Quarterback Switches From MVP to the VP

After being elected to Congress, Jack Kemp, the former quarterback of the San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills, made a keen observation.

He said, “In football, the enemy had numbers on and were out in front, where you could see them. That’s not always the case in politics.”

Now that Kemp’s a player in the political Super Bowl, as the backup quarterback to Bob Dole on the Republican ticket, I guess he had better have eyes in the back of his head.

He returns to San Diego, where 35 years ago, on Christmas Eve, he led the Chargers in the championship game of the American Football League, before there was any such thing as a Super Bowl.

The Chargers had just left Los Angeles, moving down the coast to their new home. (NFL teams are always leaving L.A., for some reason. The White House should look into this.)

With Kemp at quarterback, San Diego put together the AFL’s best record, 12-2. This did not earn the Chargers a shot at Bart Starr and the Green Bay Packers--who beat the spittle out of Y.A. Tittle and the New York Giants, 37-0, in the NFL championship game--but it did set up a game at San Diego’s Balboa Stadium between two of the AFL’s highest-scoring teams.

So what happened?

San Diego scored three points.

Kemp’s passes were intercepted four times. George Blanda of the Houston Oilers didn’t fare much better, with six interceptions, but he did flip a 35-yard pass to Billy Cannon for the game’s only touchdown.

Before 29,556 hometown fans--most San Diegans must have been somewhere else that day, maybe the zoo--Kemp kept throwing footballs to Dave Kocourek and drove deep into Houston’s territory. But then Julian Spence picked off Kemp’s pass to preserve the game for the Oilers, as well as to ruin any chance Spence would have of ever being Kemp’s own vice presidential choice, I suspect.

Kemp handled defeat as best he could.

“Pro football gave me a good sense of perspective to enter politics,” Kemp would say a few years later. “I’d already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded and hung in effigy.”

Two years later, San Diego fans were neither booing nor hanging their quarterback in effigy, having just smashed the Boston Patriots, 51-10, in the 1963 AFL championship game, also at Balboa.

Alas, that quarterback was Tobin Rote, because Kemp had been claimed on waivers by the Buffalo Bills after a clerical error by the Charger front office left him exposed. I trust that Kemp will point this out to San Diegans first chance he gets at the Republican National Convention.

Dole referred to Kemp as “an American original” when he formally introduced him as his running mate Saturday, outside a Kansas courthouse.

They once were rivals, both vying for the 1988 nomination won by George Bush, and have clashed on economic issues. But rivals do sometimes become teammates.

Once, there was an obscure--and obtuse--law in the state of Kansas that went like this: “When two trains approach each other at a crossing, they shall both come to a full stop and neither shall start up until the other has gone.”

Kemp and Dole approached each other, stopped, looked, listened, then left in the same direction.

Funny that when reports first surfaced Friday that he was Dole’s choice, Kemp, even at 61, responded by saying, “Quarterbacks are always ready.”

He was ready on the day after Christmas 1964, when the AFL championship game came to Buffalo. That was the day Buffalo won a championship. Yes, football lovers, Buffalo has won a championship.

Kemp spent that day handing off to 250-pound Cookie Gilchrist and getting within the field-goal range of a Hungarian refugee named Pete Gogolak, having no quarrel at that point with America’s immigration laws. Kemp even quarterback-sneaked the final touchdown of a 20-7 victory over . . . sorry about this, the San Diego Chargers.

I am afraid Kemp will have to beg San Diego’s forgiveness at the convention, because he also was most valuable player and led Buffalo to a 23-0 victory over the Chargers in the 1965 title game.

One year later, the Super Bowl was born. An American original.

Kemp could have been in it. He was the Bills’ quarterback in the Jan. 1, 1967, conference championship game against Kansas City, but Buffalo lost big, 31-7. The Chiefs got to go to Super Bowl I, to play Green Bay.

Upon winning reelection to Congress in 1972, Kemp said in his victory speech, “I told the people that if they didn’t reelect me, I’d come back as quarterback of the Bills.”

Actually, he had bigger plans.