Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [122]
“That’s the best way to end that one right there,” Dave Meggett told Thurman Thomas. “Couldn’t have a better way than that.”
From the sidelines, tackle Doug Riesenberg blew kisses to the stands. At midfield, Gary Reasons held his son, Nick, in one arm and an American flag in the other. At the center of the field, surrounded by cameramen, Johnson, William Roberts, Myron Guyton, and Lee Rouson broke into dance.
“We heard all the talk about putting the game off,” Pepper Johnson told a reporter. “I think that would have hurt more than helped. Hopefully (soldiers’) families taped the ball game so when their loved ones come back, they can watch us. They can watch us dance.”
Back on the sidelines, Parcells’ request was being fulfilled. Taylor holding the right leg, Banks the left, they hoisted the head coach into the air for a few seconds. They let him down to continue handing out thanks and congratulations to his players and assistants.
Heading off the field, moments later, Parcells once again encountered Lawrence Taylor. He threw his right arm around Taylor and the two legends, who had now earned a pair of world championships during their ten years together, jogged into the locker room to continue the celebration.
“Tell ya, boys,” Parcells said the following morning. “Nothing beats winning. Nothing. It’s better than sex. It’s better than Christmas morning. It’s like all the Christmas mornings you’ve had wrapped up into one.”
A few hundred miles southeast of the Bahrain Peninsula near Saudi Arabia, the USS Theodore Roosevelt was churning through the Persian Gulf. At the precise moment that Scott Norwood’s game-winning attempt sailed wide right of the goalpost, it was early morning aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. That day, the “T.R.” and its crew of six thousand sailors would continue her first combat mission: supporting operations in Kuwait and Iraq.
“The war actually started on the seventeenth of January and the Theodore Roosevelt was still steaming at thirty knots around the Saudi Peninsula to get into the Persian Gulf and arrived on the nineteenth of January and began to fly combat sorties immediately,” Admiral C. S. Abbot said in 2010. “We worked every day until the air war ended, which was essentially at the end of February. People felt very good about what they were doing.”
The ship’s commanding officer, then-Captain Abbot, knew that for most of his young sailors, this would be the first brush with combat. Worse yet, no one knew quite what to expect from the enemy as the ship cruised throughout the dangerous region. Ten days into the mission, Abbot decided to provide his officers and sailors with a small piece of home and devised a plan to let his men experience the ultimate taste of Americana (albeit, a day late): Super Bowl Sunday.
Although live television feeds were not standard in 1991, that did not discourage Abbot.
“There were probably sailors who were trying to determine the outcome of the game,” Abbot said. “But I think the crew, broadly speaking, was waiting until we could get the tape aboard and enjoy watching it through the closed-circuit TV system.”
Hundreds of television monitors were scattered throughout the ship. A videotape of Super Bowl XXV could be obtained, and the game could be transmitted through the closed-circuit television so crew members would be able to see the Giants face the Bills.
Abbot dispatched the ship’s public-affairs officer, Lieutenant Tom Van Leunen, to retrieve a video copy of the game. Supply runs between the T.R. and a base in Saudi Arabia were flown daily. So, several hours before kickoff, Van Leunen boarded one of the C-2