Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [52]
“Coach Parcells asked me how the knee felt, if I could go several times,” Hostetler said. “Finally I told him I was going. As long as it was stable, I was going back in. This was a huge game and I’ve waited a long time for the opportunity.”
Hostetler’s comeback went from improbable to incredible when, on second and seven he avoided a sack, scrambled left, and sprinted to within a yard of the first down. But on third and short, a pair of 49ers bottled up Ottis Anderson behind the line of scrimmage, and the Giants’ drive stalled.
Sean Landeta and the special teams unit got into position near midfield. The “very predictable” Giants did not punt the ball.
“They were ready to get their wall going for Taylor, and I noticed an opening on the right,” said linebacker Gary Reasons, who served as personal protector in the Giants punt team. “We had the play on all game, and I had the go-ahead to call it when I saw it.”
The play Reasons called was a fake punt. Prior to Landeta receiving the ball from long-snapper Steve DeOssie, Reasons had the option of shouting out an audible. The call alerted DeOssie to snap the ball to Reasons and instructed the Giants on the line of scrimmage to block for him.
DeOssie snapped the ball directly to Reasons, who ran untouched for thirty yards, until a bewildered John Taylor cut him down.
“I’m just looking for a hole in the line,” Reasons said. “You could have driven a Mack truck through that one.”
Reasons’ run gave New York life at the San Francisco twenty-four-yard line. But once again, the Giants could not get the ball in the end zone. Three plays produced three yards, and Bahr was sent in to attempt a fifth field goal, which he made.
Less than six minutes remained; New York trailed 13-12 and needed to get the ball back. That didn’t appear likely during the 49ers’ ensuing drive, which ate up thirty-seven yards and more than three minutes of game clock. The Giants looked buried.
“I remember Mark Ingram saying, ‘Here’s my chance to go to Tampa; my chance to play in the Super Bowl, and now it’s going down the drain,’” recalled Ottis Anderson.
“And I said, ‘Ingy, it’s my destiny; we’re gonna go to the Super Bowl.’
“‘Come on, Juice,’ he said. ‘They got the ball. They’re running out the clock.’
“I said, ‘I’m telling you, Ingy; it’s my destiny; it’s gonna happen, something’s gonna happen.’”
Ingram had good reason to be pessimistic. Roger Craig had helped the 49ers preserve dozens of victories during the past eight seasons. But the running back turned thirty that year, and a nagging knee injury forced him to miss five games; he had never missed a game prior to 1990.
Although Craig told John Madden before the NFC Championship Game that he “felt as good today as [I’ve] felt all year,” the 49ers’ ground game totaled just thirty-nine yards on eleven carries. Not until three-and-a-half minutes remained in the fourth quarter did San Francisco gain a single rushing first down. They would not get another.
Craig had already fumbled once on that possession, the first play of the drive; teammate Bubba Paris recovered it. With the clock approaching two-and-a-half minutes, Craig accepted a handoff (his third in three plays) and plunged into a blur of his own linemen and defenders. One member of that pile was Giants nose tackle Erik Howard, who got two hands on Craig and a helmet on the football, which squirted out. At the Giants’ forty-three-yard line, Lawrence Taylor swallowed up the fumble.
“I knew we’d come up with something sooner or later,” Howard said about the game’s lone turnover. “We’d been fighting so hard the whole game.”
Behind by only a single point, New York was now content—for the first time in eight quarters against the vaunted San Francisco defense—with a field goal attempt.
“To me, it was like being in the backyard with my two older brothers against my younger brother Todd and I. It didn’t matter what age we were, it was us against them,” Hostetler said years