This all reminds me of the handwringing among my ilk (and me, to some extent) in the 1980s about whether R.E.M., U2 or Natalie Merchant had "sold out."
I ultimately sided with the sellers back then, too. Those ads are from the pull-out Super Bowl advertising supplement published in the Jan. 10, 1972, Sports Illustrated, and so is this beautiful thing:
Speaking of commercialism, out-of-whack priorities out and spectacles, I am thrilled to announce that 1972 me--I'm still not certain whether he is an adult or child or what his story is exactly--did receive NFL Strategy at Christmas71! I plan to be getting out that game and my football-card Cowboys and Dolphins to play with during Super Bowl VI.
I am rooting for Miami in today's game, but most of the (so-called) "experts" appear to be picking Dallas.
There has been so much great stuff work put out on today's game by the reporters, editors, photographers, illustrators, agate typists and other artists at America's great newspapers. I appreciate all of them and their work, and I want to give a special shout-out for the fine treatment provided by the Toledo (Ohio) Blade.
The Apache Belles obviously put in their work, too, and thank you to those folks, too (spoiler alert, resultwise, in the following video).
A few things about the CBS pregame show:
ReplyDelete-- It's fun seeing and hearing Dan Reeves and Howard Schnellenberger interviewed. They're voices, of course, are exactly as we have heard them later in their lives, and it's interesting seeing them come out of the mouths of these much younger humans.
-- Paul Warfield is interviewed in front of some giant hedge, it appears, and a head shot circulated by the Associated Press for newspaper coverage the week in advance of Super Bowl VI appears to be from in front of the same hedge. I guess there must've been from the "media day" event we hear so much about from the Super Bowls now.
-- This moderatish Democrat wonders if Bob Lilly would make a decent Establishment GOP primary challenger in 2020.
-- Square-jawed, mutton-chopped Bob Griese is telling us about how loose and relaxed the young Dolphins are, and I'm inclined to believe him--about maybe all of the Dolphins except Bob Griese. My young brother from Evansville, not quite 27 years old here, looks and sounds wound tight as all get-out to me.
ReplyDelete-- You have mind's-eye pictures of Tom Landry and Don Shula. I imagine Landry's is of him in his counter-cultural fedora, jacket and tie, and I imagine Shula's is in some wide-open-collared shirt from the middle 1970s or garish NFL-licensed sweatshirt of the 1980s. In these pregame interviews, both men are in outfits that might've come straight from Hank Stram's Hail-to-the-Chiefs closet.
-- Charlie Jones is doing spots for Black & Decker, where he demonstrates various "Super Bowl Special"-priced tools (hedge trimmer, power drill, etc.) He's encouraging us about all of the spring-is-on-its-way chores we can catch up on next weekend, given we are whiling away this one watching the big game. I just want to say that I love Charlie Jones and that I don't blame him for this wrong-headed script.
With regard to Griese or other Dolphins being loose or tight before the game, here's a piece of Tex Maule's Jan. 24 game story in Sports Illustrated:
DeleteThe Dolphins, in their first Super Bowl, were being true to their nature, too. Someone asked Head Coach Don Shula if his club was relaxed, and Shula, who has matured socially as well as professionally during his two years in Miami, smiled. "They are individuals," he said. "The ones who are always relaxed before a game are relaxed and the ones who are always tense and serious are tense and serious. I think it is a mistake to ask a club to be either one way or the other. What you want the players to do is be themselves and I think our players have been themselves this week."
Halftime of Super Bowl VI will feature age-group finals in the national Punt, Pass and Kick competition. There was a local qualifier in Hopkinsville back on Oct. 2, 1971. Here’s how it worked, per the Kentucky New Era:
ReplyDeleteThis year the local level of PP&K will be co-sponsored by the Hopkinsville Jaycees in conjunction with Barnes Motor Co. …
Participants in the Punt, Pass & Kick program compete only against boys their own age. Any boy eight through 13 years of age may register to compete at Barnes Motor Co. There is no entrance fee and no body contact during competition. No special equipment is needed and participation does not impair a boy’s amateur standing.
