Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [78]
Just a few minutes into Super Bowl XXV, the Giants, not the Bills, looked like the team with the offensive edge.
Buffalo’s defense promptly stiffened, and the Giants could only gain a few yards over the next three plays. Well within Matt Bahr’s range, New York attempted a twenty-eight-yard field goal that split the uprights. With a little more than seven minutes remaining in the first quarter, the Giants led 3-0.
FLASHBACK: SUPER BOWL I
“I don’t think any of us knew what to expect,” Bill Curry said years later. “But we certainly didn’t expect thirty thousand empty seats at the biggest game in the history of the world.”
Prior to the 1966 NFL season, Curry, a second-year center from Georgia Tech, earned the starting job for the Green Bay Packers. The dual duty of snapping to and blocking for the great Bart Starr, combined with the eye of head coach Vince Lombardi scrutinizing his every move, prepared him for just about any pressure situation. By the end of that season, he was more than ready to play before a fully packed stadium for the Packers’ NFL title game against Dallas.
Seventy-five thousand, five hundred four people filled the seats at the Cotton Bowl that day, witnesses to Green Bay’s 34-27 defeat of the Cowboys. So when the Packers and Kansas City Chiefs met two weeks later to play in the first ever AFL-NFL Championship Game before a one-third empty Los Angeles Coliseum, Curry and most of his teammates were stunned.
“There were a few writers, there was a sparse crowd, and we played a game, and it just didn’t feel big time.”
The fourteen-point underdog Chiefs of the allegedly inferior American Football League met the Packers on January 15, 1967, and even caught a break on the third play from scrimmage. While blocking to help spring fullback Jim Taylor for a first down, Packer tight end Boyd Dowler separated his shoulder and left the game.
During the previous four seasons, Dowler caught more passes than did any other Green Bay player. Against Kansas City’s defense—led by future Hall of Famers Buck Buchanan and Bobby Bell, as well as boastful, yet talented all-star Fred “the Hammer” Williamson—the loss of Dowler threatened to severely handicap the passing game.
Fortunately, the Packers had a suitable replacement on their sidelines: former Pro Bowler Max McGee. But the thirty-four-year-old McGee only caught four passes during the 1966 season, despite suiting up for every game. Even more troublesome to the Packer cause, was McGee’s physical and mental status when Vince Lombardi called for the eleven-year veteran.
“He didn’t come in the huddle bright eyed and bushy tailed,” Packer guard Jerry Kramer remembered. “He was like he was half-way hungover or something, or half-way asleep. He wasn’t what you’d like to see coming into the huddle at that particular point in time.”
McGee wasn’t half-way hungover; he was full-blown hungover.
“I was rooming with Paul Hornung, my buddy, and we’re both single and here we are, last night in Hollywood, and boy I tell you, we went out and hit a few of the hot spots, the normal places and we ran into a group of stewardesses who were having a little fun,” McGee told NFL Films years later. “Well all at once: curfew. So we head back to make curfew and we jumped into bed. And for some reason, Hawg Hanner was checking curfew, not Vince. Well, I played with Hawg, he was my good buddy. . . . He opened the door and said, ‘Ok, if you two guys are in, everybody’s in.’ Well, when he went back out, we almost ran over him, I did, getting out of there.”
A stern warning had been delivered to the entire Packers team earlier that day:
“Men, if you bust curfew tonight, not only will I fine you $2,500,” Lombardi told his players, “But I will see to it that you never play another game in the National Football League.