for pass interference. But the Steeler faithful—and, eventually and controversially, the referees—decided they had seen him do something else.

Tatum’s disruption of the play was so emphatic that the ball caromed eight yards back. Did he actually get his hands on it, too? The question was crucial, because NFL rules of the time did not allow completed passes if two players from the same team had consecutively touched it.

As it happened, a second Steeler had gotten his hands on the ball: Harris. Again, the heavenly hosts had intervened. The rookie running back was supposed first to hang back and block the outside linebacker coming in at Bradshaw, then, if this didn’t happen, “chip” at anyone else in the vicinity. With no Raider of either description nearby, Harris looked downfield, where he could either block for Fuqua (what he thought immediately he would do) or become the unlikely third passing option for Bradshaw.

That’s when the pigskin ricocheted madly in his direction. Harris scooped it up around his shoelaces, caught (or, according to the Raiders, trapped) it, got up and raced to the end zone, with the Raiders in frantic but ineffectual pursuit.

Five seconds were now left on the clock, but no definitive call had been made on the field yet. Nowadays, multiple camera angles would help referees determine the outcome of hard-to-see plays. But those did not exist at the time. (Crucially, even Harris' pickup of the ball is just out of the camera's reach). The tale now takes another “Who do you believe?” twist.

Referee Fred Swearingen consulted with the game's umpire and back judge, who presumably had a better view of the Fuqua-Tatum collision, then went into the dugout of the Pittsburgh Pirates, accompanied by a Steelers official, to call Art McNally, the NFL supervisor of officials in the press box. Depending on who you believe, Swearingen asked McNally either to confirm the rule about hands touching the ball, or how many security officials would be around to help him evade the clutches of an irate home crowd in the wake of an adverse decision.

Eventually, 15 minutes after the play, Swearingen emerged with the ruling: Tatum had touched the ball before it got into Harris’ hands. Steelers touchdown.

Forty years later and Madden is still too angry to talk about the play. But from the start, Steeler fans weren’t. That night, in a local tavern, two fans announced that the day would forevermore be known as the Feast of the Immaculate Reception. Later that night, one of them called in the nickname to Steeler sportscaster Myron Cope, who used it on the air.

The Steelers had not yet gone on their remarkable run of four Super Bowl triumphs in the era of head coach Chuck Noll. But they had provided undeniable evidence that they would be a force to be reckoned with in the league. 

In a way, the play has the same place in Steelers lore as the home run that Derek Jeter hit in the 1996 New York Yankee playoff game against the Baltimore Orioles. Again, a hugely talented rookie was involved in a game-changing play. Again, controversy developed over interference by outside hands (in this case, young Yankee fan Jeffrey Maier). Again, the play was crucial in a victory that presaged better times for an old franchise.

Today, all these years later, in the Pittsburgh International Airport, stand two side-by-side statues. One shows George Washington, the other Franco Harris, bending over to catch the ball (which, of course, is not on the ground). 

A far-fetched comparison between these two figures? Not in the eyes of Steeler fans. On a YouTube video I saw, one aficionado mentioned two similarities: 1) One was the first President of the United States, the other a first-round draft pick; 2) One beat the redcoats, the other beat the Raiders. (Guess which losing side was hated more in Pittsburgh sports bars?)

The only thing missing from the Harris statue, I reckon, is a halo over the Hall of Famer’s head. But Fr. Duggan took care of all the other heavenly matters with that talk to his “superiors” 40 years ago. After the 1974 season, when the Steelers had won their first Super Bowl, at long last, Rooney begged the priest to "extend his contract" as chaplain. But the Irish prelate begged off, explaining that he had "prayed out my option."

This Day in Football History (Lombardi’s Packers Lose in 1st Try at Title)

December 26, 1960—The National Football League’s past met its future—and, for once, the past won. On their home turf at Franklin Field, the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Green Bay Packers, 17-13.

