Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [37]
When Robert F. Kennedy was murdered, it just made sense to rename the stadium for him. Though he wasn’t a Washingtonian, he had certainly blazed a trail through the Capital City, and we understood that our town stood for something a lot bigger than local concerns. The stadium, after all, was geographically located on a straight line from the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial, taking what seemed its natural place among those glorious national landmarks.
Sometime in the 1970s, the number of VIPs on the sidelines began to obscure our view. Then came the mobile carts with TV cameras that went up and down the sidelines with the cameras and cameramen on accordion platforms that would rise and lower, blocking our view just when the game was coming our way. The working stiffs seated in the stands down low would throw whole cups of beer at them. Then one year, after the season’s final game, when fans traditionally went onto the field to take down the home-side goal posts, they were unexpectedly met with helmeted police who savagely beat them with nightsticks. It was stunning and scary to witness up close.
We got the message. Things were changing in America, and the game experience was now shifting to favor the fans watching at home at the expense of the paying fans actually in attendance.
Get a couple of old RFK season ticket holders together and it’s impossible not to open the lid on a hundred breathtaking moments. And why not? Sure it’s sentimental, sure it’s self-indulgent. But those indulgences are what make those pleasures so rich and enduring. These are moments we consider as much a part of our life and times as a child’s graduation, a Thanksgiving family get-together, and ranked among the personal highs and lows of our lives.
For most Washington fans, you need only mention the names for the memories to rise up: Dick James, Billy Kilmer, Monte Coleman, Chris Hanburger, Rusty Tillman, Dexter Manley, Art Monk, Mark Mosely, Ray Knight, Len Hauss, Pat Fischer, Roy Jefferson, Bill Malinchak, Myron Potios, Jack Pardee, Paul Krause, Larry Brown, Gary Clark, Brig Owens, Doug Williams, Darrell Green, Kenny Houston. And, of course, there are the villains—Clint Longley and Lawrence Taylor. Longley, a quarterback replacement for the Cowboys, beat us on Thanksgiving Day with a hail mary at the end of the game. Walt Garrison was stopped at the one-yard line by Kenny Houston, a one-on-one tackle in the final seconds of the game, turning a potential tragedy into a never-forgotten triumph. Lawrence Taylor broke Joe Thiesmann’s leg so brutally fans from all corners of the stadium claim to have heard it snap. Together we witnessed the dizzying success of the Gibbs Era and three Super Bowl triumphs. Other teams have won more, but those were ours.
We saw Sonny come in for one play, disobeying Coach Allen’s orders to simply take a knee at the end of the half, and throw a forty-two-yard touchdown.
That play probably was a turning point in NFL history. When quarterbacks called the plays, everyone in the stands and at home would hold their breath, identifying with the man in the saddle, his style, his mind, the makeup of his character all factored in. But a corporate mentality was taking over in America, controlling everything from farming to football games. Jurgensen’s play was for all intents and purposes the end of his career. A few years later, Joe Gibbs explained the seismic change in the game this way, “It’s the coach who takes the blame for bad decisions, not the player. If I’m going to be the one to get fired, then it’s going to be me calling the plays.” It makes sense on a corporate basis, but not on a football one. The person calling the plays is no longer the person whose body is in danger. And once quarterbacks were no longer calling plays, they started getting hurt right and left. So the league began changing rules to protect them, and inserted deep flaws into the structure of what was, to me and those fans sitting around me, for a time, a flawless game.