Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [1]
And through the course of five decades, the Super Bowl has featured moments that had nothing to do with football. Looking past the national crisis caused by Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s “wardrobe malfunction” in January 2004, political events and social issues have managed to seep into the story lines of past Super Bowls.
The New Orleans Saints’ victory in Super Bowl XLIV was especially poignant considering the city was more than four years into the nightmare caused by Hurricane Katrina.
Nearly thirty years earlier, when the “Crescent City” hosted Super Bowl XV, the nation’s attention was more fixated on the safe return of the hostages that spent 444 days in Iran than the impending Oakland Raiders–Philadelphia Eagles matchup on January 25, 1981. To honor the fifty-two Americans who had been released two days before the Raiders’ 27-10 victory, the outside of the Superdome was adorned with an eighty-foot-long yellow bow.
That national pride would return to New Orleans in early February 2002. Fittingly, the red-white-and-blue-wearing Patriots from New England won Super Bowl XXXVI at the Superdome, five months after the tragic events that took place on September 11, 2001.
If these are the criteria that make the NFL’s annual title game great, Super Bowl XXV, between the New York Giants and Buffalo Bills, had them all.
In terms of what took place on the field that particular day, January 27, 1991, there has never been a better contest. There were four lead changes. The game came down to the last seconds. The margin of victory was one point. There wasn’t a single turnover. A seven-point underdog emerged triumphant.
With the Empire State showdown marking the Super Bowl’s quarter century, silver anniversary, it was appropriate that a handful of pro football legends stood on the Tampa Stadium sidelines that day.
Two of the greatest pass rushers of all time, Lawrence Taylor and Bruce Smith, led their respective defenses.
Three (current or future) Hall of Fame head coaches, Bill Parcells, Marv Levy, and Bill Belichick, were the brains behind the game plans.
Several of the greatest players during their era starred for the Giants and Bills 1990 teams: Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, James Lofton, Andre Reed, Mark Bavaro, Carl Banks, Pepper Johnson, and Leonard Marshall. In all, thirty-four once-or-future Pro Bowlers competed in Super Bowl XXV: seventeen for each team if the injured Phil Simms is counted.
And with the Persian Gulf War—America’s first true war since Vietnam—having officially begun ten days before the Giants and Bills kicked off in west Florida, Super Bowl XXV had a cloud of peril and uncertainty hanging above it like no other single-day event in the nation’s sports history.
Still, for all the lines on a Hall of Famer’s résumé, the back-and-forth excitement of a game that comes down to the last play, even the larger, far more significant non-football issues that might hover above a sporting event, Americans cherish the tales of redemptions and underdogs as much as anything. Why else are Rocky, Hoosiers, Seabiscuit, and Major League such compelling box office draws?
That is why the individual stories of New York Giants quarterback Jeff Hostetler and his teammate, running back Ottis Anderson, occupy special places in NFL history . . . and this book. That is also why the Buffalo Bills franchise’s swift transition from laughingstock to dynasty, beginning in the late 1980s and into 1990, is central to the drama within Super Bowl Monday.
But an NFL team is comprised of dozens of players, coaches, trainers,