SUPER BOWL XXVII : Bills Couldn’t Control the Enemy--Themselves

The NFC beat the AFC in the Super Bowl on Sunday.

And a pie is round, and water is wet, and ice is slippery, and roses are red and violets are blue. The Pope is Catholic and there are bear tracks in the woods and the sun sets in the West.

So did the Buffalo Bills. The score is so embarrassing, I don’t think I’ll mention it to you.

It was as one-sided as a train wreck. A disaster movie.

If there’s a team in the AFC that can give the NFC a game, Buffalo ain’t it.

This is the ninth in a row the AFC has lost. The last time they won Reagan was in his first term, coffee was a quarter and cars were American.

When a thing happens once, it can be an accident; twice, a coincidence. When it keeps happening, it’s a trend.

You have to admire the Bills’ persistence. This is their third consecutive defeat. They are like a fighter who keeps getting up. But you must wonder what it takes to convince them. The three-knockdown rule should be in effect. I mean, this is not a Rocky movie.

The NFL must have had a premonition. It did everything they could to distract the public from the game itself. Fireworks, Michael Jackson, parties, Garth Brooks. It’s an old Hollywood trick. When you have a clunker in the can, you fly the press to Monaco, fill them full of champagne and Beluga caviar and hope they don’t notice it’s a turkey and it has no plot.

The AFC has a credibility problem. If it loses two more of these things, the Humane Society might step in.

All the suspense went out of the game with the coin flip. Buffalo won that, but it was all downhill from there.

Actually, letting Buffalo have the ball fit right in with the Dallas strategy. Buffalo with the football was like a baby with a kitchen knife. It couldn’t hurt anybody but itself.

Turnover is the most terrible word in the language to a football coach. Famine and pestilence rank well below it. It signifies relinquishing the ball, prematurely and unintentionally. It is like dealing the other guy your aces, shooting yourself in the foot, putting the puck in your own net.

Buffalo turned the ball over a record nine times. But it wasn’t that so much. I mean, there are turnovers and there are turnovers. Buffalo’s were great big, gaudy, flamboyant, catastrophic ones. Volcanic. Big time. Horrible. You couldn’t bear to look. They were like a baby carriage rolling downhill into the water. Heartbreaking.

In the first quarter, Buffalo was leading. And driving. Oops! A funny thing happened to the Bills on the way to the end zone. Dallas’ James Washington intercepted quarterback Jim Kelly’s pass on his 40. Six plays later, Dallas had tied the score.

That happened with 1:36 to play in the quarter. Twenty-five seconds later, after the kickoff, Kelly got sacked on his two-yard line. The ball flew out of his arms and Dallas recovered for a touchdown. Turnover 2 was a lulu. Buffalo never got back in the game, really. Buffalo drove right back. All the way to the Dallas one-yard line. On fourth and one from there, Kelly threw again and it was intercepted. Instead of six points (or three) for Buffalo, the Bills got zero. And Dallas had the ball on the 20.

Dallas went ahead by 21-10 with 1:54 to play in the half. Eleven seconds later, Buffalo had fumbled again and Dallas gobbled it up on the Buffalo 19. Seven seconds after that, Dallas had scored again.

Now, that is major league turnovering. The game was over for all intents and purposes. The second half was a formality.

With 8:06 to play, Buffalo quarterback Frank Reich fumbled at his nine. It was recovered by Ken Norton Jr., who ran in for the touchdown that made the score 52-17, the way it ended.

A few plays later, Reich fumbled on the Dallas 36-yard line. It was picked up by Cowboy defensive end Leon Lett, who rumbled 64 yards to the Buffalo goal line, where he tried to do what wide receivers do with the ball--wave it in the air, spike it, dance on it. Only Lett didn’t have the background for it. Don Beebe stripped it from him at the goal line. Instead of getting a touchdown, Lett gave the ball to Buffalo on its 20. There is a God.

I wouldn’t want to play Dallas, either. I wouldn’t want to play any team where I would be told that, when you got into their secondary, you would meet up with a man whose father was once heavyweight champion of the world.

Ken Norton Jr. is a heavyweight champion in his own way. Dad once whomped Muhammad Ali, no less, breaking his jaw, and Ken Jr. not only scored the game’s final touchdown, but wins his heavyweight matches all of the time.

He had a typical Norton game--eight tackles, tops on the team. He has had 253 in his five-year career, not to mention 167 assisted tackles.

Ken Jr. might have been heavyweight champion in a ring as well as on the field, but father knows best and absolutely forbade him to enter the prize ring. There are easier ways to earn a living, he sternly told his son.

Pro football is no day at the beach but, unlike boxing, you can at least look around for help. You can’t double-team Ali. Boxing is not a team game.

In any event, the issue was not negotiable. “My dad was a very demanding person,” Norton recalls ruefully. One of the things he demanded was that his son keep out of the gym.

Ken Sr. had been a football player in his own right, at Northeast Missouri. He got sidetracked into the Marine Corps, where he took up boxing.

Ken Jr. drifted into football late--his junior year in high school--where he thought he could be O.J. Simpson. He averaged 8.8 yards per carry. But when he got to UCLA, Coach Terry Donahue switched him to linebacker. Donahue apparently liked the idea of making pass receivers and runners tiptoe into an area where they knew the son of a heavyweight champion was patrolling. Resentful at first, Ken Jr. grudgingly accepted the role. It was the next best thing to fighting the semi-main at the Forum.

He made the key hit in Super Bowl XXVII. It came with 6:31 to play in the second quarter. Jim Kelly faded to pass on his 33. Ken Norton Jr., so to speak, floored him. It was a hard hit--all of Norton’s are--but clean.

The game was still in doubt. The score was only 14-10 at the time, but that play sealed Buffalo’s doom. Kelly had to be helped off the field. He never returned. His replacement, Frank Reich, had engineered a comeback from 35-3 to win by 41-38 in a playoff game. But that was against the Houston Oilers. These were the Dallas Cowboys. And Ken Norton Jr.

The Cowboys have a lot of people to thank for their easy victory. First of all, they have to thank the Buffalo Bills, whose generosity was so remarkable they should be able to take it off their income tax.

But they really have to thank the son of the one-time heavyweight champion of the world. And his father. If he hadn’t chased his young son out of the boxing gym, he would not have been there to put Kelly out of the game.

Look at it this way: When Ken Norton II hit Jim Kelly I, Super Bowl XXVII was history. When Norton made that tackle, the score was 14-10. When it ended, it was 52-17. Inadvertent or not, it was the pivotal play of this Super Bowl.

The Cowboys now get Super Bowl championship rings. They should give Ken Norton Jr. a championship belt. So he can take it and show it to his dad when they get together again.