Life's Not a Bowl Of Any Single Thing

It is not called the Super Bowl because supermen play in it. The name struck Kansas City Chiefs Owner Lamar Hunt in the gentle course of watching one of his children at play with a resilient rubber ball. Super Ball. Super Bowl. But how resilient are the players? For two full decades now the buildup has grown, and grown, way past the point of overwhelming just the game. Over 100 million people have been counted in its audience and over $1 million has been paid for a minute of their attention. Sometimes the contest seems the least of the spectacle, and the ball-playing children are easily forgotten. Here, as gathered by TIME Sport Writer Tom Callahan, is a revisiting: recollections grand and small. It is not a collection of dramatic war stories but a selection of corresponding jigsaw pieces, one from each game, the sum of which may suggest something of the human experience. I Green Bay Packers 35 Kansas City Chiefs 10

"If I'd known it was going to get this big, I'd have kept the football," says Packer Receiver Max McGee, 53, who scored the first super touchdown after staying out all night entertaining "a very nice girl from Chicago." He never expected to play. "I was over the hill." But Boyd Dowler fell injured, "and the next thing I knew Bart Starr was audibling a quick little post pattern, my wake-up call. I had a philosophy: quarterbacks making $100,000 shouldn't throw passes behind receivers making $30,000. So, trying not to get killed, I reached back to knock the ball down, and somehow the point just hit me in the palm and stuck." Retired within a year, McGee opened a Mexican restaurant, Chi-Chi's, which multiplied into franchises. His worth now is measured in the tens of millions of dollars, and racehorses in which he once invested pari-mutuelly are now his pets. "I got lucky," he says. II Green Bay Packers 33 Oakland Raiders 14

Starting as a rookie in 1968, the guard Gene Upshaw would sample a Raider Super Bowl in every decade. "Like crawling, walking and running," says the current executive director of the Players Association. "Remember, the first four games were called the A.F.L.-N.F.L. World Championship. The A.F.L.ers wondered if it was going to last." Just for playing in the Super Bowl, the Raiders received rings, but Receiver Fred Biletnikoff took to calling them losers' rings, and the name stuck. Upshaw, 40, says, "To tell you the truth, I don't even know where mine is." He had once dreamed of playing for the Green Bay Packers, of leading the famed Packer sweep. "After we lost, I went over to their dressing room and sat down next to the great tackle Henry Jordan." Jordan predicted that Upshaw would be back for a number of title games and advised him to savor them. "After my '80s Super Bowl, I had two seasons left. For some reason, I couldn't leave the dressing room. I was the last player there. The attendants were cleaning up. I guess I was holding on to it, like Jordan said. Holding on as long as I could." III New York Jets 16 Baltimore Colts 7

Being a former Colt, one who left Baltimore on mean terms, Jet Cornerback Johnny Sample pressed a personal grudge and won a private Super Bowl, but he lost something too. Sample recalls, "At one point I jumped on [Colts Running Back] Tom Matte out of bounds. He didn't do much after that." Another time, "momentum carried me into the Colts' bench and I got slugged with six or seven helmets." Other raps were to come. Not surprisingly, football had nothing for him after his playing career ended within a year. "I'd hoped to coach," says Sample, 48, "but the only letter I could bring myself to write wasn't answered." In 1972 a federal court convicted him of check fraud, and he served 366 days in prison. At Allen-wood, Pa., "not a jail, a summer camp," Sample realized how much he "needed to be connected somehow" with sports. "I never played tennis before I retired, but I played there every day." Now Sample is a tennis linesman at tournaments like the U.S. Open and last week's Masters in New York. As he puts it, "I'm back in the game," this time on the side of the rules. IV Kansas City Chiefs 23 Minnesota Vikings 7

"Look at Kassulke running around," Kansas City Chiefs Coach Hank Stram gloated in a famous film of the runaway. "It looks like a Chinese fire drill. "About 3 1/2 years later, a motorcycle accident paralyzed Karl Kassulke's legs. Recalling only that the Chiefs had an intricate offense, he says, "Certain memories have been lost, but I've got my normal thinking back," and he has been "fending very well in a wheelchair." Able to drive a special car, Kassulke, 44, works for Broken Wing, a Christian outreach to the handicapped. He teaches the various transferring techniques, such as from wheelchair to bed. "And did you know I married my nurse?" As a matter of fact, they have a son who is six. "When you marry your nurse," he says, "life is complete." In and out of a coma for weeks after the crash, Kassulke guesses he borrowed on something learned in football that he is trading on still. "I knew how to take things in stride, how to size up the competition, how to fight back, I guess. You don't just throw in the towel if you lose the Super Bowl." V Baltimore Colts 16 Dallas Cowboys 13

