Super Duel at the Super Bowl

Two great quarterbacks battle to cap their careers

Super Bowl XIII will turn on how well two talented but distinctly different men perform under fire. Sports Editor B.J. Phillips visited the Pittsburgh Steelers' Terry Bradshaw, and Reporter-Researcher Peter Ainslie sought out the Dallas Cowboys' Roger Staubach. Their findings:

STAUBACH: "You have a camera and it's focused downfield. All the other is a blur--the hands, the people, the movement--but your point of focus is beyond them. If you stare at the closer stuff so that you actually see a guy's arm or hand, then you're in trouble. There's an antenna, a sixth sense, inside you that directs the ball past the guy's hands."

Such is the view from behind the face mask of the Dallas Cowboys' Roger Staubach, one of the most calmly efficient quarterbacks in N.F.L. history. At 36, he is at the height of his skills. Roger the Dodger, the U.S. Naval Academy scrambler who came into the pros ten years ago with a pronounced tendency to gallop away with the ball, has long since matured into a sharp-eyed passer whose forte is picking apart the secondary, not romping down the sidelines. To avoid destruction, Staubach goes to ground with a hook slide that would do a major league base runner proud: "My instincts resist it, but the coaches instilled it in me. The more experience I have, the less I have to run, because my real asset is reading defenses and throwing to the right receiver."

Staubach did that often enough during the past season to rank near the top of pro quarterbacks in completions: 231 of 413 passes (55.9%) for 3,190 yds. and 25 touchdowns. The man whose legs won him the Heisman Trophy in 1963 now lives, as do all N.F.L. quarterbacks, by his arm. His hands, gnarled and disfigured, reflect his trade: the index finger on his throwing hand still shows the marks of off-season surgery, and the little finger on the same hand zigs at right angles from one fracture, then zags back again from a second break. It is these hands that will load the Dallas shotgun against a Pittsburgh defense that is skilled at masking its strategy with fake formations until the play is underway.

Utterly methodical in everything he does (father of five, he has a small library of volumes on child raising), Staubach is fascinated by the intellectual challenge of dissecting pro defenses, especially one as sophisticated as Pittsburgh's. "I'm really learning new things all the time," he insists. "I'm constantly growing." Head Coach Tom Landry calls the Dallas plays, and while Staubach would prefer otherwise, he admits that the system frees him to search for telltale flaws in a defense. Like Bradshaw, Staubach knows all the tactics that his opponents are likely to use in given situations, but that is the easy part. The hard part will come when Staubach tries to spot the variations in the Steelers' defense--while on the run. Says he: "You 'key' on certain defenders--you see what they are doing and that tells you, ideally, what everybody else is doing."

Staubach's rapport with Drew Pearson, Billy Joe DuPree, Tony Hill and the rest of his fleet of receivers has been built, like all of his skills, on years of hard work. He has been playing football since age twelve, with four years off for Navy duty after graduation from Annapolis. Even in Viet Nam, however, Lieut, (jg) Staubach chucked a football on the docks at Danang. His arm is neither as poor as early detractors claimed nor as great as revisionists insist: just a good solid arm harnessed to the needs at hand.

Staubach's greatest asset, however, is his fierce competitiveness, fierce even by the standards of a league filled with men who brood for days after a defeat. In the simplest matters, Staubach's instincts inevitably take over. Says Wide Receiver Pearson: "He's 36, and I'm 27, and he doesn't want me to beat him in anything. We can just be running laps and it becomes competitive. He's keeping his ego intact because he says that he can still beat the younger guys, and I'm trying to keep mine because I don't want the older man to beat me. That's how he motivates, by doing, not by talking. He sets an example for all of us to follow."

By now Staubach has plenty of laurels to fall back on. Aside from his college triumphs, he led Dallas to Super Bowl victories in 1972 and 1978. Yet, Landry says, "Roger is an unusual person--he loves football and doesn't get tired of playing it. When they reach his age, a lot of people lose the incentive." Staubach hopes he can play for another three or four seasons. "Life is short," he says, "and football is still a challenge."