Scoring is based on accuracy and range with one point added for every foot of punting, passing and kicking distance and a point subtracted for every foot off a center line.
Twelve national finalists will compete for the national champonships in their age group during the half time of the Super Bowl Game in New Orleans January 16, 1972. Winners will have their names permanently enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Their trophies will be presented by Football Commissioner Pete Rozelle.
Boys, accompanied by a parent or guardian, may register for PP&K at Barnes Motor Co.
Man, I'd love to see that upcoming CBS special, I'm a Fan, starring Dick Van Dyke and Carol Channing, but it does not appear to be available on YouTube.
ReplyDeleteHerb Adderley, a cornerback with the Cowboys, is playing in his fourth Super Bowl--two with Green Bay and now two with Dallas.
ReplyDeleteCharlie Jones amps up the Black & Decker pressure. You buy the hedge trimmer, and you get a coupon for a cut rate on a gardening book. You buy a drill, and you get a coupon for a cut rate on a home-repairs book.
ReplyDeleteThe Dallas defense and Miami offense are introduced one by one to great fanfare and the narration of CBS's play-by-play man, Ray Scott, and color commentator, Pat Summerall. Pat wryly points out that Bob Kuechenberg has the unenviable assignment of blocking Lilly, and the AP this week said that Kuechenberg "performs with exhuberance that tends to make him gulty of penalties."
ReplyDeletePlease rise ...
ReplyDeleteMiami's first possession got off to a bad start as Griese threw behind a slanting Warfield on first down. Three and out.
ReplyDeleteDallas got a first down on a Duane Thomas run, but then things started closing in on Roger Staubach. Sacks by Manny Fernandez and Jim Riley lead to a Cowboy punt.
0-0. Dolphin ball at the Miami 42 ...
Little pulls right, levels cornerback Adderly and Csonka cuts behind that traffic to run for a first-down first down into Dallas territory.
ReplyDeleteI've heard a fair amount of my life that Larry Little was overrated because he made his reputation blocking cornerbacks on pulling-guard stuff, and, for the last 10 or 15 years, I've been confused as to why Bob Kuechenberg, a perennial All-Pro of my youth through two sets of Super Bowl teams, has failed to garner Hall-of-Fame traction. I'll bet the first impressions of non-Dophins fans of both of those players were cemented by this very broadcast.
And now Csonka--the No. 2 American Football Conference regular-season rusher of NFL71 with 1,051 yards and nary a fumble on 195 attempts--fumbles. Super Bowl V MVP Chuck Howley recovers at the Dallas 48, and on comes the Cowboy offense ...
ReplyDeleteMiami's defensive line is all over the Dallas backfield, and the Dolphins' zone apparently is effectively sealing off passing routes. But Roger Staubach's scrambling gets the Cowboy drive started, and then a couple of Walt Garrison quick-hitters move Dallas down to inside the Miami 30 ...
ReplyDeleteThen, after a sack, Staubach hits Bob Hayes and Duane Thomas for completions to set up a first-and-goal. Miami’s defense stiffens, and Mike Clark kicks through a short field goal.
ReplyDelete3-0, Cowboys.
Griese throws high and outside for Paul Warfield on second down, and then Lilly throws Griese for the famous 30-yard sack on the last play of the first quarter.
ReplyDeleteHighlighted by Tim Foley's diving deflection of a deep Staubach pass, the Dolphin defense holds Dallas at midfield, and now Miami has a little something going. With about 11 minutes to go, Griese completes his first pass--a buttonhook for about 20 yards to Howard Twilley near the 50.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure I read in Bob and Brian Griese's book that the Grieses and Twilleys often doubledated.
Despite a strong tailwind, Garo Yepremian's 49-yard try for a field goal drops just short of the crossbar (still at the goal line, not the back of the end zone).
ReplyDeleteStill 3-0, Cowboys.
Thomas and Garrison are both gashing the left side of Miami's defense.