With five seconds to go in the game, and only two years left in his football career, a 23-year-old boy kicked a 32-yd. field goal that won a Super Bowl. "What do you do after you've won the Super Bowl?" Jim O'Brien asked himself, and there was no answer. "I was single," he says, "and I was immature. I did some dumb things." He got into a barroom fight, and a bottle in the face cost him some of the vision in one eye. "That's my badge a stupidity." It took a few years, but with the help of a wife, O'Brien eventually found a life in construction management (making inventions on the side, none as yet patented). "I'm 38 now, and I've finally figured it out. The thing about Americans is, we have no heroes of substance, only athletes and movie stars. The inventors, the cancer-cure finders, are in the real game. It could have been better for me if I had never made that kick. I'd have been more serious. But practicing every day as a kid, I always dreamed of the last-second field goal to win the biggest game in the world, and there it was." VI Dallas Cowboys 24 Miami Dolphins 3

Dallas Runner Duane Thomas thought of the movies, but the Super Bowl's Garbo made it only as far as a momentary job in microfilm at 20th Century-Fox. "I may not be a movie star," says the leading rusher of Super Bowl VI. "But I'm a moving star." A number of sales positions have gone by, and for the past six months he has been selling medical supplies to hospitals. Imagining Thomas a spieler is a little startling. "Oh, I've always been able to communicate. It's just that football is a nonverbal communication. Anything I believe in wholeheartedly, I can get across." His famed iconoclasm on the Super Bowl--"If this is the ultimate game, why is there another one next year?"--still suits him. "I've always had this certain character," says Thomas, 38. "The motto at my high school was 'You pay your debts to the past by putting your future in debt to yourself.' Even in college I'd audible to the quarterback if I didn't agree with the play. I know it's been hard for people to accept the way I am. It's been hard for me to accept being this way. But I have to be myself." VII Miami Dolphins 14 Washington Redskins 7

The little Cypriot necktie maker and tie-score breaker, Garo Yepremian, 41, completed (in a manner of speaking) the only pass he ever attempted, for a touchdown at that, in a Super Bowl of all places, to the other team, alas. "One pass, can you imagine?" he says. "Some guys throw 50 a week and are never remembered by anyone." Six years before, Yepremian had kicked off for the Detroit Lions in the first American game he ever saw. But by the climax of his second Super Bowl he had mastered the nuances. As Miami sought to clinch its undefeated season with two minutes left, Washington bounced Yepremian's 41-yd. field goal attempt right back to him, and Garo knew what he had to do. He still damns the fates: "If only I wasn't left-footed and right-handed." For days after the disaster, Yepremian felt like "an outcast." Then, one day, "a letter arrived from Coach Shula full of all the good things I'd done. still take it out and read it sometimes. Besides fooling around with ties, I'm doing promotions. There are other Super Bowls to achieve. I can throw a mean pass now." VIII Miami Dolphins 24 Minnesota Vikings 7

When you ask for Mercury Morris, a correctional officer says, "You mean 'Euu-Geeene' Morris," which is O.K. with the Dolphins' lost runner. "Mercury did the crime," says Morris, 39. "Gene is doing the time." For the past four years, "one day at a time"; for the past three months, Thursday to Thursday. Like and scores, appellate results are posted weekly, and Morris is full of hope again that the mandatory will be removed from his 1 5-to-20-year cocaine sentence. His humor is intact. He can smile at the memory of being singled out in front of everyone as someone who would never be singled out. No pictures in old jerseys for Merc, who must always be in uniform now. Wistfully he says, "A prison is lit up like a stadium, and sometimes it even sounds like a football game. Every team has fans in here, and the countdown to the Super Bowl is amazing. For a 4 o'clock game they start staking spots at the TV around 11." Morris waits for the kickoffand springs to the telephone. "That's when the line is the shortest." IX Pittsburgh Steelers 16 Minnesota Vikings 6

Back on the final day of the 1969 season, at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, the Pittsburgh Steelers lost their 13th straight game for Rookie Coach Chuck Noll, who predicted a few of them "would soon be getting on with their life's work." Immediately Ray Mansfield, 44, a center and therefore a realist, started selling life insurance on the side. "We never have that one extreme moment of football glory," he says, "so offensive linemen are less afraid of living on." They receive on-the-job training in anonymity. A gathering of the heftiest Steelers watched the Super Bowl together that year, and at one point Mansfield gave voice to their unreasonable dream of someday playing in one. As it happened, they would play in four, starting back in Tulane Stadium at Super Bowl IX. "The few of us who spent half our Steeler careers with a hopeless bottom team gazed around that field at each other and at the younger players. They had no idea." The starving team from the starving town at the great banquet. "They had absolutely no idea." X Pittsburgh Steelers 21 Dallas Cowboys 17

