Word: bowling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That the Colts were ready for the race to the Super Bowl was obvious from the first day of training, when every member of the squad reported to Goucher with a signed contract. Thus the Colts began practice with no holdouts and no distractions-the only N.F.L. team to do so in an era of free agents and player unrest. While the players went through drills under muggy Maryland skies, the emphasis was on honing a club that would be young enough-average age: 25-to contend for years...
...Colts resemble the 1971 Miami Dolphins and the 1968 Minnesota Vikings-all sound, young clubs with rosters of largely unheralded collegians on the brink of Super Bowl seasons. The similarities are not surprising, since the same man, Joe Thomas, built all three teams. Thomas, 55, is vice president and general manager of the Colts, a job he engineered for himself by talking Owner Robert Irsay into buying the club for him to run. A onetime assistant coach, Thomas' reputation for finding football talent was so established that he was the first person hired by the expansion Vikings and, later...
There is nothing so rare as a good evening of exhibition football on television, except possibly an intelligent pre-game show. Fans will find both when they tune in the Super Bowl rematch between Pittsburgh and Dallas on Aug. 28. Before the game, ABC will air not the usual image-burnishing salute to the sport but a realistic study of football as a way of making a living (8 p.m. E.D.T.). It's Tough to Make It in This League neither glosses over the problems players face nor flogs the cliché of football as a paradigm of society...
...most effective scenes are about the college draft. Director Paul Galan focuses on University of Virginia Quarterback Scott Gardner. He is seen at the Senior Bowl, an exhibition that Narrator Walt Garrison calls "a flesh market for the N.F.L. [and] a forest of eyes" -the eyes, of course, belonging to pro scouts. Last year was a bad one for quarterbacks, but Gardner did not know how bad until he waited by his scarlet phone on draft day. The first round-worth at least $100,000 a year to any player -passed. By the eighth pick, when a Buffalo...
...injuries that inevitably result. He deadpans: "Players are like human beings in this regard." If the show glamorizes anything, it is the survivor. There is a cheerful sequence about the Washington Redskins' "over-the-hill gang" who are much livelier than the glum recruits at the Senior Bowl. The program's strength lies in such vignettes. The viewer may end up agreeing with the good doctor that the armored monsters who will fill the home screen in coming months are "just like human beings...