The Eagles, winning their third NFL championship, had reached the summit--and a couple of people associated with the team, perhaps sensing it, decided to leave while they were on top. Head coach Buck Shaw and quarterback Norm Van Brocklin, the league’s MVP, both announced afterward that they were retiring. And though he would stay another two seasons, Chuck Bednarik, the team’s versatile center-linebacker, would be the league’s last “two-way man.” By the 1962 season, age and injuries would send the Eagles hurtling down to last place.

The cellar was where the Packers had long resided, but everything was different now under head coach Vince Lombardi (in the image accompanying this post, of course). The team, posting only a 1-10-1 record under predecessor Ray “Scooter” McLean in 1958, had responded to the constant prodding of Lombardi—previously, an assistant coach for the New York Giants and, further back, head coach at my high school, St. Cecilia’s of Englewood, N.J.—with their first winning record in 12 seasons the next year (7-5). Then, in 1960, they won their first division title in 16 years.

In a December 26, 1960 preview of the championship game, Sports Illustrated writer Tex Maule, noting that the Packers were “a sound football team,” still accurately predicted that they would have trouble with “Van Brocklin’s keen, probing aerial game.” And so it came to be—but not, however, before The Pack gave Eagles fans some serious heart palpitations.

The Packers actually outgained their veteran opponents and bested them in time of possession. Two Eagle turnovers early in the going gave the Packers terrific opportunities, but all they could come away with were three points.

It turned out, then, that a 13-10 Packer lead late in the game turned out to be too precarious to maintain. A 58-yard Ted Dean kickoff return put the Eagles deep in Packer territory, giving “The Dutchman” Van Brocklin time to pick apart the Packer defense. Seven plays later, Dean made it into the end zone on a five-yard sweep.

One minute and twenty seconds remained on the clock as the Packers’ QB, Bart Starr—hailed by Maule as “the smartest (academically speaking) quarterback in the business”—tried to engineer his own drive. He almost pulled it off, too, marching the team down the field until the final dramatic play of the game.

The Packers were on the Eagles’ 22-yard line when Starr, noticing that everyone else was covered, threw a swing pass to rugged fullback Jim Taylor. You can see the action without benefit of highlight films through the words of the peerless Red Smith: “That wonderful running back ducked his head like a charging bull, bolted like an enraged beer truck into Philadelphia‘s congested secondary, twisted, staggered, bucked and wrestled one step at a time.”

Taylor managed to get to the nine-yard line and would have made it into the end zone but for Bednarik. The latter, 35 years old, pressed into service by Coach Shaw to play both sides of the line because of injuries, had already played 58 minutes of the game when he had his appointment with destiny.

A Bednarik hit earlier that year, on Frank Gifford, was so ferocious that the Giant running back was out of commission for 18 months. But his tackle now, against Taylor, was more significant.

"The tackle I made on (Jim) Taylor was the greatest play I ever made," Bednarik later remembered (in an interview posted on the Eagles' Web site). "When I saw him swing out of the backfield I took off. After catching the (Bart Starr) pass I tackled him to the ground and started watching the clock: four... three ... two ... One.”

At last, hearing the gun go off, Bednarik relented: "Taylor, you can get up now. This ****** game is over!"

A dejected Taylor lay on the ground for a full half-minute before rising from the turf. As David Maraniss relates the scene in his great biography of Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered, his injured backfield teammate, Paul Hornung (whom I wrote about last week), came over to console him when Bednarik wrapped his arms around the two younger men, saying “they had a helluva football team and would be back in the championship the next year.”

Lombardi--and his team--felt the same way. In the somber lockerroom afterward, the coach abandoned the barking tones his players had gotten used to for the last two seasons and addressed them quietly and matter-of-factly. At the start of the game, he said, they might not have felt confident against a veteran team, but now they knew they could hold their own. “This will never happen again,” he assured them. “You will never lose another championship.”

And that’s how it turned out throughout the rest of Lombardi’s tenure as head coach of the team, which eventually won five NFL championships and the first two Super Bowls. In 1971, the year after his death, Lombardi was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, followed by nine of his players from that 1960 youthful dynasty-in-the-making: Taylor, Starr, Hornung, Forrest Gregg, Ray Nitschke, Willie Davis, Jim Ringo, Willie Wood, and Henry Jordan.