Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [50]
Not long after leaving that note, Bahr returned to Candlestick. In Week Eleven, the 5-6 Browns traveled to San Francisco, and with forty-three seconds remaining, Bahr nailed the game-winning field goal to defeat the 49ers.
“I can’t say enough good things about the 49ers,” he said after the win. “I made a lot of friends in my short (four-week) stay here. It’s good to come back and say hello.”
Bahr did not enjoy the rest of 1981 nearly as much as his former teammates. The 15-12 victory was Cleveland’s last of the season and they finished 5-11; San Francisco won their next eight games, including Super Bowl XVI.
He spent eight more seasons kicking for Cleveland, but by age thirty-four, Bahr was again out of a job. The Browns cut him during the 1990 preseason in favor of a Canadian Football League kicker. Only an injured right groin suffered by Giants kicker Raul Allegre kept Bahr from retirement. Beginning in Week Four, Bahr became an efficient replacement for New York in 1990. He converted seventeen of twenty-three field goal attempts, including one in the final seconds that completed Jeff Hostetler’s unexpected comeback against Phoenix. Hostetler—who served as the Giants’ holder—found plenty to talk about with the team’s new kicker.
Bahr earned a degree in electrical engineering from Penn State: he too followed his older brother, all-American kicker Chris, to State College, Pennsylvania. Relying on consistent accuracy, Matt surpassed each of his brother’s school records during three varsity seasons from 1976 through 1978. Among his many Nittany Lion teammates those years were Ron and Doug Hostetler.
“I held for a lot of kickers,” Jeff Hostetler later said. “Matt Bahr had, without a doubt, the greatest disposition as far as a kicker, because, lots of them, you can do it a hundred times in a row and hold the ball the same way, but if they miss, it was always, ‘you leaned [the ball] too far forward or you leaned it a little this, or you just missed the mark.’ Matt Bahr was always ‘just get it down.’”
On the chewed-up natural grass of Candlestick Park, Hostetler “got it down,” enabling Bahr to convert his third field goal in three attempts during the 1990 NFC Championship Game. The successful forty-six-yarder—six minutes after John Taylor’s touchdown—made the score 13-9.
Given the Giants’ inability to score touchdowns in more than six quarters against San Francisco that season, to win the conference title, they would likely have to pitch a shutout the rest of the way.
The Giants forced a punt, and after Ottis Anderson gobbled up thirty-six yards to set up a first and ten inside the red zone, momentum had seemed to shift. But the offense failed to gain another yard, and when Bahr hooked a thirty-seven-yard field goal wide left early in the final period, all Bill Parcells could do was seethe in disgust.
Parcells’ mood only worsened over the next few minutes. After the Giants made another defensive stop, Hostetler hit wide receiver Mark Ingram on a fourteen-yard square-in route. The first down, which pushed them into San Francisco territory, was costly, however.
To make the crisp throw, Hostetler stepped upfield, straightening his front leg. Just as the ball left his fingertips, 49ers defensive lineman Jim Burt—a former Giant—dove at Hostetler and locked ahold of his knee, twisting him to the ground.
Several members of the Giants’ sideline, including Parcells, were outraged and shouted at both Burt and the referees. They thought the hit was both late and a cheap shot.
“That’s the way Burt plays,” said Lawrence Taylor. “He goes for the knees. So I yelled, ‘If that’s the way you want to play, somebody else is going to lose a quarterback.’”
Wincing and curled up on his side, Hostetler semi-coherently answered the questions of trainers and the team doctor. He eventually