A New Light On An Old Poll

Notre Dame Stadium. A sunny fall afternoon, 1969. Whack! Joe Theismann's first pass in the first game of his junior year hits me in the chest. I'm playing right cornerback for Northwestern and I stagger forward until I'm crushed by several Notre Dame offensive linemen.

Jones Stadium, Lubbock, Texas. A hot summer night, 1971. The Coaches' All-America Game. I'm playing strong safety for the East, and I back into the right-side curl area. I raise my hands, catch a ball and run it into West territory. I've intercepted a Jim Plunkett pass.

Sure, everybody's scrambling for an angle on the two Super Bowl quarterbacks, and some of the angles are pretty loose, and maybe mine is, too. But hey, it's mine. And I'm using it because I absolutely guarantee not another sports-writer in the world has intercepted passes from the two starting quarterbacks of any Super Bowl, no matter when.

I mention this to Plunkett the day after the Raiders beat Seattle for the AFC Championship, and he shrugs. He's sitting outside the Raiders' locker room in the L.A. suburb of El Segundo, wearing a T shirt promoting a Bay Area marathon he ran in last year. The marathon nearly finished him. "I didn't recover for a month," he says. Why did he run? "Said I'd do it, so I did it," he snaps.

That's Plunkett. Honest, curt, no baloney. My interception means nothing to him. He doesn't remember it, doesn't try to remember it. "One of many," he says.

Two days later, Joe Theismann and I are taking the air shuttle from New York to Washington, D.C. The Redskins had beaten San Francisco for the NFC title the previous Sunday and now Theismann is returning from a banquet in Manhattan at which he received the Professional Football Writers of America Most Valuable Player Award for 1983.

Theismann's cuff links are gold numeral 7s, his jersey number. On his right hand he wears last year's Super Bowl championship ring, a diamond-studded monster. If the Redskins win the Super Bowl this year, Theismann says he'll definitely wear both rings at the same time, "maybe on the same finger."

Theismann doesn't remember my interception, either. He was a gambler in college, always scrambling, always trying for big plays. He had a high completion rate, but he threw a lot of interceptions, too. He was so skinny then, and he always wore eye-black on his cheeks (he still does) and he just reeked arrogance as he crouched behind the center.

"We killed you in that game, didn't we?" says Theismann, grinning. Yes. The final score was 35-10, Notre Dame. And that's it: Joe Theismann won, and the rest doesn't count.

It's Nov. 24, 1970, and the Heisman votes are in. Plunkett and Theismann are seniors and the two top candidates for the award. Archie Manning of Ole Miss was up there with them, but he broke his left arm two weeks ago and now he's a long shot. Theismann thinks the voting resembles a political election. When he hears the results he's devastated: Stanford's Plunkett, by a lot.