Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [3]
“It gets boring just sitting around,” Hostetler said when reporters asked him that week about his non-quarterback role. “These things give me something to do. It gets me involved. At least I’m contributing somewhere.”
But punt blocking and route running was not the pro-football future Jeff Hostetler had hoped for. Since childhood—playing two-on-two tackle football with his brothers, Ron, Doug, and Todd—he dreamed of commanding the huddle, scanning the field for receivers, and throwing the football to the open man.
“And I hope everyone remembers that,” said Hostetler, addressing his desire to be the team’s quarterback. “People ask me when I’m going to play. And I tell them I don’t know. I know I can play. I just need the opportunity.”
Like his teammate Jeff Hostetler, running back Ottis Anderson hungered for a chance to play. But at least Hostetler occasionally contributed to the Giants on special teams, as he did in the early November game against Philadelphia. On that day, Anderson never even set foot onto the field of play.
A month before their win over the Eagles, New York curiously acquired the eight-year veteran Anderson—a former all-pro and the eleventh leading rusher in NFL history—from the St. Louis Cardinals. But with Joe Morris in the middle of his second straight exceptional season, Anderson was not brought in to change the status quo. His role was expected to be that of a decoy or to occasionally spell Morris, who (at five feet seven inches and 190 pounds) was averaging more than twenty carries per game.
“The Giants told me they needed more production from the fullback position,” Anderson later wrote, “though they knew I was a halfback. It was a way to quickly get me on the field and change their one-dimension offense, which was basically Joe Morris left, Joe Morris right.”
Anderson carried the ball thirteen times for fifty yards in three games after joining the team; not bad for a soon-to-be thirty-year-old rusher still learning the playbook. But a nagging hamstring injury, which he suffered during his first appearance with the Giants, slowed his step.
And although, at first, he had been eager to leave the inept 1-4 Cardinals for the 4-1, perennially playoff-caliber Giants—“This is like a second chance in my life, a chance to play in the Super Bowl,” he said when he met the New York press—his mood quickly soured. Only six carries in three games, then sitting out completely during the Giants’ win in Philadelphia, left Anderson feeling lost.
“Embarrassed,” he said, describing his mood a few weeks into his Giants career. “That’s it. I get traded from a team that hasn’t won a game to a team that has lost only once, and then this thing happens to my hamstring. So I’m more embarrassed than anything else. You can deal with frustration. People say don’t worry, but you’re a player. You want to produce.”
New York’s victory over the host Eagles that day pushed their record to 8-2, the team’s best start since 1963. The Giants would not lose another game during the remainder of the regular season, earning home-field advantage in the playoffs. And once the postseason began, Bill Parcells’ crew was even better. They obliterated Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers in the opening round 49-3, then shut out Joe Gibbs’ powerful Washington Redskins to advance to the franchise’s first Super Bowl. At the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, New York overcame a narrow halftime deficit to stomp the Denver Broncos and win Super Bowl XXI 39-20.
Anderson scored a somewhat meaningless two-yard touchdown in that Super Bowl win (the Giants already held a twenty-point lead with less than four minutes remaining in the game), but admitted the moment left him feeling “somewhat saddened, because I felt I was on a team that I didn’t make a major contribution to.”
“To be honest,” he later said, “I didn’t feel a part of that Giants team.”
Neither did Jeff Hostetler. Playing wide receiver