A Flying Start

You, too, can win cash and valuable prizes if you can just name the minor marketing detail that was left out of the Great Randall Cunningham Comeback Party on Sunday at Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium. Was it...

•Randall's personal line of T-shirts, the ones with his picture on them? Nope. They were stacked, folded and ready for the after-comeback rush.

•Randall's personal line of hats, the ones that said HE'S BACK SCRAMBLING, a reference to his pronouncement "I'll be back scrambling" after the Green Bay Packers blew out his left knee in the first game last season? Nope. The hats were blocked and ready.

•The hype? Nah. For the past year, all anybody in Philadelphia has wanted to talk about is Randall. You don't take the scariest quarterback out of the NFL for a year in his prime and not get curious about what he'll be like when he comes back.

•Randall's deal to write a book about the comeback year? Nope. Signed and ready.

•Randall's own candy bar, the Randall Bar, the one in which the caramel and peanuts are "scrambled" and on which there is a special place for Randall to put his autograph if you ever meet him and your mouth isn't too stuck together with caramel and peanuts for you to ask him for it? Nope. The shelves were loaded.

•The scaring pressure to perform? Nope. Even the Philadelphia Eagles' minister/conscience/soul, defensive end Reggie White, put the capital-O Onus on Randall and his team. "If we don't win it all this year," said White, "we never will."

No, everything was shined, polished, primed, gassed up, priced, gleaming and double ready for Randall's comeback.

Except Randall.

In his long-awaited debut against the vaunted New Orleans Saints, Cunningham came up about 30 gallons of Rustoleum short. He nearly forgot to get his ankles taped, lost three fumbles (is it too late to call the candy bar Butterfinger?), couldn't decide whether to run or pass, got sacked six times, missed wide-open receivers (including one in the end zone from two yards away), hit only one down-field pass (for 20 yards and a touchdown), second-guessed himself and generally gasped and smoked like a '92 Jaguar running on five '63 Valiant spark plugs. "I guess I was about 70 or 80 percent," he said, generously.