'A FAILURE? LORD NO!'

The most exclusive lodge in American professional athletics is the brotherhood of championship quarterbacks. Its circle is limited, and members tend to be intolerant, even contemptuous, of nonmembers, no matter what their claims to greatness. Bobby Layne, the roistering old Lion, quarterbacked teams that won championships in the N.F.L. He belongs. So do Bart Starr, who won five, Johnny Unitas, Norm Van Brocklin and Joe Namath. Francis Asbury Tarkenton, 36, is not a member. Though he has won three conference championship games, Tarkenton has yet to win The Big One.

In the 16 seasons since the rookie quarterback with the choirboy face took the snap from center in the Minnesota Vikings' first National Football League game, he has surpassed all others in passing yardage (41,798), touchdowns (308), completions (3,186). Along the way to achieving those records, Tarkenton put a new word--scramble--into the vocabulary of football and marked the game forever with his indelible style. This coming Sunday, he will try for the third time to join the lodge.

The innocent face is seamed now, although the eyes remain as ingenuous as ever. The preacher's son from Georgia chews tobacco and affects barracks language--acceptable, almost required vices in an old pro. The once idyllic Tarkenton marriage faltered this season when Wife Elaine moved to Atlanta with their three children. He is a millionaire several times over, a self-made corporate presence who teaches industrial motivation to some of the largest firms in the U.S. So often do interviewers seek him out for his incisive football mind and for his sophisticated, glib delivery (still tinged with a Southern drawl) that NBC has erected transmitters outside his homes in Atlanta and Minneapolis to allow viewers to see and hear him from his living room.

Tarkenton's extraordinary records, his longevity and hardiness--he has missed but one game because of injury--his utter command of the 100-yd.-long environment of football and his success outside the game would seem to leave him with few challenges. But there remains a restlessness in him, a relentless drive. "The problem I have with life," Tarkenton has written in his autobiography, "is that I have more things I want to do than I have time to do. I'm talking about a deep involvement. You can get it on the football field, of course. You can also get it in a van I lived in for 16 to 18 hours a day several years ago, motoring around the South finding out what assembly-line workers were doing as part of the research for my behavior management service."

Still, the matter of lodge membership rankles. Always there is the implication that without it, a man of his talent is unfinished, his gifts somehow flawed. Says Tarkenton: "Of course it bothers me not to have played for a Super Bowl champion. But a failure? Lord no. I have played with and against the best players in football since 1961 and I have to believe I belong with the best quarterbacks ever. I don't give a damn about artistry or how much velocity my pass develops or how many tight ends I can knock through a brick wall with my ball. Let the strong-arm cultists be happy with their images. I play. I play week in and week out, year in and year out."

Nonetheless, Tarkenton has gone to the Super Bowl twice before and come back twice in defeat. For quarterback and team, there is hollowness--and hope. Says Tarkenton: "Football is not the end of creation for me. But it's big, and not winning the Super Bowl has made me feel empty because that is the highest you can go in pro football, and our team hasn't experienced that. We are going to go there January 9. We are going to win."

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