The oil business has been brutal this year. Sometimes the old Cowboy Cliff Harris, 37, misses "a defined field where flags are thrown." Then he smiles and remembers the singular instant of Super Bowl X, when, for mocking Roy Gerela's missed field goal, he was body-slammed by Linebacker Jack Lambert. "In Dallas, logical thoughts were ingrained," Harris says, "emotional reactions discouraged. The funny thing is, you know how to play the best when you can no longer play at all. Even watching games now, the emotions of football flow through me, but I'm still in my mind a thinking football player. People around me boo and cheer and really don't understand." When no penalty befell Lambert, the Steelers soared, the Cowboys slumped. It struck Harris as a betrayal of ideals, and yet he was consolable later. "You have something to look forward to only if you do lose. After one that we won, I looked over at Charlie Waters and whispered, 'But whom do we play next?' When you win the Super Bowl--I hesitate to say it--you're depressed." XI Oakland Raiders 32 Minnesota Vikings 14

"I didn't like to lose," says Lawyer Alan Page, 40, a special assistant to the Minnesota attorney general, "but no one has ever explained to me how one loss blights a season." Sometimes, the worst thing to be in America is second best in the world. "It doesn't make much sense, does it?" He started four Super Bowls at defensive tackle and, ending with XI, lost every one. "Almost none of the specifics have stayed with me. In retrospect, the result really isn't all that important. The excitement is in the striving, not the attaining, going out and trying to perform, hopefully enjoying ourselves along the way." Page gives little thought to football now. "The things I learned there aren't very transferable. I suppose they shaped me, but I have never consciously drawn on them." Even the Super Bowl cannot call him back. "It doesn't particularly interest me. To some degree, it's inescapable for everyone, but I won't go out of my way to watch it. For a football player, I guess I'm not much of a football fan. To tell you the truth, Inever quite understood the whole magic vision people see around sports." XII Dallas Cowboys 27 Denver Broncos 10

For 17 pro seasons as an assistant coach, starting with the newborn Boston Patriots in 1960, Red Miller dreamed of his moment. He never dreamed it would last but a moment. In his careful, defensive way, the 49-year-old "rookie" head coach squired the Broncos to the Super Bowl as Denver's deprived fans painted the country a bright orange. "I walked out onto the field," Miller says, "and thought, 'I used to coach at Astoria High.'" Within three years he was available to Astoria again, but the U.S. Football League's Denver Gold hired him for his marketability. Sales boomed briefly, but within a year he was fired again. At 58, Miller has, in a phrase coaches use on cut day, "resumed life" as a Dean Witter stockbroker. Norris Weese, the Bronco quarterback who finished the Super Bowl, visited Miller's office recently, and the coach gave him a tour of the different-size cubicles. "Like coaching," Miller says, "it's just a matter of putting in more hours than anyone else. I want to win the stockbrokers' super bowl. Hell, yes." XIII Pittsburgh Steelers 35 Dallas Cowboys 31

He dropped the Super Bowl, smack in his hands, keeled over just like Charlie Brown and collapsed in the end zone forever. "Tough to handle," drawls Jackie Smith, 45, the great St. Louis tight end, coaxed from retirement by Dallas. "But it mellows." He produces fishing films now in rural Arkansas and misses big cities not at all. No tight ends are in the N.F.L. Hall of Fame, but one ought to be. "Sounds crazy, considering what happened," he says. "But I don't guess I ever enjoyed a season so much. All those years in St. Louis, I never had time to reflect, and looking back after retirement, everything seemed so jammed together." When the Cowboys called, looking for an emergency replacement, Smith was 38. "I promise you, I was like some old boy in his living room thinking, 'Man, I'd like to be down there with the Dallas Cowboys.' Suddenly I was, and it came to me what a great gift it is to have the ability to play. I was given a little slot of time back to understand this. One pass can't take that away from me." XIV Pittsburgh Steelers 31 Los Angeles Rams 19

Several years before the Rams reached the Super Bowl, Defensive End Fred Dryer and Teammate Lance Rentzel spoofed the famous hype by crashing the press box in the '20s guise of Front-Page Reporters Cubby O'Switzer and Scoops Brannigan. Each carried a "press" card in his cap and a $50 bill in his kit for flashing at bellhops and other cheap purposes. "After that, I couldn't help but smile at the Super Bowl," says Dryer, 39, for whom acting has become a profession. He plays Police Detective Hunter on television. "When all the over-coaching, overpreparing and overwriting is done, the Super Bowl is a goddam game. We played well. I let the event in completely and enjoyed the whole thing tremendously. The loss was gone the second I walked out of the stadium." Vacating football was more complicated, like dropping a longstanding character. "To put it aside," says Dryer, "you almost have to give up the fact of who you were. I couldn't be an athlete in my mind the rest of my life, so I left the football player behind. Within a year, it was like I never played sports." XV Oakland Raiders 27 Philadelphia Eagles 10