BRADSHAW: The week before the A.F.C. championship play-off game between the Steelers and the Houston Oilers, Pittsburgh Quarterback Terry Bradshaw was sick, and Rocky Bleier was worried. "Terry wasn't able to eat all week long, and I was concerned about how he would play," says Bleier, a running back who blocks like a lineman. "When he comes out fired up and cocky, our offense plays that way. But if he comes out tentative and unsure, we play that way too. So every day I asked how he felt." The answers were reassuring but unconvincing, until the morning of the game. Then Bleier and the Steelers got incontrovertible evidence that all was well with Terry Bradshaw, Louisiana cattle rancher and quarterback. "I saw him put a big old chaw of tobacco in his mouth, and if he could stomach that, he could stomach anything. That's when I knew everything was going to be all right."

Everything has indeed been all right for Terry Bradshaw, 30, in his ninth and finest season in the N.F.L. He led the Steelers to their third Super Bowl with a brilliant year: completing 207 of 368 passes (56.3%) for 2,995 yds. and 28 touchdowns, and winning the A.P.'s N.F.L. Player of the Year Award. The No. 1 draft pick of 1970 has become the No. 1 quarterback of 1978, and nobody laughs about his chewing tobacco any more.

The climb to the top, like the social acceptability of a chaw, was not easily won. "My career has had several stepping-stones," Bradshaw admits, "and not all of them were up." Tall and handsome, with an arm strong enough to throw the ball halfway home to Grand Cane, La., he was touted as the salvation of a franchise that had wallowed among the perennial losers for years. But this blithe and simple country boy from small-time Louisiana Tech was totally unprepared for living in the goldfish bowl of pro football, much less playing to a chorus of boos. Says he: "I wanted so bad to make the Steelers a winner so they'd be proud of me. Maybe I wanted it too much, put too much pressure on myself."

The big kid had to learn under fire, not only how to play football with the big guys but how to handle life in the big time. His game alternated between sublime achievement and miserable failure. "I made mistakes, plenty of mistakes," Bradshaw says, "and some of them were stupid mistakes. From stupid, it went to dumb, and that's the image I've been stuck with."

It took Bradshaw four years to realize his enormous potential and lead the rebuilt Steelers to Super Bowl titles in 1974 and 1975. Despite this success, and this year's accolades, he still remembers, all too vividly, those nightmarish early years: "When I first came up, everything hurt me, all the talk about being too country, too dumb. The hardest thing was to be myself, so I withdrew. Now I'm me and I'm happy. It shows."

It shows in Bradshaw's private and public life. Married to Skating Star JoJo Starbuck, his second wife, he is at peace with a frantic home life split between Louisiana and Pittsburgh. On the field he has developed both a close relationship with teammates and a mastery of his sport. Says Coach Chuck Noll: "Terry knows the game of football in all its complexity as well as any quarterback I've ever seen.'' Indeed, so complete is his understanding that the "dumb" quarterback, has become one of the game's top tacticians. Unlike the Cowboys' Staubach, he calls his own plays, and is respected around the N.F.L for his skill at "audibles"--changing plays at the line of scrimmage.

Bradshaw has developed a kind of extrasensory system of communication with his talented receivers. Says Lynn Swann: "There are some balls that Terry throws and I catch that go beyond the timing or even beyond the play itself. It's as though the ball has his force and my force around it. I'll turn when I'm not supposed to turn, or turn early or turn late, and there's the ball. Terry has put my scent on it, and nobody else can possibly catch that ball but me." Adds John Stallworth, the other wide receiver whom Dallas must stop: "I used to see Terry and Lynn have that magic, and now it's starting to happen to me. You can't explain it, you just want more of it."

Even Bradshaw admits that this year has been special. "Last year I throw a pass to Swann, it's a good pass, a good catch, and somebody is right there to tackle him. This year I throw the same pass, and he zigs around four guys and goes into the end zone. Call it luck or magic or whatever, I like it." So do the Pittsburgh fans. As rugged as their team, they will be waving those orange-and-black towels in Miami to cheer on their country boy quarterback as he struggles to win a third Super Bowl and establish the Steelers as the dominant pro football team of the '70s.

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