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“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