Some say the 15th Super Bowl was the game that united the American and National conferences in a common cause against--nothing personal--the Philadelphia Eagles. "Even on picture day, we had to practice," recalls John Bunting, 35, an Eagle linebacker. "I remember the box lunch on the bus." Knowing that coaches mimic other coaches' success, the Raiders whispered among themselves about their duty to restrict Coach Dick Vermeil's military work habits to Philadelphia. "When we finally got on the field," Bunting says, "we were exhausted emotionally and physically. I was crushed for weeks." Released after eleven seasons, he moved to the U.S.F.L. and lost the championship game there too. But the Philadelphia Stars repeated the following year and this time won. "I thought of the Super Bowl," says Bunting, now a coach with the Baltimore Stars, "and I felt relieved, finished, fulfilled. No more risks to take. At half time, I'd taken an injection in the Achilles, and I was tired of that kind of pain. I sat there and cried." XVI San Francisco 49ers 26 Cincinnati Bengals 21

When the 49ers cut Linebacker Dan Bunz last summer, fans tried to reimburse him for a goal-line stand. "They sent $57 checks, my number," he says, "to go out to dinner." Head-on, he had tackled Cincinnati's Charles Alexander on a flat pass to the half-yard line with third down and the Super Bowl to go. "Maybe the replay is what's etched in my mind, but I felt so aware at the time, so keyed up and alive. For a mad second, I almost went for the ball. It was that perfect tackle I'd always heard about." On fourth down, Alexander was only a convoy, but his hard look toward Bunz telegraphed that play too. "I broke my chin straps," says Bunz, 30. "My nose was bleeding. It was the highlight of my life." His wife Elizabeth, a dentist, had looked forward to having her husband's teeth off the line. On this season's first Sunday, she tried to settle him in front of the TV. "Calm down, you're not playing anymore." But by half time she surrendered softly. "If you can play, go play anywhere." In December he hooked on with Detroit. XVII Washington Redskins 27 Miami Dolphins 17

For nine years in Miami, Tampa and Washington, Defensive Back Jeris White mysteriously shunned the press. No incident triggered his silence, no anger accompanied it. His off-season real estate career might have profited from celebrity, but he simply declined to think of himself as a football player. "Now that I've been out a few years," he says, "I guess I can say I was afraid for Jeris White. I was afraid of becoming enraptured, the way so many others bathe themselves in a false sense of reality. I wanted to be the steak, not the sizzle, and I knew that if I was to come out whole, I had to keep a separate identity. Jeris White, the person." Allowing for the customary withdrawal pangs, he seems to have made it. "I think you al ways ache a little," says White, 33, who played well in the Super Bowl but kept in the shadow of the stadium tunnel later while the other Redskins met the press. "My old Miami coaches passed by and said, 'Nice game, Jeris,' and I thought, 'Full circle.' " He held out the next year and never came back. XVIII Los Angeles Raiders 38 Washington Redskins 9

During the pregame buildup, Jack Squirek had all manner of attention lavished on him--by the University of Illinois student newspaper. "Then I intercepted that pass," he says, "and for one day I was famous." An assistant coach had a premonition: plucking the quickest young linebacker from the Raider bench, to inserted Squirek for a single down with instructions to ignore the zone defense and shadow little Runner Joe Washington. "Wasn't it about ten yards?" Squirek, 26, muses. "It happened so fast, I only remember being in the end zone. After the game, jeez, there were seventy, a hundred writers, all around me." But as he came from nowhere to score that touchdown, Squirek has returned there, to the Raider periphery. "I realize there's a lot of talent on the Raiders," he says, "but it's frustrating not to play. When you're a rookie, you're eager to do anything, but it's tougher to be a special-team player after you've had a taste of glory. Now I dream of just steady, uneventful play." Like Max McGee, Squirek forgot the ball, but the equipment men remembered. It's on his mantel. XIX San Francisco 49ers 38 Miami Dolphins 16

For 15 seasons and three Super Bowls, Jack Reynolds seemed as much a coach as a player, a thinking man's linebacker armed with his own sideline chalkboard. "I liked the strategy, the military part," he says. "Right flank, left flank. The offenses tap-tap-tapping, the defenses deploying their troops. It's a war. It's a con game too." But old soldiers fade away, and Reynolds, 38, should have read retirement into the mere three downs he staffed last Super Sunday. "Just the opening play of the game," as he recalls, and two others early on. "The bottom line is you're a team player. If you win, there's enough for everybody." Old Hacksaw had to be cashiered as a player, and to the 49ers' surprise, could not stay on as a coach. For now, he is making a living being Hacksaw in old jocks' commercials on TV. "I felt uneasy watching others do things I could do better, and uncomfortable teaching them. It's hard to put into words, but it was like being pulled apart from within, like I had killed myself for 15 years and was finally dying." Ray Mansfield's phrase is better: living on.