ReplyDeleteMike Ditka, wide open in the middle of the field and deep in Miami territory, lets Staubach's dart bounce away from his belly and hands. Miami takes over at its 26 after a punt.
ReplyDeletePunt back to Dallas.
ReplyDeleteRay Scott adroitly points out that Calvin Hill has not yet played, suggesting that maybe he won't. Poor Calvin Hill has been limited by injuries (and the emergence of Thomas and, to a lesser extent, Garrison) ever since his phenomenal rookie season. All the week leading to the game, there was wondering whether Hill would be able to start alongside Thomas, with Hill insisting he would be physically ready. But the writers kept pointing out that Hill was visibly limping.
4:17 to go in the half ... Dallas nearing midfield ...
AND HERE COMES CALVIN HILL!
Again, Staubach has a man open in the middle of the field, deep in Dolphin territory, but this time it's Lance Alworth, who comes down with the line-drive throw.
ReplyDeleteAnd now Hill runs through a couple of giant holes and over a couple of colliding Miami tacklers to take the Cowboys to the Dolphin 12. This feels like a crucial, must-not-break moment for the Bill Arnsparger's bend-don't-break-by-design defense ...
Touchdown, Alworth.
ReplyDeleteNot that I remember his being weak-armed at all, but I didn't remember Staubach having such a gun arm.
ReplyDelete10-3, Cowboys.
ReplyDeleteMiami gets the ball back with 52 seconds left, and Griese gets the Dolphins moving with a couple of underneath passes. Then he fires deep to leaping Warfield around the Dallas 20. Miami calls its second timeout, and it will have maybe a couple of downs and a timeout to try to get a touchdown. It still has the one timeout left to bring on Yepremian. I've been a little tough on my main man Bob so far in this game, but it should be said that he has handled these dire moments exceptionally well.
14 seconds to go in the half ... Dallas 24 ...
ReplyDeleteOuch! Griese hits Warfield at about the 2, but he comes down just out of bounds!
ReplyDeleteYepremian ... 31-yard try ... good!
10-3.
So that's the end of the first half, and here's the only footage I can find of the Super Bowl VI halftime show. Per Wikipedia, the theme was "Salute to Louis Armstrong," and the show featured Ella Fitzgerald, Carol Channing, Al Hirt, USAFA Cadet Chorale and U.S. Marine Corps Drill Team. And per this New Orleans-oriented website, it was an "amazing" show and the fourth-best among all Super Bowl halftime shows to take place in New Orleans.
ReplyDeleteHere's Yepremian with the second-half kickoff ...
ReplyDeleteAnd Dallas appears to have almost no difficulty driving for a touchdown: 17-3. This is starting to look bad.
ReplyDeleteOr, as NFL Films put it perfectly, "the flanks opened, and Thomas flowed into the secondary."
DeleteWith this NFL71 season in its final moments, Pat Summerall reassures us with a rundown of the upcoming “Sports Variety on CBS.” Here are the five enticements displayed on the screen:
ReplyDelete— NIT Basketball
— ABA Basketball
— Triple Crown of Racing
— CBS Tennis Classic
— AAU International Champions
With MLB72 and the NCAA basketball Final Four ahead on WPSD Channel 6 NBC and the Sapporo 1972 Olympics and NBA72 playoffs in the offing on WSIL Channel 3 ABC, I’ll bet the local suits at KFVS Channel 12 CBS are not exactly riveted by Pat’s report.
Maybe he comes back in later in the game, but it's an interesting moment in Dolphins history when Ray Scott announces here that injured Jim Riley has been replaced by Vern Den Herder at defensive end.
ReplyDeleteRiley, an all-American defensive lineman under Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma, was the Dolphins' second-round draft choice in NFL67. That's the same draft that Miami chose Griese in the first round, so one could imagine that the second-year team felt it had maybe identified its offensive and defensive leaders for a decade in Griese and Riley, its top two draft choices.
