SUPER BOWL XXVI : BUFFALO BILLS vs. WASHINGTON REDSKINS : Bicker Is Better for the Bills

In the fight game, they would say Buffalo has “a puncher’s chance.”

That means it’s Dempsey-Tunney--and we all know how that comes out. It means the other guy has all the best of it on paper.

And Washington would seem to. The Redskins have balance, experience, know-how. They are bigger, stronger, smarter, calmer, steadier. They are kind of boringly predictable. You know what they are going to do, but they defy you to stop it. They are seven-point favorites and they think that is an underlay.

Buffalo, on the other hand, looks like a rabble. The Bills don’t even huddle before their plays. They run up to the line of scrimmage excitedly. Their quarterback calls the signals, not some cerebral coach with access to a computer. They play sandlot football. They are undisciplined. They quarrel a lot with each other. Everybody wants the ball and the spotlight. If they can’t get it any other way, they make controversy. Their principal defensive player, for example, lets it be known he wants out of town because he says it’s full of racism. They are the Oakland Athletics of football. The Bickering Bills, the league calls them.

Their quarterback is a fine broth of a lad with the map of Ireland on his face, a hunk of pure gold for an arm and blarney on his lips. He looks like nothing so much as an Irish hoofer who will break into a soft shoe and a chorus of Mother Machree at any minute.

He is the Buffalo Bills in one sense. He has the touch and nerve of a riverboat gambler with the football. Being Irish, he is emotional, sentimental, probably believes in fairies and is not slow to be critical.

But when one of his coaches referred to him as the “Michael Jordan of the Bills” this week, it was more than one of his teammates could endure.

Thurman Thomas figures if there is a Michael Jordan play-alike on this team, he is not Irish. He is African-American and his initials are T.T.

He has a chance to be right. T.T. was voted the league’s most valuable player this season, and with good reason. He rolled up more than 2,000 combined yards, pass receiving and rushing--only the 11th player in NFL history to do so. He wants the world to know he’s “the best all-around back in the National Football League,” and it’s about time they recognized it.

On any other team, this might be ominous. On the Bills, it is merely another day at the office, business as usual. Dissension is a way of life. It is not a team, it is an Irish picnic. They have a Jewish coach, an Irish quarterback, a WASP owner and a constituency whose names end in i or o and whose diet runs to kielbasa or mozzarella. They don’t play golf, they play pool, and they don’t have cocktail parties, they drink around the sink.

Thomas says he was as big a factor in getting the team to two Super Bowls as anyone, including, by the way, the quarterback.

But Thomas feels so unappreciated, he stalked out of the regular morning media session at the Bills’ headquarters hotel Wednesday, leaving the flower of American journalism clutching empty note books, muted microphones and motionless tape recorders--to say nothing of silent screens.

The NFL takes a dim view of this truancy. It is struggling, after all, to make the Super Bowl the world’s premier sports event, supplanting the World Series, Wimbledon, the World Cup or Wrestlemania. You can’t do this sulking in your room.

Thomas felt upstaged by his quarterback--whom Thurman considers to have as his chief function handing the ball off to Thurman Thomas in pressure situations--when Kelly not only got hailed as football’s Air Jordan but got the top billing, sharing the podium with the coach in the hotel’s main auditorium. Thomas got to sit at a table in an overflow room behind the partition.

Thomas felt like chopped liver. Thomas knows he is caviar. He boycotted the interview.

Thomas is used to being overlooked. He played at Oklahoma State, where he rolled up 5,004 yards and scored 48 touchdowns during a spectacular career. But this got him only seventh place in the Heisman Trophy balloting and only the second round (40th pick) in the NFL draft. A year later, a player he played in front of at Oklahoma State, Barry Sanders, became a Heisman winner and first-round draft choice.

“He gets the ink. His style is flashier than mine,” Thomas says.

But Thomas is the guy lining up in Super Bowls. Buffalo never got there until he showed up. So, T.T. let it be known he was tired of standing in a corner waiting to be discovered.

He might face a fine for his Wednesday no-show. But he made his point. He was elevated to top billing Thursday--the coach’s co-star at the interviews in the main auditorium.

Thomas knows what to do when he gets the ball.

Did he, he was asked, consider himself the Michael Jordan of the Bills? “Well, let’s say there are two Michael Jordans here--Kelly and Thomas,” he grudgingly acknowledged.

Did he consider running back equal in importance to quarterback? “The offensive line is more important than either of us,” he replied. “Without the offensive line, I can’t run and he can’t throw.”

The notion persisted that Thomas relished the controversy. He is but the latest in a long line of super-athletes who function best in high dudgeon. Jackie Robinson and Ty Cobb were two of the most famous. It is a matter of history that both fueled their careers on hate and rage. Cobb never forgave society for the fact his mother shot his father. Robinson couldn’t forgive it for making him sit in the back of the bus when he was serving his country in a war. Pitchers and second basemen bore the brunt of their ill humor.

Thomas doesn’t function on hate, simply resentment. His teammates think he sets out to find things to feed his annoyance. “We don’t pay any attention to Thurman,” Kelly said with a smile. “It’s his way of getting ready.”

Thomas said: “It makes me play a little harder. Being in Buffalo in a small market tends to get you overlooked.”

Actually, on the field, part of T.T.’s arsenal is being overlooked. At 5 feet 9 and sub-200 pounds, first you have to find him. Teams haven’t had too much luck. It is nothing for three or four cornerbacks or linebackers to sift through the rubble of a line of scrimmage looking for him while muttering: “Wait a minute! He was here a moment ago!” only to turn around and see Thomas disappearing in the distance like a departing train. He needs tail lights.

He hopes to make the Washington Redskins sit up and take notice today. Make Kelly the faithful sidekick, the supporting player.

The only trouble is, then, the media won’t know whether to call him Air Thomas--or Thurman Jordan. Or simply whistle, “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?”