In Golden Anniversary Super Bowl, One L of a Change

SUPER BOWL L January, 2016

As the first woman to play football in a Super Bowl, all the attention got to be too much for Large Marge McCoy after a few days. Tens of thousands had sent congratulatory telegrams wishing her luck in the Golden Anniversary Game or attempted to get in touch, ranging from national women’s organizations to President Limbaugh himself, until finally she hid inside her hotel room and took the phone off the hook, disappointing her groupies in the lobby.

Given permission to drive herself to the game, the better to avoid a mob that banged against the windows of the Buffalo team bus, McCoy slipped unseen from a delivery dock and tipped a valet parker $20 for bringing her car around. It was the white, hydrogen-powered convertible that she was presented two days before by People’s Home Journal for being named the magazine’s woman of the year--a definite beauty, a ’16 Corvette that she opened up to 100 m.p.h. on her way to the Los Angeles Jim Murray Coliseum.

There, they were waiting.

“Marge! Marge!” the kids wailed. How had they known where she’d be?

She did what her teammates had taught her. Looked down, looked preoccupied, pretended not to have time to sign autographs, slapped a few palms. An old security guard ushered McCoy toward a private gate. He never even asked to see her ID. This was one of the advantages of being the only woman in the league. One of the disadvantages was listening to the lame jokes. This one, the usher’s, had something to do with backfield in motion. He stopped snickering as soon as he heard McCoy’s response, which included an anatomical reference of her own.

The locker room was hers and hers alone as McCoy slipped her leather jacket and leather pants onto hangers and removed her five gold chains, one by one. It was always better like this, quiet, before the rest of the players came stomping into the room and started filling up the room with the smells of ointments or pounding savagely on one another’s shoulder pads. One of them snapped a wet towel at McCoy on her first week with the team. She nearly strangled him with it before three teammates dragged her away.

The coach came in ahead of everyone else and asked if she was nervous. McCoy said what made her nervous all week was being asked repeatedly if she was nervous. The coach patted her scalp and let her be.

Within an hour, the room was crowded, and within two, the players were huddled together in prayer. The team chaplain stepped aside to make room for a visiting Roman Catholic priest from England who was brought in for this special occasion. The priest said a prayer for every player’s safekeeping, and then she added, almost as an afterthought: “The Pope sends along her blessings.”

In the tunnel, McCoy ran into and nearly knocked over a Dallas cheerleader.

Their eyes met for a second. The cheerleader struck a pose in her hot pants and white go-go boots and said: “Good luck today.”

McCoy looked her up and down and said: “Hey, it’s the 21st Century, babe. Dress like it.”

She was mean, all right. Mean and hard. Everybody said so, from her first day as a walk-on at Auburn to her first appearance on the field, when she took the hamstrings away from some poor slob from Tennessee. Within three weeks she was starting at left cornerback and within four she was featured in half the TV programs and magazines in the country, many of whom became a nuisance to her mom and dad, who got tired of telling the story of how Marge celebrated her 12th birthday by sticking her Barbie doll in the microwave.

Drafted in the fifth round, not as a novelty but as a legitimate prospect, McCoy played special teams during the exhibition season and got into a fistfight with a snotty little sixth-round safety out of Purdue who made less money. She lost the fight, but sneaked into the parking lot later and flattened all four tires of his car.

During pregame calisthenics, McCoy tried not to listen to all the “Golden Anniversary Super Bowl” promotion blasting from the stadium’s jumbo television screen. At one point, when her own name was mentioned, several of the Dallas players happened to be strolling by and three of them bent from the waist in her direction. A fourth gave a curtsy. She spat and turned her back. Mean.

McCoy’s principal assignment in the game was Art Friar, a wily wide receiver who had broken many records and spirits. It was his 15th and final season with the Cowboys and he had publicly pledged to bring them their first Super Bowl championship since the ‘90s. Her Buffalo teammates made Marge pledge to knock the old Dallas coot all the way back to the ‘90s.

She lined up opposite him after the opening kickoff and got ready to play ball. This would be the first meeting between Buffalo and Dallas in a Super Bowl in 23 years, and it was astonishing to think that, in that much time, how things could change.