ReplyDeleteRiley emerged as a starter at left end midway through NFL68, and, according to the player profiles one of the wire services circulated before Super Bowl VI, he had bounced back from a subpar NFL70 to have his best season in NFL71. So Riley was, indeed, a young anchor of Bill Arnsparger's gestating "No-name Defense."
But either because of this injury that Ray Scott reported or some other injury or simply his being lapped by competition from his own teammates, Super Bowl VI is going to be Jim Riley's last NFL game.
Taking Riley's spot on Miami's defensive line in Tulane Stadium is Vern Den Herder, a 6-foot-6 former All-Iowa Conference standout with the NAIA Central College Dutch standout whom Miami selected in the ninth round of the NFL71 draft.
ReplyDeleteNow if you're as old as Morissey or so young to think Dan Marino was the best quarterback in Dolphins history, you probably don't know much at all about Vern Den Herder. But if you're a Gen-Xer who collected Topps football cards, you have a pretty strong feeling about Vern Den Herder--he turned up in every set from NFL74 through NFL81, save the NFL78 issue.
ReplyDeleteNow if you were stupid like me, you thought Vern Den Herder was kind of a scrub player. Here was this guy who always looked really neat and prim in his posed photos or he looked really haggard and distressed in his live-action shots, and his cards never bore the All-Pro insignias on the front. It never really occured to you that making an NFL team year after year and being notable enough for Topps to make you one of the 15 to 25 guys per team they made cards of in a season probably should indicate that the guy was pretty good. No, you figured Vern Den Herder to be the Topps equivalent of Lenny or Squiggy--a lesser character in the show only to highlight the goodness of the major characters. And so when you played with your football cards in the floor, you were constantly having Vern Den Herder decimated by the blocking of some opposing All-Pro offensive lineman like Rayfield Wright or Ron Yary, or, if you were pretending to be the Dolphins' general manager, you were packaging Vern Den Herder and some other undesirables in a miraculous trade for, say, "Mean Joe" Greene and ensuring Miami's Super Bowl dominance for the second half of the 1970s, as well.
ReplyDeleteBut, like I said, you were stupid, because it turned out that Vern Den Herder was really, really great. In 2012, a writer named Kevin Kraczkowski at The Phinsider ranked Den Herder as the 12th-greatest Dolphin of all time. After serving as Riley's sub in NFL71, Den Herder is going to become a starting Miami defensive end for a decade, and, in the perfect NFL72 season, he's going to (unofficially) lead the team in sacks and (officially, by the Associate Press) be selected first-team all-AFC. That's really, really great. He was reportedly one of Don Shula's all-time favorites.
ReplyDeleteAnd whatever happened to Jim Riley (whom that same Phinsider writer picked as the 82nd-greatest Dolphin, which is also pretty good)? It's not totally clear.
ReplyDeleteAccording to his bio at Jim Riley Outreach Inc., he was a member of the perfect NFL72 Dolphins--though he did not play again after the NFL71 Super Bowl. That bio goes on to read, "Shortly into his pro career, addiction began to play a deadly role in Jim’s life. For many years, Jim and his family struggled because of his addiction. In 1985, Jim Riley won the most important game of his life, his battle with alcoholism. Since that time, Jim and his wife Robin have dedicated their lives to helping others with addiction problems through The Jim Riley Outreach, headquartered in Edmond, OK."
ReplyDeleteJenni Carlson with The Oklahoman had a really good column written in Jim Riley's first person in 2012, which reads in part:
ReplyDeleteI don't blame football for the stupid crud I did. College, that's when I started my drinking. It was mostly for fun. I didn't do that much of it until later on, and during football season, I always curbed it because, you know, I was playing ball.
It was in the pros that I really lost my way. They had an open cabinet. You could get all the drugs you needed. You didn't have to check 'em out. Alcohol, the coaches weren't telling you not to drink. They were drinking with you. Smoking. We smoked in the locker room. We did. At halftime, we were smoking in the locker room.
(Coach Don) Shula never did buy any. He just bummed 'em off of us.
I became chemically dependent and didn't have any idea what that meant — “No, no, look at all the stuff I do. I can't be.” It became ugly. It became really ugly.
