Terry reacted smoothly. Fading still further back in the pocket, she waited for Furness to commit himself and then twisted smoothly away from his bulk. She headed for the right side where Mean Joe Greene was waiting, spotted him, and quickly reversed herself. And all the time she was watching Pete Gorgonzola in order to gauge her pass so he’d be where he was supposed to be to catch it.
She faded still further back. Gorgonzola was free of Mike Wagner now, but the timing was way off. The whole defensive line descended on Terry like a wall of brick toppling in an earthquake. Gorgonzola twisted his head, looked for the ball, didn’t see it, turned away and threw up his hands to indicate the hopelessness of the situation as he trotted towards the goal line. Terry tossed the pass and back-pedaled away from the tacklers without being touched.
The ball soared through the air. It was a beautiful pass, sixty yards or more. It was heading straight for where Gorgonzola was going to be—in the left-hand corner just beyond the twenty-yard line. But he was making no further effort to catch it. He was still looking in the direction and waving his hands loose-wristed over his head, resigned to failure. Pittsburgh safety Mike Wagner had stopped trying to cover him and was just watching his receding figure and laughing.
At the eighteen-yard corner, the ball fell from the air and right into Gorgonzola’s upstretched hands from behind. Automatically, he closed his large palms around it. He stood there for an instant and stared at it.
Upfield Mike Wagner’s jaw fell open. He blinked. He muttered what might have been a curse. And then he was off like a shot after Gorgonzola.
Seeing him coming, Gorgonzola emerged from his daze. He sprinted down the sidelines towards the goal. He crossed the goalline standing up. Wagner, still ten yards away, braked to a halt and shook his head in disgust.
For a long moment everything was very silent in Milhous Stadium. Everybody—fans, players, officials, coaches—was having trouble believing his eyes. Had the Whittier Stonewalls—zero points for thirty-six and three-quarters games—really scored a touchdown?
Pete Gorgonzola was the first to recover. He raised the ball high over his head and yelled “TOUCHDOWN!” He started to fling it to the ground and then caught himself. “TOUCHDOWN!” he yelled again. And he bent from the waist and laid it very gently in the mud of the end zone.
Pandemonium broke loose. The first one to reach Pete was a small brunette cheerleader named Taffy. I could hear her yelling all the way from the bench. “I’ll move in with you, Pete,” she was shouting. “We’ll have a relationship. Maybe we’ll even get married, have kids.” Pete Gorgonzola looked pleased, but a bit overwhelmed. As for me, I felt pretty smug.
While the stadium security guards were clearing the astounded and exuberant fans from the field so that the game might proceed, I found myself watching Horseshoe Cohen, the field goal kicker I had counseled regarding his difficulty positioning his penis between his sex companion’s labia. Horseshoe was carefully inserting the contact lenses I had recommended. Then, he positioned one of the cheerleaders about ten yards away from him and had her raise her short skirt. As usual, she wasn’t wearing any panties. Holding the ball out in front of him, he lined up with her naked crotch and practiced placing his kicks. A little while later, Horseshoe scored the extra point, and Whittier was trailing only twenty-one to seven.
“Ain’t that wonderful?” the cheerleader he’d been lining up with commented to me as she passed. “Put it in just as easy as last night.”
Terry Bradshaw is possibly the most even-tempered player in professional football; nevertheless, his mouth was a grim, thin line when he trotted onto the field to take charge after the run-back. It was even grimmer and thinner after the astounding second play.
On the first play, Steeler tight end Benny Cunningham had picked up five yards on an end run. As the teams lined up again, my eyes happened to light on Ambrose Pierce, the Whittier defensive lineman I had advised regarding penetrations of the neutral zone and premature ejaculation. He was muttering to himself. I read his lips.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was repeating, under the impression that Ronald Reagan (who quoted it as fervently as if Franklin D. Roosevelt had been a right-wing Republican) had originated the phrase.
No matter. The ploy worked. Ambrose stayed on-side until the snap, following which his first move was precision-timed. He moved as if intending to charge over offensive guard Sam Davis. But the instant Davis committed himself to the straight-ahead confrontation, Ambrose slid smoothly around him to the left to shake up Bradshaw’s timing in the slot.
The Steeler quarterback, looking for the short yardage that would give them the first down, had called a slant-out—a quick pass to tight end Randy Grossman out in the flat. The general ineptness of the Whittier defense, however, had lulled Bradshaw into expecting more time than Pierce’s penetration now allowed. Bradshaw wasn’t about to be sacked, but he did have to spin away from Pierce in order to fire the bullet.
Meanwhile, Sam Davis had recovered and came hurtling in to block Pierce from the side. Ambrose’s concentration held, and he sidestepped the second block, although not quite so smoothly as he had the first. What happened then was one of those flukes that gridiron buffs talk about for years afterwards.
Ambrose saw a chance to dive over Davis and tackle Bradshaw. Sensing this, Davis rose straight up from the ground, erupting like a righteous volcano. He came up flush between Pierce’s legs and Ambrose, flailing, locked his thighs around the guard’s neck as he rose. Shaking himself, Davis broke the grip and Pierce went flying sidewise through space. He and Bradsha'w’s bullet pass to Crossman met in mid-air—converging vectors—and, when Ambrose Pierce hit the mud, the pigskin was lodged securely in his gut.
The turnover had the rain-soaked Whittier fans on their feet again. When they spotted Terry trotting out onto the field with the Whittier offense, they actually cheered. The team looked pleased but embarrassed. It was the first time their appearance had been greeted so enthusiastically.
Coach Newtrokni was a pixie play pusher. He sent Terry out with instructions to fire off the exact same sideline pass that had been intercepted from Bradshaw. It worked. The Whittier tight end, out in the flat, picked up exactly ten yards for the first down and stepped out of bounds to stop the clock. Terry Niemath, however, did not get off so easily in her success as Terry Bradshaw had in his failure. Remembering the long touchdown pass, the Steeler defense had paid their respects to the arm that had thrown it with an all-out blitz.
This time they nailed her. Twist as she would, Terry couldn’t get away. A split second after the pass was fired, she went down under a saturation bombing of Pittsburgh blockbusters.
The pile-up included both linemen and backs. Middle linebacker Jack Lambert was the first to extricate himself from it. Immediately, the feared Steeler wild man began jumping up and down on the muddy field in an off-the-wall fashion which was decidedly uncool.
“A WOMAN!” It was a Tarzan yell to warn the natives of an alien presence in their jungle. “THE QUARTERBACK IS A @%!&‘!#$!!! WOMAN!” (Later, there were some who claimed to have seen froth on Lambert’s lips but, doubtless, they exaggerated.) “A WOMAN!!!”
The pile-up unraveled. Cornerback L. C. Greenwood walked away shaking his head disbelievingly. Jack Ham was looking at his hands and talking to himself as if he couldn’t believe the answers they were giving him. Banaszak, who had been sprawled atop Terry and was the last up, slouched off with a face the color of an over-ripe tomato.