Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [80]
With the score 21-10 late in the third quarter and the Packers inside the red zone, McGee ran another post-pattern. He swam around the underneath safety, cut in front of Mitchell, and again found an open spot in the secondary. Right at the goal line, Starr targeted McGee. Although it was a perfectly placed, over-the-shoulder pass, McGee made another dazzling circus catch for a Packer touchdown. The ball hit his hands, bounded into the air, and the juggling McGee pulled it down for a thirteen-yard score. He finished the game with seven receptions for 138 yards and two touchdowns.
“He thought he should have been the MVP,” Curry said about McGee, who passed away in 2007. “Bart [the MVP Award winner of Super Bowl I] tried to give it to him!”
At 28-10 with just a quarter to play, McGee’s second touchdown put the game out of reach. Early in the final period, running back Elijah Pitts’ rushing touchdown pushed the lead to 35-10, sealing the game.
Not much happened after that. Green Bay tried to kill time off the clock, and the Chiefs essentially surrendered, replacing perennial AFL all-star quarterback Len Dawson with backup Pete Beathard. Now a blowout, many spectators began to lose interest, including a ten-year-old boy whose home stood just a few miles from the Los Angeles Coliseum.
“I was just a kid and I wanted to know when I was going to get the popcorn and the hot dog and the soda,” he remembered. “And probably, after I finished that, I was ready to go.”
Mike Lofton, an army sergeant major and single parent, surprised his son, James, with tickets (albeit, not very good tickets) to the big game. With so many vacant seats in the stadium, Mike and James snuck closer and closer to the field. By halftime, the father and son watched from a wonderful viewing point near the thirty-yard line.
“I really didn’t know much about the teams that were playing, but I was always grateful for his taking me to that game,” James Lofton said about his father, who passed away in October 1990. “It was a real special memory.”
Lofton soon learned to make his own spectacular touchdown catches, first at George Washington High in Los Angeles, then at Stanford University. Over the years, the memories of what took place on the field during Super Bowl I faded for Lofton. But at the start of his own NFL career, he would become thoroughly reacquainted with the tale of Max McGee and the first touchdown in Super Bowl history: The sixth overall selection in the 1978 NFL draft, he was selected by the Green Bay Packers. Lofton’s rookie season would be McGee’s fourth as a folksy, colorful contributor to the Packer radio broadcasts.
“I talked to those guys a little bit about what it was like playing in that game,” said Lofton. “[I came] to know Max over the years, [and saw] that play countless times.”
While McGee broadcast games well into the 1990s, Lofton left Green Bay and joined his hometown Los Angeles Raiders in 1987. After nine seasons (including six under head coach Bart Starr) as a member of the Packer franchise that won the first two Super Bowls, Lofton yearned for a chance to play in “the biggest game in the history of the world.” Even if a spectacular circus catch wasn’t one of his goals.
“[Playing the Super Bowl is] a fantasy, sure,” he said a few days before his Buffalo Bills faced the Giants. “There’s the one-handed, reverse catch that you always want to make. But, you know, I usually tell guys, when you go out trying for the spectacular, something for the blooper film usually results.”
Seeing Matt Bahr’s field goal provide the underdog Giants an early lead left Buffalo’s high-powered offense eager to make a big play. After all, when the Giants forced a three-and-out at the outset of Super Bowl XXV, it marked the first time the Bills were kept without an opening-drive touchdown in that postseason.
On second and eight from their own thirty-one-yard line, the no-huddle