Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [49]
“Each time I play [the 49ers] I think about the play, no doubt about it,” Walls said on the Tuesday before the 1990 NFC Championship Game. “Stepping in Candlestick gives me a feeling of intensity and alertness because I never want to be caught in that position again.”
A decade after “The Catch,” Walls found himself in that position—or, rather, out of position—at another critical moment of an NFC Championship Game played beside San Francisco Bay.
The Giants and 49ers played to a 6-6 tie through the first half of the 1990 NFC title game. Early in the third quarter, New York’s Sean Landeta boomed a punt downfield where John Taylor dangerously fielded the kick at his own seven-yard line. Taylor took two steps right, noticed a wall of blockers aligning by the opposite sideline, reversed field, then turned up and gained thirty-two yards. Only Landeta—who forced him out-of-bounds—could prevent the tie-breaking score.
Landeta’s “tackle” didn’t really matter, however. He simply delayed a Taylor touchdown by one play. On first and ten from his own thirty-nine-yard line, Montana took a five-step drop, scanned the field, and spotted Taylor eighteen yards away, near the sideline. Everson Walls, locked in man-to-man coverage with Taylor, sprinted toward that spot.
“I went for the interception,” said Walls. “I got a hand on it, but he got two on it. My break was good. My execution was bad.”
Intercepting quarterbacks had made Walls a Pro Bowler. In 1981, the undrafted rookie from Grambling State posted a league-high eleven interceptions. And although he was “posterized” by Montana’s pass to Dwight Clark, Walls had played tremendous defense prior to yielding “The Catch.” He picked off Montana twice, recovered a fumble, and accounted for eight tackles.
“You can’t blame Everson for just one play,” Cowboys great Charlie Waters said. “We had double coverage on Clark. It had to be a perfect throw and a perfect catch . . . he just made a spectacular catch.”
After nine seasons and forty-four interceptions, Dallas released the hometown veteran. The Giants signed him for the 1990 season. At age thirty, Walls started all sixteen games, scored his first career touchdown on a fumble recovery, and paced the team with six interceptions.
But Walls’ attempt to nab Montana’s toss in the third quarter of the NFC Championship Game came up short. Taylor caught the ball, spun around, and bolted for the end zone.
“Everson Walls is a gambler, always has been,” John Madden said, breaking down the play during the CBS television broadcast. “He goes [for the interception] in front of Taylor, and now the bad thing is when you miss the interception and you go for it in front of him and there’s no one behind ya, it’s a touchdown.”
Walls’ heart sank: “I thought, ‘Oh [shit.]’ I knew he was gone.”
Taylor’s sixty-one-yard touchdown reception lifted San Francisco to a 13-6 advantage.
“It wasn’t the first time that we had had our back against the wall that season,” Everson Walls said. “No panic, no change. We had plenty of time left. So even though there was frustration, we were still very poised as a team.”
That poise even extended to kicker Matt Bahr, another retread who the Giants scooped up that year when no one else wanted him.
Bahr’s career as a professional athlete began in relative obscurity, as a defenseman for the Colorado Caribous of the North American Soccer League. Within eighteen months, however, Bahr was playing in the Super Bowl. He kicked a forty-one-yard field goal and four extra points as the 1979 Pittsburgh Steelers won a fourth championship in six seasons.
Pittsburgh surprisingly cut Bahr prior to the start of the 1981 season, so when San Francisco offered him a temp job (49er