From: johndoe@samadams.inmet (johndoe)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.football.pro
Subject: DECEMBER 28, 1975   VIKES GET SCREWED!!!
Date: 17 Nov 92 20:22:41 GMT
Reply-To: johndoe@inmet.com (Bus error - core dumped)
Organization: Intermetrics, Inc.

>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 un-
 beatable.  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 held 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 quarterback 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 con-
 tact, 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 astonish-
 ment, 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.  He
 looked at the official slackly.  Was it all right?  Any flags? There was some-
 thing 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 professionals.  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 football 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 championship 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.......

the whole point of this excerpt you have copied is lost on you, isn't it?  if
you knew anything about the kind of person tarkenton is, you would know how he
is commenting on what he views as his own arrogance as a football player, as
the member of a team he considered to be superior.  he is commenting on how
men such as himself and the estimable alan page, now a respected and honored
man in your own home state's judicial system, can be reduced to name calling
and banalities in the face of loss.  and how even all of this is so
unimportant in the face of humanity.  foreman, one of the players adversely
affected by the "bad call" of the officials, forgets completely about the
game, the loss, and pleads with the fans to stop.  the living horror is
dealing with the fact that, despite the pain of the loss, it is all child's
play - "a mindless mockery" - in the face of the bleeding man standing in the
end zone.

don't tell me you forgot your smiley faces.  you say hopefully other fans will
read this and know what it feels like to have your hopes and dreams destroyed
by a bad call.  that is not at all the point of this excerpt!  while hopes and
dreams of football glory may have been destroyed by a bad call, tarkenton is
trying use this great pain of his as a point of contrast to show how much
worse he feels that the official was struck in the head, bleeding on the
sidelines ... how trivial even the most wrenching losses are in comparison
with useless physical suffering cold-bloodedly inflicted by another human
being.

-johndoe
Newsgroups: rec.sport.football.pro