A Lot of Good Things Snowball for the Chargers : Pro football: Despite losing Humphries and being pelted by fans, San Diego rallies for fifth victory in a row and reaches playoffs, 27-17.
The team with as much chance as a snowball in hell barged into the AFC playoffs Saturday after enduring thousands of them.
From the far corners of the cold, unwelcome expanse that is Giants Stadium. From the bored, angry hands of fans whose team had long since been eliminated.
Snowballs, sailing like line drives, knocking out the Charger equipment manager, pelting players, enraging team officials who demanded that the game be forfeited.
Left untouched was the Charger heart. It is thicker than ever after a 27-17 comeback victory that turned a 4-7 frog into wild card royalty.
“Let me just say, ‘Gawwwwd,’ ” Charger owner Alex Spanos said, patting his chest after three hours that were as shameful as they were memorable.
With five consecutive victories to end the regular season, the Chargers will be around to defend their AFC championship for at least one more week. They will be host for a playoff game against another wild-card team next weekend, with the prime candidate being the Raiders if Oakland makes the playoffs.
Not bad for a team that spent Thanksgiving in last place.
“Today was our one last chance, and we told ourselves to stand up,” safety Shaun Gayle said. “Just stand up.”
Then run like heck, which is what Gayle did midway through the fourth quarter after it looked as if the Chargers had played their last card.
They had fought back from a 17-3 halftime deficit to tie it, 17-17.
They had survived even though both starting quarterback Stan Humphries and defensive inspiration Rueben Davis were on the sidelines because of concussions.
They had not lost concentration even though they were afraid to turn their faces toward the stands for fear of being knocked cold. Literally.
“You didn’t want to do anything to make yourself stand out,” safety Bo Orlando said. “You didn’t want to give the fans a target.”
But then the Giants drove 41 yards to the Charger 12. Six minutes remained. The Charger defense was confused and exhausted.
Quarterback Dave Brown wanted the finisher. He backpedaled and swiveled toward the left corner of the end zone. He saw tight end Howard Cross and began to throw and . . .
It was Junior Seau’s turn to stand up. He sneaked around left end on a blitz, hit Brown’s arm, caused the ball to veer directly to Gayle at the Charger one-yard line.
Ninety-nine yards later, the Chargers had a lead that they never lost. Gayle, 33, huffed across the end zone line and into a bad Bing Crosby movie, snowballs pelting him from all sides as he hugged his teammates.
But tell us Shaun, why were you cradling the football for those final yards? There weren’t any Giants for miles.
“Snowballs,” he said. “They were coming down so hard, I didn’t want them to knock the ball loose. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
And he spent 11 years in Chicago and the NFC Central.
The setting for such a barrage was perfect, as stadium officials shoveled only the aisles after an early-week blizzard. So each of the 77,546 seats came equipped with its own personal snowbank. The 50,243 fans in attendance took full advantage.
With the realization that the snow was really ice, and that ice thrown from an upper deck can really hurt, early chuckles turned to fear.
“We were sitting ducks down there,” Orlando said. “You were standing on the field hearing the sounds of the iceballs hitting the turf--woosh, woosh, woosh--and you couldn’t move.”
Sid Brooks never had a chance to move. Brooks, the Chargers’ beloved 60-year-old equipment manager, was hit underneath the left eye by a snowball at the start of the fourth quarter and collapsed behind the bench.
A former Air Force sergeant who did tours in Korea and Vietnam without a scrape, Brooks could not survive one afternoon at Giants Stadium.
“War is hell . . . today was just a cowardly act,” Brooks said.
As Brooks lay motionless behind the bench, officials stopped the game, and the crowd was warned that the Giants would forfeit if the barrage didn’t stop.
The fans didn’t listen. They were even pelting the medical team that worked on Brooks, who was revived and returned to work with a welt.
While the game was still tied, Charger Coach Bobby Ross began screaming at referee Ron Blum to end it. When NFL supervisor Ron DeSouza appeared on the sidelines, Ross also screamed at him.
It appeared nobody would listen. The complaints reached all the way across the Hudson River to NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue in New York, yet nobody listened.
“Bobby was finally telling the NFL guy to come stand next to him, and then he would see how dangerous it was,” Charger General Manager Bobby Beathard said.
The Chargers understood that Blum wanted to forfeit the game--it would have been the first such forfeit in NFL history--but the league would not give permission.
“The referee wanted to stop it, he was going to stop it, but the league wouldn’t let him,” said Gale Gilbert, who threw for only 97 yards but made no mistakes while replacing Humphries.
