From: bergerson@cvdv79.mayo.edu (Chad D. Bergerson)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.football.pro
Subject: DECEMBER 28, 1975   VIKES GET SCREWED!!!
Date: 16 Nov 92 19:12:21 GMT
Article-I.D.: bmw.1992Nov16.191221.24549
Reply-To: bergerson@mayo.edu
Organization: Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN


The following is an excerpt from the book "Tarkenton", by Jim Klobuchar and
Fran Tarkenton.  It gives a very vivid recount of the events that took place on
that very memorable day in 1975.  Hopefully other fans will read this too and 
feel what it is like to have your dreams and hopes destroyed by a bad call in 
a very big game....

    

    Tarkenton trotted off briskly.
    The professional's trot.  Seventy yards and six minutes in eleven plays.
It was 14-10, and the gin-laced snowmobile pilgrims in the gloomy tiers of Met
Stadium screeched and stomped and clutched their Thermoses in the air.
    The Cowboys were dying.  A veteran ballplayer can sense that as acutely as
he can sense the irresistible momentum of a touchdown drive.  They were not only
dying, Tarkenton told himself on the sidelines, they looked terrible doing it.
It was no judgement of the Cowboys' effort or their performance.  For much of 
the game Dallas looked like the stronger team.  Its play was smoother, and its 
statistics were more impressive.  Yet heading into the final minutes, the 
Cowboys seemed uncoordinated and lost.  Centering deep to Staubach in the shotgun
formation, John Fitzgerald rolled the ball on the freezing turf and dirt a 
couple of times.  Staubach groused the second time.  Marshall and Page heightened
his distemper by racking him for an eight-yard loss.  With 3 1/2 minutes to go,
Mitch Hoopes punted for Dallas.  It was short and almost abject.  To compound the
unsightliness, the Cowboys had an illegal man downfield.  You could almost hear
the air going out of Dallas.
    The Vikings had possession.  Their tactical situation was almost unbeatable.
It was third and two on the Dallas forty-seven when Lee Roy stopped the clock.
With just over two minutes left, and two yards to go, the Vikings could put it
away right here.  But Tarkenton needed more than a short-yardage play.  The
Cowboys were going to stack enough people on the line to hold the levees at
Galveston.  He wanted a rollout option to keep the Dallas secondary loose.
    Tingelhoff snapped it, and Tarkenton rolled right.  The strong safety,
Waters, had to respect a possible pass there.  It was in capital letters in the 
defensive playbooks.  But Waters didn't.  "They're not going to throw that thing
on third and two at midfield," he counseled himself.  Waters flew up to the line.
Tarkenton tried to step inside, but there wasn't room.  He couldn't throw because 
there wasn't time.  He help the ball and got nailed.  And Clabo punted one more
time.
    The pros sanctify the big play, which sometimes takes a very prosaic form.
In all the shock waves ten minutes later, nobody remembered how Charlie Waters
defied the manuals and buried the quarterback on the play Dallas needed if for
nothing more than the usual doomed thrashings at the finish.
    With Dallas in possession, Fitzgerald bowled the ball back to Staubach, who
responded by barking and fuming.  The Cowboys were disordered.  On fourth and
sixteen from the twenty-five, Drew Pearson told Staubach, "Me, throw it to me on
the sideline.  I can beat Wright with an out ball."  Staubach lofted it amid a
flutter of "Ave Marias," and Pearson leaped to spear it at the fifty as he was
going out of bounds.  Nate Wright nudged him while he was descending.  Even
without Wright's assistance, Pearson was likely to land out of bounds.  The
official, Jerry Bergman, could have seen it that way, but didn't.  The catch was
allowed.  It was a marginal play, and not many officials want to decide a playoff
football game with a penalty call in the final minute.  Bergman was under an 
even larger gun.  He had been wounded by all the recriminations following the 
Mercury Morris fumble play in the Miami-Buffalo game a few weeks ago.
    The hairy-chested tycoons would decide this on their own.  Flags are okay
early in the game.  In the last minute of this one, Dallas and Minnesota were
going to police themselves.
    Tarkenton's view of the midfield pass was obscured.  There was some bitching
around him, but he couldn't join because he didn't really see the play.  Staubach
had thirty-seven seconds left from midfield.  Tarkenton didn't visualize Tarkenton
calling the play in this circumstance.  He rarely looked at the other quarter-
back that clinically.  All he wanted Staubach to do was get wiped out by the
