Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [59]
In Tampa, Smith reiterated his earnest belief that he was the league’s best: “I still think I’m the best defensive player right now, is there any reason not to?”
Smith made even more noise when reporters asked him to comment on the Bills’ Super Bowl opponent.
“I’d rather have played the 49ers,” Smith told reporters. “The 49ers are famous and everybody says they are this and that. It makes me sick. I wanted the 49ers.”
Teammate Carwell Garnered agreed.
“I wish we could have played the 49ers too, and I mean it like Bruce does, with no disrespect to the Giants,” the rookie fullback said. “The 49ers were the team of the 80’s, and we wanted to show against them that we’re going to be the team of the 90’s.”
That week a handful of Bills expressed a desire to be appreciated outside of the comparatively small market just a few hundred miles from Times Square and the World Trade Center. Sharing the Super Bowl stage with a team from the country’s largest and most prominent metropolis revealed a subtle resentment within the Bills.
“My reason for making the statement I made was to get the credit I deserve,” Smith said. “I really didn’t think I was getting it and probably one of the reasons is that Buffalo has only one newspaper. It’s been frustrating at times,” he said Wednesday. “It would be nice for endorsements and things like that. You have to play extremely well to get noticed in Buffalo. If I played like that for the New York Jets or somebody, I would be a legend.”
Lawrence Taylor was already a legend, and he would have been one wherever or whenever he played.
The Giants selected Taylor with the second overall pick in the 1981 NFL draft, and he immediately became one of the game’s best players. He won back-to-back NFL Defensive Player of the Year awards during his first two seasons in the league. In 1986, as the Giants charged to a Super Bowl victory, Taylor became just the second defensive player in league history to win the regular season’s Most Valuable Player Award.
Despite scandalous behavior over the years—habitual drug use, arrests, a league suspension a few years earlier, and a casual relationship with prostitutes—Taylor’s play always bailed him out with the coaching staff and the fans.
But Taylor was set to turn thirty-two-years old the week after Super Bowl XXV, and with an influx of younger linebackers emulating his model, he no longer symbolized state-of-the-art. A Week Three hamstring injury literally slowed Taylor down, and by the middle of the season he admitted to feeling “heavy” when he chased after mobile quarterbacks like Randall Cunningham. An heir apparent even surfaced that season. In his second season, Kansas City Chiefs outside linebacker Derrick Thomas recorded twenty sacks, including a record-setting seven-sack performance in Week Ten against Seattle.
Taylor said little to protest his skeptics. In response to Bruce Smith declaring himself the league’s premier defender—prior to the Bills-Giants Week Fifteen matchup—Taylor said, “It doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t concern me. Everybody’s time passes.”
And on Media Day, he was content to acknowledge, “Right now, Bruce Smith is the best.”
Accepting another pass-rusher’s superiority wasn’t quite as absurd or blasphemous as the New York media portrayed. Smith did have an incredible season in 1990: he garnered thirty-nine of the forty-two votes for the NFL Defensive Player of the Year Award.
It was the self-effacing tone with which he spoke during the week of Super Bowl XXV that seemed entirely out of Taylor’s character.
“Can I jump over buildings in a single bound? No, and I’m not trying to,” said Taylor. “At this point in my career, I’m not trying to be Superman. I’m happy with being Clark Kent. Clark Kent can get the job done if he has to.