Lance Mannion: A shout out to Houston Gamblers great Jim Kelly

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Saturday night, January 16, 2021. Posted Sunday night, January 24.

Buffalo Bills Wide Receiver celebrates catching a pass for a touchdown during last week's the AFC Divisional Championship game against the Baltimore Ravens. Bills won 17-3 to go on to the Conference Championship playoff against the Kansas City Chiefs tonight. Photo by Rich Barnes/USA Today Sports, via the Grand Forks Herald.

It’s been a long time since I was a football fan, and I haven’t watched it regularly in ages, since Joe Montana left San Francisco, in fact. But I watched Buffalo play Baltimore last week and I’m watching them play Kansas City tonight, because a good friend from my college days is an ardent Bills fan and I feel I have to root for them for her sake, but geez! Football is boring.

What are we watching? Two committees of old men playing eleven-level chess using young men as the pieces?

When I tweeted that point last week, a friend quoted George Will: “Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” But Will was talking about the play on the field; the committee meetings he meant were the huddles. I mean the way football games are covered on television and the way we’re made to see them. The committees are the coaches, and the cameras and commentary focus on them as if what they’re doing is why fans at home are watching and who we’re rooting for.

I also hate the challenges, which are based on the premise that there's no such thing as a legitimate play unless a camera sees it and another committee of old men agree the camera saw what the replays show they saw.

And I’ll spare you my standard rant against the half-time reports, particularly Fox’s, another committee old men who seem to think what we want to watch is yet another committee of old men, this one acting like a gang of frat house fanboys using football as an excuse to flirt with each other and indulge their man crushes.

As it happens, the two most ardent football fans I know are women. The other is also a friend from college. (Different school.) She lives in New Orleans, so I felt obligated to watch the Saints play the Buccaneers.

Brady vs Brees, two old men who have defied aging. If nothing else, I thought, maybe I'll learn how to recapture some of my lost youth. Cheaper than Nugenix, at any rate.

Bucs won. Oh well. Saved me from having to choose between rooting for the Saints and rooting for the Packers, one of my old favorite teams and my brother Larry’s all-time favorite.

Back to the Bills and the Ravens. Buffalo won in the cold and the wind, 17-3. Should say with the help of the wind and the cold. This is the first time the Bills are in the conference playoffs since their glory days in the 1990s when they were led to four consecutive Super Bowls and six AFC Championship appearances by Hall of Fame quarterback Jim Kelly.

The then twenty-four-year-old quarterback for the USFL's Houston Gamblers, future Buffalo Bills great and Football Hall of Famer Jim Kelly (right) scrambles before passing for a touchdown in a game against the Memphis Showboats, June 24, 1984. Photo by John Henley/AP, via AZ Central.

Kelly is going to be sixty-one on Valentine’s Day. He’s been sick on and off with cancer since 2013. He recently announced he’s cancer free, but he’s been there before. So it was doubly good to hear NBC announcer Al Michaels give a shout out to Kelly at the end of the game.

Reminded me, though. Everybody should read "Football for a Buck" by Jeff Pearlman. I've been recommending it as the book that explains Donald Trump. Just about very bad quality he showed himself to possess as president, he'd shown himself to possess during his involvement with the USFL in its short life in the early and mid-1980s when he almost singlehandedly destroyed the league through his greed, selfishness, egomania, and stupiidity. But it's foremost a book about football, as a game and a business. And it includes a good mini-biography of the young Jim Kelly during his USFL days with the Houston Gamblers when he was not the good man he grew to be.

Donald Trump isn't the worst person in the book, until he is. Neither is Kelly. Far from it. But a lot of people in the book are shown to have behaved badly at the time, and Kelly is one of them.

He was prodigiously talented but selfish, self-indulgent (to put it mildly), immature, even for a kid just out of college, arrogant, careless, and in a way lazy. The Gamblers wanted him to learn a different type of offense than he was used to and he shrugged them off. He thought he was already a great quarterback and didn’t need to work at being any better. He relied on his talent to carry him through any situation, on and off the field. Without hitting readers over the head with it, Pearlman presents Kelly as the anti-hero of a morality tale, with future San Francisco 49er great and Football Hall of Famer Steve Young as his mirror image. Young is one of the few people in the book who did not behave badly.

When the Gamblers threatened to give his starting job to another QB, Kelly set out to show he could run the new offense better than his potential replacement. And he succeeded.

This led to a showdown with the L.A. Express and their quarterback Steve Young in a game that has become known as “The Greatest Game No-one Saw,” because a relatively small number of fans turned out in the stands---the USFL’s chronic league-wide problem---and ABC decided to broadcast another game:

What those select few in attendance viewed, however, was something out of a futuristic football-video bonanza...Young and...Kelly threw for a combined 829 yards (a pro football record 574 for Kelly alone)...The Express held a 23-13 advantage entering the fourth quarter, and when the score reached 33-13...the Gamblers’ media director [led] reporters from the press box toward the field to prepare for the postgame interviews On the Houston sideline, chaos reigned. [Houston’s co-owner] Jerry Argovitz was grousing about his team’s flaccid offense, yelling insults toward [Gamblers’ head coach] Jack Pardee. Hosea Taylor, a six-foot-four, 249-pound defensive tackle, overheard his obnoxious boss and stomped toward him, fists up. “Hosea had to be held back,” said Ray Alborn, the defensive line coach. “He had murder in his eyes.” Then---Bam! Within a span of nine minutes, Kelly led the Gamblers on drives of 74, 43, and 84 yards. [Pearlman’s footnote: “The word ‘drive’ presumes a long stretch of plays. Such was not the case. Kelly hit Richard Johnson for a 52-yard touchdown pass on the first ‘drive,’ Vince Coville on a 40-yard touchdown pass on the second ‘drive,’ and Ricky Sanders on a 39-yard touchdown pass on the third ‘drive.’”] It was one deep laser after another, and the fleet of Houston wide receivers made mincemeat of the [Los Angeles] secondary. “We started running the no-huddle offense with 10 minutes left in the game,” said John Jenkins, the offensive coordinator. “Nobody had ever done that before. It was like watching an Olympic track meet.”

When, with seconds left, Young’s pass to Mel Gray was intercepted, Houston sealed a 34-33 win for the ages. “That was the most amazing single battle I ever engaged in,” Kelly said years later. “Empty stadium, exciting teams, nonstop scoring. Steve and I still talk about that one.”

An ironic post script: The reason Kelly started his professional career in the USFL was that he was drafted by the Buffalo Bills in the 1983 NFL draft and he did not want to play in Buffalo. Too Cold.

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Game’s over. Chiefs won, 38-24. I was going to be rooting for Buffalo, no matter what, but I was also rooting against the Kansas City fans. I’d forgotten. They do the tomahawk chop, which is every bit as offensive as the Washington Football Team’s old name.