Godfrey Took the Long Way to Super Bowl

Chris Godfrey looks as if he ought to be the bouncer at a Haagen-Dazs.

Some pro football linemen have eyebrows like black licorice, and noses on which you could snap open a beer bottle, and gnarled lips, and busted teeth, and fuzzy little goatees that make you wonder if the guy wakes up every morning and shaves with a pair of scissors.

Not Godfrey. There is an innocence about him. A sweetness. He has one of those faces that ought to be gazing upward at a priest’s as he passes a chalice on the altar. The head, though, rests atop one of those torsos that obviously gets filled with air at neighborhood gas-station pumps. You know: the Li’l Abner look.

A 6-3, 265-pound offensive lineman for the New York Giants, Godfrey is a gifted young man, quick of reflex and quick of wit, who got to the Super Bowl the old-fashioned way: He earned it. Since leaving the University of Michigan in 1980 with a business degree, he has had to overcome such indignities as being released by three NFL teams and being forced to ply his trade in the Three-Dollar League, the United States Football League.

Although he is approaching his 29th birthday, Godfrey went into this season with the Giants having appeared in only 32 National Football League games. He wasn’t even an offensive lineman when he broke into the league. He played defensive tackle.

Said Bill Parcells, the New York coach: “He’s living proof that no matter how low a guy may get, he can not only survive, but excel.”

Take, for example, the second of three times the Giants had to confront the Washington Redskins this season. Everyone had his binoculars on the trench combat between Brad Benson, the rugged left tackle of the Giants, and Dexter Manley, the motor-mouth and mean motor scooter of the Redskin pass rush, who promised to terrorize quarterback Phil Simms.

Benson got the best of it, even becoming the first NFL offensive lineman since 1984 to be named his conference’s offensive player of the week.

After winning the award, though, Benson said: “I don’t like this attention. I looked at the stat sheet after the game and I saw (Washington’s) Dave Butz had no tackles, no assists and no sacks. That means Chris Godfrey shut him out. But because Butz didn’t have much to say before the game, Chris didn’t get any attention.”

He has not gotten much for years. When a man is signed as a free agent by the Redskins, released three months later, signed as a free agent by the New York Jets, released the next season, claimed on waivers by the Green Bay Packers and released the next season, he is not likely to be hounded by Random House for his autobiography.

Godfrey did get to play in the 1983 USFL championship game for the Michigan Panthers, who took account of his damaged knee, moved him to offensive guard and got good use out of him for a couple of seasons. By then, scouts from the Giants were occupying the press boxes. General Manager George Young knew that other NFL teams had given up on Godfrey, but said: “We had to go with what our eyeballs told us. We just scouted the hell out of him.”

Then signed him as a free agent in 1984.

Said Godfrey: “I heard they had a lot of problems protecting Simms. I heard there were a lot of ‘lookout’ blocks.” As in: “Look out, Phil, here they come again!”

Simms’ life insurance premiums have gone down since then. He no longer considers himself the meat in a Manley-Butz sandwich. Linemen like Benson, Bart Oates, Billy Ard, Karl Nelson and Godfrey have helped their blond quarterback have more fun. These guys can block around the clock.

At their side is tall, dark and handsome tight end Mark Bavaro, blocker, pass catcher and member of the Word of the Month Club. Bavaro is more than just the strong, silent type. He is monosyllabic. He makes Steve Carlton sound like Chatty Cathy.

Vance Johnson of the Denver Broncos uses more breath in a sentence than Bavaro uses in a week. If it were 3:15 when you asked Mark Bavaro what time it was, he would look at his wristwatch, say “Three-fif” and make you guess the rest.

Godfrey gets a large charge out of Bavaro.

“One day we were doing kind of a panel discussion at a high school in Norwood (N.J.), and the girls were all going crazy for him,” Godfrey said. “It was like the Beatles had landed.

“They were all falling in love with him, and they’d get to ask him a question, and he’d give them a two- or three-word answer, and they’d love that. They’d heard about him being like that, and to see him doing it made it even funnier.

“So I kidded him about it. I said: ‘Mark, you know, you could really cultivate this image. Take these big speaking engagements and get up there and talk for, like, 30 seconds. And everybody would be happy. Because you’d just be being yourself.’

“There’s a girl across the street from me about my age and she loves Mark. Both my sisters love Mark. You could put him on the cover of Teen Beat and advertise a ‘Win a Date With Mark Bavaro’ kind of thing. But all the girls’ hearts are broken now that they’ve found out he’s engaged to be married this off-season.”

Some guys get the screams and squeals; other guys get noticed only by referees. Godfrey is more than aware of his position’s anonymity, as he was quoted recently in the New York Times: “Offensive linemen like to be recognized, but it happens positively once a career. Otherwise, the only time anyone hears about you is when the referee says, ‘Offense, No. 61, holding, 10 yards,’ and your mother is watching as the camera looks for you.”

This, perhaps, can be his “once a career.” He is playing rock-solid football, his team will be in Super Bowl XXI Sunday, and someone even steps up to him now and then to hear what he has to say.

“I thought they said this Super Bowl stuff was going to be outrageous, that they’d be swarming all over us,” Godfrey said, kidding around the other day at the Orange Coast College field at Costa Mesa, talking in relative peace while the Lawrence Taylor-types were drawing mobs. “This isn’t so bad. New York was worse than this.”

On this same field, Godfrey rehearsed with his Michigan teammates before three other games at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Those weren’t Super Bowls, though. They were Rose Bowls. And most people know by now how Michigan has done in Rose Bowls.

“You mean you’re 0-3 in bowl games after practicing on this field?” Godfrey was asked.

“That’s correct,” he said.

“Doesn’t that worry you?”

“No,” he said, laughing. “We were the ‘away’ team then. This time we’re listed as the ‘home’ team.”

“You mean Denver’s the Big Ten team in this game?”

“I’m afraid so,” Godfrey said.

Offense, No. 61, joking.