The league, however, said it was Blum’s decision.
“Commissioner Tagliabue was kept updated during the course of the game, but it was referee Ron Blum’s decision to continue or forfeit the game,” spokesman Joe Browne said.
The only thing certain is that, unlike the game in Dodger Stadium last summer in which the Dodgers forfeited to the St. Louis Cardinals because fans would not stop throwing baseballs, this game continued.
And baseball doesn’t even have a commissioner.
Beathard will phone Tagliabue today looking for answers.
“The officials lost control of the game,” Beathard said. “They should have stopped it. It was terrible. It was dangerous. I don’t know why the league even sent a guy here, because he didn’t do anything. I don’t know why they even made an announcement, because they wouldn’t enforce it.”
Stadium security officers made 15 arrests and ejected 175 others for the snowball caper, while 15 fans were treated for snowball-related injuries.
“This was the ultimate disgrace,” Giant receiver Mike Sherrard said.
The Chargers know about disgrace. At halftime of their biggest game of the season, they had been outgained, 172-64. They had 10 yards rushing. They had yet to convert a first down. Against a team that was 5-10.
With Gilbert and his season rating of 36.3 at quarterback, the game seemed lost.
“Then some guys started shouting,” receiver Tony Martin said. “All sorts of guys. Walking through the locker room just shouting about how this was our last chance.”
Seau was one of those guys. Four plays into the second half, he recovered a fumble and brought the ball to the Charger sidelines, shouting some more.
Seven plays later, after a fourth-down conversion run by Rodney Culver, the Chargers scored on an eight-yard run by backup Aaron Hayden. He was replacing injured Natrone Means, one of the many casualties in this Charger season.
The defense continued to hold, was blessed with a wind-altered 42-yard field goal attempt by Brad Daluiso, then the Chargers tied the game in the fourth quarter on Culver’s eight-yard run on fourth-and-two. That capped a 12-play drive that featured another fourth-down conversion, a 13-yard slant pass to Martin.
Perhaps there is a reason that the Chargers are 17-4 in games after Thanksgiving under Ross.
Earning that 18th victory this season, no matter whom they play next week, will be difficult considering Humphries left the locker room wearing a brace on his sprained neck while the Chargers ended the game without enough sound defensive linemen to field a unit.
“We know we have miles to go,” Gayle said.
Leaving this stadium by bus, they agreed, was a nice start.
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Obstacle Course
Pages from the Chargers’ 1995 diary:
* Jan. 29: The Chargers lose to the San Francisco 49ers, 49-26, in Super Bowl XXIX in Miami.
* June 19: David Griggs, inside linebacker and one of the defensive leaders, is killed in an automobile accident in Florida.
* July 23: Natrone Means, the team’s top offensive weapon, does not show up for the first day of training camp, beginning a bitter, name-calling contract dispute that lasts 11 days.
* Aug. 7: Darrien Gordon, star cornerback and punt returner, re-injures his shoulder and undergoes surgery. He will sit out the regular season.
* Aug. 19: The Chargers’ third exhibition game in Houston, badly needed because earlier injuries limited practice time, is canceled minutes before the opening kickoff because of holes in the Astrodome turf.
* Aug. 23: Eleven days before the regular season opener, Coach Bobby Ross enters the hospital with severe abdominal pains and later undergoes surgery to repair scar tissue from a previous operation. He will be absent for a week.
* Sept. 18: One day after a victory in Philadelphia, Ross returns to the hospital for a night because of more abdominal trouble.
* Oct. 9, approximately 11:30 p.m.: Quarterback Stan Humphries is knocked out of the game in Kansas City against the Chiefs because of a bruised left shoulder. He will sit out his next start, a home loss to the Dallas Cowboys.
* Oct. 9, approximately 11:45 p.m.: Tamarick Vanover returns a punt 86 yards for a touchdown in overtime to give the Chiefs a 29-23 victory. With 1:12 remaining in regulation, the Chargers had led by a touchdown.
* Nov. 5: Means suffers a hamstring injury in the first quarter against the Miami Dolphins. He will carry the ball three times in the remaining seven regular-season games.
* Nov. 19: The Chargers rebound from a 21-0 deficit to tie the Denver Broncos, 27-27, midway through the fourth quarter . . . only to lose, 30-27, on Jason Elam’s field goal with two seconds remaining. Their record falls to 4-7. It is their last regular-season loss.