Viking rush.  From the shotgun Staubach threw to Preston Pearson, who dropped the
ball.  Now thirty-two seconds left.  Staubach set up again.  The Viking rush was
urgent but a half-second off and a half-yard late.  Drew Pearson was flying 
shoulder to shoulder down the sideline with Nate Wright.  It was a prevent 
defense, all right.  But still, it wasn't preventing the Cowboys from loosing the
jackrabbit flanker one-on-one against Wright.  Krause was coming over, but Golden
Richards was on the other side, and Krause had to worry about that.  The ball
was nosing down through the wind.  Underthrown.  Pearson had to slow down.  
Aware, Wright tried to adjust to the changed rhythm.  They made contact, and
Wright fell.  Striding over him, Pearson hooked the football on his hip with one
hand.  It was a kind of catch only heaven could understand, or ordain.  But 
Pearson had the ball and was stepping into the end zone in astonishment, almost
in guilt, because even the profession flankers with all their big talk about 
catching anything in sight don't catch a football like that.
    Pearson looked at the official slackly.  Was it all right?  Any flags?
There was something yellow on the field.  Pearson could have sworn it was a flag,
but it was nothing more accusatory than a tennis ball flung from the stands.
    Wright got up and charged the official with Krause.  On the sidelines Tarkenton
screamed and swore.  He ran onto the field with a half-dozen others.  The crowd
was comatized in silence.  The sounds were from the players, not the spectators.
"You dirty son-of-a-bitch," Tarkenton yelled crossfield to the official.  "It was
interference!  Call it!"
    The culminating year.  The season of seasons for the conglomerate quarterback,
and the year of the Super Bowl championship for his football team.  They were 
going to beat the Steelers somehow, and all the old derisions and neglects would
be wiped away.  And now a hotdog, cocksure official, which is the way Tarkenton
characterized Bergman, pulled the plug on Tomorrowland.  The screen went black.
    And it all came tumbling down.
    Tingelhoff got Tarkenton back to the sidelines.  The Vikings couldn't stop
yammering.  These were the good, disciplined, mechanical men.  Calculating pro-
fessionals.  And in this ugliest, wrenching moment of their football lifetimes
they were acting like deranged dockyard toughs.
    Grant restrained his players, but he couldn't blame them.
    Page was chewing out one of the officials. "Take it," he said, "and stick it
up your ass."
    They docked Minnesota fifteen yards for that on the kickoff.  Fritsch hammered
the ball deep, and McClanahan brought it out to the fifteen.  Tarkenton ran on 
with the offense, looking for Bergman.
    He cursed the official from cap to shoelaces, accused him of losing his guts
and blowing the ball game.  Bergman flung his replies, then told the quarterback
to play football or he was going to run him off.  Tarkenton called a pass play, 
and Too Tall Jones ripped him on the one-yard line for a loss of fourteen.  
Tarkenton got up and renewed his assault on Bergman.  Christ, he couldn't believe
it.  Six months down to this.  The day of days for the quarterback and his foot-
ball team.  Bergman told him to stop or he was out.  "Go ahead,", Tarkenton railed.
"You already took it away from us."  Bergman wasn't going to run him in a cham-
pionship game.  But he might as well.  As they were arguing, the official nearby,
Armen Terzian, grabbed at his head, struck by a bottle thrown from the stands.
Other bottles were falling.  Foreman raced to the railing.  A week before, other 
dues-paying morons in Buffalo threw rock-hard snowballs and ice chunks at the
Vikings and caught Foreman in the eye.  He had double vision for three days.
"Knock it off," Foreman pleaded.  "You already hurt one guy."
    Tarkenton closed his eyes.  It was degenerating.  It was a living horror.
The day that began with sunbeams and gold dust, with the intimations of Jubilee
ahead, was winding down with a cruelty and vindictiveness that made the whole 
progression of events seem like a mindless mockery.  They were losing the football
game in a way they couldn't possibly lose it.  The season was in ashes.  And now
an official knelt bleeding from a missile flung from the stands by some drunken
fan. 



too bad that it hit the wrong official.......

-
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Chad D. Bergerson                            Internet: bergerson@mayo.edu
Mayo Clinic                                  Voice: (507) 255-7567
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