There was no joy in Pittsburgh this day. And Sidney Thornton surely stood at the head of the joyless. On the one-yard line, his left foot encountered a mud-slick, and his butt hit the dirt. Even as he was recovering, the downfield judge was zooming in to call the ball dead.
Some situation! On the plus side for Pittsburgh, they had possession in sudden death overtime. On the minus side, their first-and-ten was on their own one-yard line. On the plus side, their quarterback was Terry Bradshaw, perhaps the coolest head in pro football, and he had the protection of an offensive line experienced in blocking as much weight as it could bench-press as well as three plays to make a first down, which would remove them from the goalline situation.
Bradshaw took one step back with the snap—no more—positioning himself just behind his own goalline. Within the next two seconds, several other things happened at the same time. Ambrose Pierce valiantly faced off with Pittsburgh center Mike Webster. Number Thirty-two, Franco Harris, crossed behind Bradshaw to take the handoff. The handoff was blocked from the view of Hans Brinker (the Whittier middle linebacker I thought I’d cured of plugging the wrong hole by recommending anal sex) by his own lineman. Thinking Bradshaw still had possession, Brinker rushed to stop up an obvious opening through which Number Twelve might have slipped.
The blitz was on and, in the split seconds all this was occuring, Brinker moved too hastily. The ever-treacherous mud snagged him, and his feet went out from under him. His pratfall was much worse than the one Thornton had taken earlier. It carried him on his back and across the mud like a greased pig on a sliding pond. In this position he slid right between the braced and widespread legs of the grunting, butting, contending Ambrose Pierce and Mike Webster and emerged behind the Steelers’ goal line. He arrived just in time to trip up Franco Harris inadvertently as he started to run with the handoff.
Harris went down. The line judge’s whistle blew. The play was dead. Whittier had scored a safety in sudden death overtime. And that, kiddies, is how we beat the Pittsburgh Steelers twenty-three to twenty-one!
It was pandemonium, of course. The fans were sobbing on the field and mobbing the players. The offense formed a ring around Terry Niemath and managed to hustle her off to the locker room before the focus shifted from Hans Brinker to her.
Coach Newtrokni elbowed his way through the crowd towards the Pittsburgh bench and Steeler Coach Chuck Knoll. I trailed along behind him, curious to see how he’d behave in victory. The two coaches met in the midst of the throng, embraced and shook hands.
“Great game,” Knoll said sincerely. “You earned the win.”
“Nonsense, Chuck,” Coach Newtrokni replied. “You outplayed us all the way. There’s only one reason we managed to pull it out.”
“What’s that?”
“Why, it was God’s will, Chuck,” Coach Newtrokni told him with a perfectly straight face. “The Lord was on our side.”
It was pouring cats and dogs but, to my surprise, Coach Newtrokni was not struck by lightning.
CHAPTER NINE
The next day, we made front page headlines as far away as the New York Times, which ran the story right beside one headed “Reagan Denies Budget-cutting Fiscal Policy Responsible for Lepers’ Business Failures.” Two parallel columns covered the Stonewalls-Steelers upset and the debut of professional football’s first woman quarterback. Inside the paper, an editorial discussed the implications for the sport, for women, and for the American way of life generally:
. . . As John F. Kennedy observed, “Life is not always fair.” Certainly it has not been so in the de facto segregation which has kept women out of professional football. Now, however, there must be an agonizing reappraisal of this policy. Whatever the result of this reappraisal, there is no denying the shock of a feminist-inspired earthquake whose tremors are even now spreading beyond the gridiron and throughout the entire male sports world. Anxious hockey players are already vowing that they will not countenance any females’ pucking around on the ice.
... And what does this event portend for the status of women generally? The National Organization of Women asserts that quarterback Terry Niemath’s right to play football is inviolable. The Moral Majority views it as a dastardly attack on family values and feminine daintiness. This newspaper leans toward the opinion that women should be allowed to participate in pigskin activities, while reserving the right to staff our sports department according to our time-honored traditions of experience, seniority, and access to all-male locker rooms.
. . . There can be no doubt that this is one more indication of how the American way of life is changing. While change for the sake of change is surely not desirable, there is also nothing to be gained by stubborn resistance to change; In this spirit, one of reasonable compromise among reasonable men, this newspaper recommends giving women the right to participate in professional football, while feeling obliged to question the wiseness of allowing them on the playing field past the onset of the second trimester of pregnancy. Feminists will say that the right to decide rests with the individual woman, while anti-feminists may wish to bar women with child altogether. The reasonable man, however, will surely agree to the wisdom of a compromise de- signed to keep the pregnant out of the huddle once they begin to show.
During the following week, the controversy escalated, spilling over from the sports pages and the editorial pages. A suit was filed on behalf of a twelve-year-old girl in Connecticut challenging the local Little League rules barring her from participation on the football team. The Governor of a southern state vowed personally to stand in the locker room door and block it to keep any “gal” from invading the hallowed male premises of the State University gridiron program. An ad hoc organization of born again Sunbelt ladies issued a statement that “real women” would never engage in such roughhouse activities, only lesbians; an immediate response from women athletes spearheaded by Billie Jean King24 denied vehemently that participation in even the roughest sports was any indication of sexual preference; this in turn was attacked as “reactionary” by the Sappho League, which demanded that the contribution of lesbians to professional sport be recognized and that their entrance into professional football be expedited.
A spokesman for the Administration told the press that, while President Reagan didn’t wish to become involved in the controversy, his views on the sanctity of motherhood, wifehood, and the family were well known, and it was therefore safe to assume that he would not want his son to marry a football player. Listener-sponsored Pacifica Radio reported this and tacked on an ironic reminder that Reagan’s son was a ballet dancer. A group of male ballet dancers protested the inference that his occupation might somehow make him less interested in female quarterbacks. Gay Rights activists protested their lack of sensitivity to the contributions of gay dancers to the art of ballet. The brouhaha fizzled out when somebody remembered that the President’s son was already married.
The Washington Post conducted a straw poll among public personalities on the topic of women in professional football and came up with the following responses: .
Budget Director David Stockman25 : “There will be no government funding of abortions for football players, no matter how needy they claim to be.”
William F. Buckley26 : “If women do not immediately withdraw from professional football, I shall form a group of minutemen, to demand male membership in NOW, the D.A.R., and the Girl Scouts of America!”
Bella Abzug27 : “Congress should immediately push through a bill providing day care facilities for football-playing mothers.”