Thank God my wife and some people that love me enough intervened on me in 1985. That's when I turned my life around. I learned how to be a real man, a father, a husband, a friend.
To go back to that life? Put me in my grave before you do that.
It's pretty simple. When you're doing the wrong thing and you want to turn it around and do the right thing, you do just the opposite of what you were doing.
So, good for Jim Riley and his wife and friends, good for Vern Den Herder and good for the journalists and the internet, which, as previously reported, is amazing.
ReplyDeletePat Summerall reports that Don Rickles has a new sitcom on CBS. I wonder if he and Bob Newhart are already big friends at this point. Bob Newhart has his show coming out on CBS this fall. I read a report the other day in the 1972 newspapers that Suzanne Pleschette has signed on to play Bob's wife in the not-yet-named show.
ReplyDeleteSpoiler alert: The Don Rickles sitcom is not going to work out long term.
DeleteEnd of three quarters: Dallas 17, MIami 3.
ReplyDeleteMiami picks up its first first down of the second half, and Craig Morton is working out on the Cowboys sideline after Roger Staubach is knocked silly by Jake Scott on a safety blitz on the previous Dallas possession. But Chuck Howley intercepts Griese on a third-down try past midfield, and here comes back on Staubach, and that's pretty much that.
ReplyDeleteHowley, the great Wikipedia reports, "was also named most valuable player of Super Bowl V, intercepting two passes and forcing a fumble in the Cowboys' 16-13 loss to the Colts, making him the first defensive player and non-quarterback to receive the honor. To date, he is also the only player from the losing team to win the award.
"The following season, Dallas made it back to Super Bowl VI, and again Howley had a great performance, recording a fumble recovery and a 41-yard interception in the Cowboys 24-3 win over the Miami Dolphins. His performance was under MVP-consideration, but quarterback Roger Staubach won the honor.[10]"
Yeah, Ray Scott has decided it's over. He's moved on to talking about the Jack Whitaker/Tom Brookshier post-game show.
ReplyDeleteStaubach ... Ditka ... touchdown ... Dan Reeves hold ... Mike Clark kick ... 24-3.
ReplyDelete11:40 to go ...
ReplyDeleteGriese fumble, pulling away from center Bob Demarco ...
ReplyDelete8:30 to play ...
ReplyDeletePat Summerall has left Ray Scott behind to join Tom Brookshier in the Cowboys' locker room. I'm taking this harder than I expected to.
ReplyDeleteIt was going to be worse, but Calvin Hill just fumbled at the goal line after Dallas had converted a fake field goal.
ReplyDeleteWhat a sham championship this must've seen to old-time NFL fans: The Cowboys, formed just 12 years ago, over the Dolphins, formed just six years ago.
ReplyDeleteThat guy who wrote the fake autobiography of Howard Hughes and died in December 2017 ... he's going to be on 60 Minutes tonight 1972.
ReplyDeleteI tend to want to crack on Tex Maule for his predictions that seem to always assume the same things are going to keep happening. But three things about Tex Maule:
ReplyDelete-- One, he was totally right that the Cowboys clobber the Dolphins in this game.
-- Two, he is always fantastic in coming up with a plausible explanation of what just happened in a game or season. In Super Bowl VI, he explained that the key was that meticulous Tom Landry had two weeks to prepare a plan that would both exploit the laudable discipline of Miami's young defense and account for the inventiveness of the Dolphins' veteran, quick-thinking-on-the-fly middle linebacker, Nick Buoniconti. (NFL Films arrived at the same analysis for its movie on the game, but, of course, Tex Maule had to hustle up his take in time for next week's issue of SI.)
-- Three, he was a freaking beautiful writer.
It's interesting how Summerall pried at Staubach in the immediate aftermath of the game on his frustration with Landry's calling his plays.
ReplyDeleteI love Requiem for a Heavyweight. I love Watertown. And I love Bob Lilly.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, back in Miami ... "I don't believe in a parade for losers."
ReplyDelete