Into the Pride Bowl

After a 188-game season of startling upsets and comebacks, a couple of semi-Cinderella teams stumbled into the 1971 Super Bowl. Both the Baltimore Colts and the Dallas Cowboys have been prime contenders for the championship game since it began in 1967. The Colts reached it once--only to lose; Dallas, despite innumerable preseason predictions that the puissant Cowboys were certain winners, never made it at all. In this Sunday's encounter in Miami, both teams will be less concerned with replenishing their bank accounts (each player on the winning team will receive $15,000) than with banishing their reputations as losers.

During the past five seasons, Baltimore amassed a brilliant 57-15 record, the best of any team in the National Football League. But the only thing that people remember is their embarrassing 16-7 loss to the underdog New York Jets in the 1969 Super Bowl. This season, transferred to the American Football Conference in the newly reorganized N.F.L., the Colts have had to live with the charge that they sneaked into the playoffs only because they were in the league's weakest division. Even hometown fans seem unimpressed; when the Colts defeated the Cincinnati Bengals 17-0 in the A.F.C. divisional playoff game two weeks ago, there were more than 5,000 empty seats in Baltimore's Memorial Stadium. Such indignities are not taken lightly by the team. Recalling the loss to the Jets, Center Bill Curry moans: "If I live to be 97, there won't be a week I don't think about it. We were the first N.F.L. team to be humiliated before the world." Adds Linebacker Mike Curtis: "All I ever think about is getting back."

Double Bow-Out. To do that, the Colts will have to rely, as always, on the passing arm of 37-year-old Johnny Unitas. In the A.F.C. championship game against the Oakland Raiders last week. Johnny U. completed only eleven of 29 passes, but most were long gainers in clutch situations that helped lead the Colts to a 27-17 victory. Showing a newfound aggressiveness, the Colt defense sacked Raider quarterbacks five times and intercepted them three more. A late-blooming rookie running back, Norm Bulaich, bulldozed his way to 71 yards and two touchdowns in 22 carries.

Basically, the Colts are a plodding and unspectacular team, which reflects, in part, the unobtrusive personality of their first-year head coach Don McCafferty, 49. "Execution of plays is what wins for you," he says, "not new formations." Nonetheless, McCafferty is not above introducing a little razzle-dazzle. In the Oakland game, the Colts pulled a variation on the old Statue of Liberty play. Their "this week special" was something known as a "66 Double Bow-Out"--a flood of four crisscrossing wide receivers that so confused the Raiders' secondary that Ray Perkins of the Colts was able to score unmolested on a 68-yd. pass play.

Loser Onus. For the Dallas Cowboys, bowing out under pressure is the problem. In each of the past four seasons, Dallas has played for either a league or a divisional title--and lost all four games. An erratic team this season, the Cowboys allowed opponents an average of only nine points in their first four games. By midseason, however, Dallas had lost to the Minnesota Vikings 54-13 --the worst defeat in the team's eleven-year history--and taken a 38-0 beating from the St. Louis Cardinals. With a 5-4 record, even Coach Tom Landry had to admit that the team's chances of making the playoffs were "a big fat zero." Headlined one Dallas newspaper:

COWBOYS FOLD EARLIER THAN USUAL.

Landry, a Sunday-school teacher who has been known to shed real tears during his locker-room exhortations, read the team a poem about togetherness and hanging in there when the going got tough. To help "the team think more of itself," Landry also simplified his multiformation offense in favor of "physically punishing the other teams, like the Green Bay Packers used to do." To help sore-armed Quarterback Craig Morton shake the "loser onus," the coach began calling all plays from the sidelines--emphasizing a ground game that featured the nearly unstoppable sweeps of Rookie Running Back Duane Thomas. Relying primarily on running and a tenacious defense, Dallas finished the season with five straight victories. Then the Cowboys knocked off the Detroit Lions 5-0 and the high-scoring San Francisco 49ers 17-10 in playoffs to win the National Conference championship.

After last week's victory, the sober-sided "Rev. T.L.," as his players call him, allowed himself a moment of emotion. "You can't imagine how we feel," he said. "You just can't imagine how much we've suffered the last four years." The Colts, who are two-point underdogs to the Cowboys, can imagine. Come Sunday, the Pride Bowl will decide which team will suffer some more through a long, hard winter.

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