Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [75]
But for all the differences, in the final moments leading up to the kickoff of Super Bowl XXV, nothing separated the two teams.
“Here we are big football players,” Stephen Baker remembered, “I had to look around and see if it was OK to cry. And I saw [Giants guard] William Roberts—one of the biggest guys on the team—he was crying. Now, I was like, ‘It’s OK to cry.’”
“It just made you proud to be an American, knowing that here we are, playing this big game, and our troops are over there fighting for us. When those F-16s flew over, it just made you feel good. Everybody shed a tear. And then after that, it was time to play.”
7
The First Thirty Minutes
The surreal, patriotic scene of Whitney Houston and the jet flyover having disappeared in a matter of minutes, football returned to Tampa Stadium. Just after 6:15 p.m., Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks stood on one side of the freshly painted Super Bowl XXV logo at midfield. Buffalo captains Mark Kelso, Kent Hull, Steve Tasker, Andre Reed, and Darryl Talley waited opposite them.
Walking out to join the group of Pro Bowlers and future Hall of Famers was a sharply dressed elderly gentleman. His hands crossed, resting at his waist, the sixty-four-year-old looked modest, even uncomfortable, standing center stage with the eyes of the world upon him. But the opening moments to the Super Bowl’s quarter-century celebration deserved the presence of Alvin Ray “Pete” Rozelle.
From the game’s bold moniker to the grand and occasionally gaudy halftime performances, Rozelle invented the Super Bowl. As commissioner for twenty-nine years, he expanded the NFL financially and geographically far beyond anyone’s imagination. With the proclamation of the annual late-January holiday, the Super Bowl became the most important event on the annual sporting calendar.
In November 1989, Rozelle stepped down as league commissioner, a post he had held since 1960. So when San Francisco crushed Denver in Super Bowl XXIV, for the first time ever, Rozelle was not inside the winning locker room to present the Lombardi Trophy. Fittingly, for the silver anniversary, he returned to participate in another ceremonial moment: the pregame coin toss. Later that evening, the game’s Most Valuable Player would receive the recently renamed Pete Rozelle Trophy. Super Bowl XXV would begin and end with a nod to the sport’s greatest visionary.
“No name is more synonymous with the Super Bowl than Pete Rozelle,” Commissioner Tagliabue said that week. “It was Pete’s imagination and foresight that made this great event a reality.”
Nurturing the Super Bowl from a matchup between two football teams into a worldwide event was Rozelle’s crowning achievement as NFL commissioner. But all week long in Tampa, Rozelle was reminded of his greatest regret.
On the day after President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Rozelle spoke with a former classmate at the University of San Francisco: Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary. Salinger urged the commissioner to continue on with Week Eleven of the 1963 NFL season. As Rozelle stated, “It has been traditional in sports for athletes to perform in times of great personal tragedy. Football was Mr. Kennedy’s game. He thrived on competition.”
The NFL played its full slate of Sunday games.
In an interview around the time he announced his retirement, Rozelle was asked what his biggest mistake was as league commissioner: “Playing the game on Kennedy Sunday,” he answered.
Three decades after being soundly criticized for the decision to play on “Kennedy Sunday,” Rozelle still believed sports possessed some sort of healing power.
“President Roosevelt urged sports to continue [during World War II],” Rozelle told the New York Times when the Gulf War broke out. “And they did. He felt that people needed diversion because if they brooded about war, all their waking hours, they would be very depressed people.”
After a week