sadly: cowboys key player regarte why he miss the goal and coach ask he to live the team because of he lose the games….
As part of our countdown to Super Bowl 50, SI.com is rolling out a series focusing on the overlooked, forgotten or just plain strange history of football’s biggest game. From commercials to Super Bowl parties, we’ll cover it all, with new stories published every week here.
There are plenty of other places Jackie Smith would rather we start this story. Hell, anywhere else would be better. For a man who considers himself the luckiest ever to live, why choose the one moment when his luck ran out? A moment that he hasn’t talked about—not in depth, not like he does as he drives around his old St. Louis stomping grounds in mid-November—in nearly 40 years?
But, come on. It always starts here, at the Orange Bowl in Miami, on Jan. 21, 1979.
Super Bowl injuries: What it’s like to get hurt in the game of your life
Third-and-three. Ten-yard line. There were two minutes and 46 seconds left in the third quarter of Super Bowl XIII against the Steelers, and the man with more career catches and more receiving yards than anyone else on the field had his hand in the dirt on the right side of the Cowboys’ line. Smith had played in 215 games in his 16-year NFL career, catching nearly 500 balls for 8,000 yards (more than any tight end before him), and he already knew this would be his last. It was going to be the fairy tale ending: The kid from Kentwood, La., who was as surprised as anyone on the day he got drafted, who toiled so long and so hard for the middling St. Louis Cardinals, who retired and then reluctantly came back for one last ride with America’s Team. It was setting up so well for the old vet—older, at 38, than any other player in the game—that the Florence (Ala.) Times Daily predicted Smith would have “the best time of them all. . . no matter how hairy the going gets.”
And for a while, he did. Smith had only been on the field for a handful of snaps, all of them running plays, and this one looked to be more of the same. Trailing 21–14, Dallas lined up with two ends, Smith and Billy Jo Dupree, plus an extra lineman in Andy Frederick. All-world running back Tony Dorsett went in motion to the right and quarterback Roger Staubach ran play-action perfectly to Scott Laidlaw, faking the entire back end of the Steelers’ defense. Then, in came snarling Jack Lambert, barreling through the A gap, aiming to blow up the play, the moment, before it could even happen.
If only. Laidlaw picked up the future Hall of Fame linebacker with a crushing block that stopped Lambert in his tracks, giving Staubach just enough time to operate. With the pocket closing, the QB spotted Smith streaking down the center, into the end zone, without a defender in sight.