Kicker’s Haunting Memories Could Be Erased Next Season

Since Sunday, I have been thinking a lot about Scott Norwood.

He kicked four field goals in the Buffalo Bills’ season opener, one of them from 47 yards.

In the Niagara (N.Y.) Gazette’s sports pages the next day, Tom McDonough’s game story was topped with a reference to a story appearing elsewhere in the same edition:

“Fans think Super Bowl, (See Page 1A).”

The date of that paper was Sept. 10.

When Scott Allan Norwood went home from that game, he must have been feeling fairly pleased with himself. He had 99 field goals in his NFL career. And he was employed by the kind of team that would keep him scoring more, more, more.

Not a bad situation for someone who had been released in 1982 by the Atlanta Falcons and in 1985 by the Birmingham Stallions of the old USFL.

Even the Bills released Norwood once--for one day. They turned him loose Sept. 1, 1986, then re-signed him the next morning.

He went on from there to score 83 points, the most in one season by any Buffalo player since O.J. Simpson in 1975.

The year before, Scott Norwood went to camp with nine others, in an audition of kickers that seemed right out of “A Chorus Line.”

Norwood was an NFL nobody, a non-drafted player from a Division I-AA university, James Madison, where he played soccer and football, occasionally doing both on the same day.

During the 1986 season, the Bills came to expect great things from Scott Norwood. He made eight field goals in a row before missing a 47-yarder at Kansas City. He also missed one at Miami on Oct. 12, 1986, that struck the right upright. It was from 60 yards.

Those who saw it said it had plenty of distance, that it would have easily carried five yards farther.

It would have been the most memorable kick of Norwood’s career.

Now, it is not even his most memorable miss.

Scott Norwood will go down in history as the ghost of Super Bowl XXV.

Ghost, not goat. Goats make mental mistakes, mess up easy plays, run the wrong way, pass to the wrong person. Roy Riegle was a goat. So was Bill Buckner. So was Fred Brown from Georgetown. There have been dozens of famous goats; maybe hundreds.

There was nothing wrong-headed about Scott Norwood’s misfortune in Sunday’s Super Bowl. He missed a difficult kick. It is not as though, given 10 chances at it, he would have made nine. But he probably would have made five.

How would you like to live inside Scott Norwood’s head for a few days this week?

I keep picturing Buffalo’s kicker standing by himself in some neighborhood park, surrounded by several footballs, aiming at some target 45 to 50 yards away, maybe the monkey bars or the slide. Maybe some kid too young to recognize him is fetching the footballs. Maybe it’s snowing.

I keep wondering if Buffalo’s kicker feels like turning on the television news at night, if someone else in his house gets up to change the channel when Super Bowl highlights are replayed.

I keep imagining Buffalo’s kicker reviewing the circumstances again and again in his head, envisioning Adam Lingner’s snap, envisioning Frank Reich’s placement, envisioning the ball as it went right of the goal posts and never hooked left.

I keep seeing Leon Seals, the 270-pound lineman, curling his arm around Norwood’s shoulders as the broken-hearted Bills trudged from the field.

I keep flashing back to Darryl Talley, the linebacker, gripping Norwood’s hand at a news conference and saying to him: “I’m still with you.”

I keep conjuring up the image of an estimated 25,000 Buffalonians, waiting to meet the team plane, reserving their greatest applause for the kicker as he descends from the jet.

What a roller-coaster of emotions this must be for Scott Norwood, who became, more or less, the first man in history who could single-handedly win or lose a Super Bowl on the final play.

Jim O’Brien could only win Super Bowl V for the Baltimore Colts by himself. The score was tied when his 32-yard field goal beat Dallas, 16-13.

For Norwood, the sporting phrase do or die never had more meaning.

Yet maybe the only saving grace of a war abroad that brings real death is the reminder that do or die in a sports context is a very silly phrase indeed.

Scott Norwood has handled this thing about as well as it can be publicly handled. And so, it appears, have the football fans of Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Rochester and the rest of western New York.

Had it been a 27-yard field goal that Norwood missed and not a 47-yarder, I don’t know what sort of reception he would have received, sympathetic or merely pathetic.

But I am still picturing that shaggy-haired little boy who sang during the Super Bowl festivities, “Did you ever know that you’re my hero?”

I am thinking that if Scott Norwood is not yet a hero, perhaps he can still become one. Buffalo fans think Super Bowl, (See Page 1A), January, 1992.