Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [81]
“The ball was really hanging up there,” Lofton remembered. “Had Jim been able to throw it three or four yards further, ’cause I had beaten him easily, and the ball was kinda underthrown a little bit . . . it would have been an easy score.”
Williams leapt, sprawling out in midair, then deflected the ball with the fingertips on his right hand. The tipped pass spun end over end, high above the ground. The extra hang time allowed Lofton to adjust and locate the ball.
“He got a lot of the ball, so it wasn’t a bad deflection. He was coming down when the ball was coming down. He really wasn’t out of position,” Lofton noted. “Those are the kind of plays you can’t predict. You certainly don’t practice them.”
Displaying remarkable concentration, Lofton pulled in the wobbly ball. He danced along the sideline, trying to stay in bounds to reach the end zone. Lofton’s tiptoeing—and the additional split-second in which the tipped ball floated in the air—gave Everson Walls time to swoop in and knock Lofton out-of-bounds at the eight-yard line.
“I played safety like I played cornerback,” said Walls, a cornerback who played safety in the Giants’ nickel and dime packages. “I could still sit back and read an offense extremely well, and I was good at anticipating. And I knew that’s where [Kelly] was going with the pass. That’s what allowed me to get a jump on it and stop Lofton from scoring a touchdown.”
In the previous twenty-four Super Bowls, only nine plays from scrimmage netted more yards, and each of those produced a touchdown. Although Walls prevented Lofton from scoring, the sixty-one-yard catch-and-run seemed destined to yield a touchdown and, perhaps, spark Buffalo’s great offense into a scoring frenzy. But two incompletions from Kelly, sandwiched between a short Thomas rush up the middle, stalled the drive, and kicker Scott Norwood converted on a short field goal to even the score at three.
At the start of their next drive, the Giants offense picked up where they had left off. From their standard, multiple tight-end set, consecutive rushes by Anderson and Hostetler gave New York a first down.
Hostetler then fired a pass downfield to Stephen Baker and saw tight end Howard Cross—who thought the ball was intended for him—stick his hand up and deflect the ball. The ball slowed down and fluttered through the air, but stayed on target: Baker pulled the ball into his stomach. The second fluke, tipped-pass reception of the quarter garnered a sizable chunk of yardage and moved the Giants to midfield.
Buffalo’s defense had now surrendered eighty-eight yards and six first downs. A week earlier in the AFC Championship Game against Los Angeles, at the three-minute mark of the opening period, Darryl Talley was returning an interception for a touchdown to boost their lead to 21-3. Seven days later, at the exact same three-minute mark, the Bills were embroiled in a much different contest.
“I’ve never been so tired in a football game in my life,” said Shane Conlan. “I was even tired in the first quarter. They kept pounding with guys like Anderson, and that wears you out. . . . I broke my face mask on Anderson in the first half. It just snapped and turned all the way around to the right side of my helmet. I mean, jeez, it’s the first time I ever broke a face mask.”
“They were sagging,” said tight end Bob Mrosko, who needed postgame stitches on his forehead following a collision with Darryl Talley. “They weren’t pursuing as hard. In practice we had told ourselves that no matter what happened, we’d play our style of football.”
While Anderson was vital to the offensive game plan, the Giants needed to mix passes into the ground-heavy attack. And after Anderson pounded out four yards on a first and ten from midfield, miscues in the passing game