Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [61]
“I remember one of the guys working in the hotel,” said fullback Maurice Carthon.
He says to me and O. J. when we were walking to our room, “you guys cost us a lot of money.” And we were like, “what do you mean?” He said, “’cause as soon as you guys won the game, we had to take all this 49ers stuff out of here. The 49ers were gonna have all these big parties, and they were gonna spend like two or three million dollars at our hotel.”
And I remember that morning, O. J. and I got up and we were still excited about being at the Super Bowl at seven in the morning, so we started driving around town. And Nike had these two big bulletin boards. At one part of the city of Tampa Bay, they had Joe Montana on it and the other part of the city they had Jerry Rice catching the ball. And that kinda fueled our fire for the whole week for the Super Bowl and into the game, because nobody gave us a chance.
Still, no member of the media hauled in quotes from a New York player citing a lack of respect.
“That’s a testament to Parcells. The more you say, the more you gotta take back,” Riesenberg said.
There did, however, come a breaking point for the media-savvy, veteran group and they could no longer dish out a wealth of flowery words. The Bills often embarrassed their opponents, especially in the postseason. But the Giants defense yielded the fewest points in the NFL and managed, in two San Francisco road trips that season, to limit one of the greatest offenses in history to just ten points per game.
“We would have to have seven guys break their legs and everybody come out there not prepared in order for a team to score 40 points on us,” Pepper Johnson said. “I don’t see anybody marching the ball up and down the field on us.”
Giants players and staff never feared Buffalo’s offense. They simply immersed themselves in film and preparations.
Although the press had reported that the 49ers sent staff members to Tampa, before the NFC Championship Game, to ready hotel rooms and offices, the Giants had (more covertly) done the same. Parcells’ personal secretary, Kim Kolbe, and George Young’s personal secretary, Janice Gavazzi, also flew to Tampa that week with simple, yet specific instructions from Parcells: “Get it like I want it.”
“I’ll be darned,” Parcells recalled, “[Kim] met us at the plane at about 3:30 in the morning, all the [hotel room] keys were out, the players knew where to go, our offices were set up. And we were up and ready and working by 7:30 that morning.”
Giants players had Monday off. Gary Reasons (nine-over-par 81) and Lawrence Taylor (four-over-par 76) played golf at the North Course of Largo’s Bardmoor Country Club. That week, Taylor remarked, “I’d rather go to the Super Bowl than shoot 70. [But] I’d rather shoot 65 than play in the Super Bowl.” Golf had become a huge part of Taylor’s life: In his 1987 autobiography, LT: Living on the Edge, he claimed that the “golf course was my detox tank” for his cocaine habit.
While Taylor and Reasons hit the links, Jeff Hostetler and Raul Allegre, along with Bart Oates, John Washington, Eric Dorsey, and Mike Fox—a combined eleven hundred pounds crammed together—rode the roller coasters at nearby Busch Gardens. And although each was given twenty-five Super Bowl tickets, more than a handful of players spent their day off trying to find more for friends and family members.
Meanwhile, Bill Parcells and his staff were hard at work.
“There’s a way to do it . . . a way to win. You just have to find it. That’s the mentality that coaching is really about. Nobody else understands,” Parcells told famed sportswriter Jerry Izenberg during the writing of No Medals for Trying, a behind-the-scenes look at one week of the Giants’ 1989 season. “Mickey [Corcoran, his old high school basketball coach] taught me that. He always said there was a way to win every game. Finding it is what separates some people from others.”
By the time the Bills plane landed in Tampa, they had already put