“I crossed a lot of high mountains, shed a million tears,
But when I come to the River Jordan, Hallelujah,
Then I’ll have no fears, then I’ll have no fears.”
— “One More River to Cross”
Kickers. They bear the burden of football. Not only are they the players who use their feet on the ball, thus granting the American game a justification, but they also, again and again, become the difference between wining and losing. Winning is great, but losing is hard. Just ask Stephen Gostkowski, who missed a Patriots’ point on Sunday 24 February. “I feel like I lost the game for the team,” he says. That is, he lost the team’s chance to go to Super Bowl 50.
His coach and his teammates say otherwise, but Gostkowski is not alone in feeling the weight of such tragedy. Kickers’ missed points make up the bulk of stories about lost opportunities in American football, whether or not these stories are accurate. The blame is something of a constant in the game.
Consider two weeks ago, when Minnesota Vikings kicker Blair Walsh missed a 27-yard field goal. The image on television was all too familiar. The foot connected with the ball, the ball soared, and then, as it went wide of the goalpost, you saw reactions. Vikings players and fans’ faces fell, Seattle Seahawks players and coaches exulted. In the days that followed, the moment became a meme and Minnesota first graders wrote Walsh letters of encouragement. Such rituals are well known in football, an industry premised on the ostensible character building provided by losses and victories, personal and collective. While thousands of crucial kicks have gone wrong, each one constitutes its own sort of tragedy, each one resonates in its own way.
One particular miss that has resonated for decades and for many people is that by the Buffalo Bills’ Scott Norwood. This miss is at the center of The Four Falls of Buffalo, a new 30 for 30 documentary now available on Netflix. In fact, it’s one of many misses, including the Buffalo Bills’ four lost Super Bowls, in 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1994. These losses are legendary, in large part because the very achievement of getting to the Super Bowl four years in a row is unmatched (made more acute, perhaps, by the fact that the team is now the only one that has not appeared in the NFL playoffs in the current century). The losses are legendary as well because they are exemplary, because each occurred for its own set of reasons.
As Ken Rodgers’ film looks back on Buffalo’s four trips to the Super Bowl, it tends not to blame or find fault, but instead to celebrate achievements. This celebration begins with Jim Kelly, of course, the beloved Hall of Fame quarterback. He appears right away in the film, his figure admirably sturdy, his Bills jersey gleaming white, as he looks out on Niagara Falls. Over the dull roar of the water, narrator William Fichtner observes, “Thanks to Mother Nature and Father Time, you don’t have to look far in Buffalo to find the perfect metaphor for the city’s football team in the early 1990s.” It’s grand note to start, and as the film turns to each new season, you see the Falls again.
This repetition is formally elegant but also thematically misleading, in the sense that each season becomes its own story, one that’s soon transformed into its own mythology. After Kelly recalls his own separate tragedies (familiar to many viewers, including the 2005 death of his eight-year-old son Hunter and Kelly’s recent battle with cancer), the film sets to recounting the team’s saga, beginning with their first Super Bowl (XXV), versus the Giants, at the time coached by Bill Parcells and defensive coordinator Bill Belichick. The Bills, led by head coach Marv Levy, had developed an effective no huddle offense that contributed to its impressive 13-3 season (common now, Fichtner notes, but unusual then). But Belichick had a counter plan, which the Patriots’ notoriously unintelligible head coach here articulates perfectly: he set up an unpredictable defense, in order to “make ’em figure it out while they’re trying to go that fast.”
The Bills didn’t figure it out. Their hurry up schemes met something of a match in 1991. No one could have known that this Super Bowl loss would not be the only one for the team, much less that it would be one of four in a row. Sometimes, as wide receiver Don Beebe puts, it, such drama has positive effects. “I think it really brought us closer together,” he says
The missed kick is hardly the only factor in this loss, even if it remains a broadly symbolic one. Other factors in 1991 might have been the Bills’ excessive partying during Super Bowl week and running back Thurman Thomas’ missing helmet during the game. (“Somebody from Harry Connick’s band picked it up and moved it.”) Not to mention that Norwood’s missed kick occurred after the Giants offense had been on the field for over nine minutes so as to leave him with mere seconds to win the game with a 47-yard kick. That kick — as they always are — was all about pressure, as well as a peculiar footnote to this peculiar game, namely, a patriotic display at the stadium that included Whitney Houston and air power. “Until this day,” asserts running back Kenny Davis, “I tell people that I think it was the wind from one of those Apache helicopters that was hovering over the stadium.”
Other theories, expressed by players and commentator Chris Berman, and accompanied by a sad piano soundtrack, indicate people are still haunted by the miss, and no one more than Norwood, who appears here to remember his “sorrow and disappointment in letting down teammates who are there on the field of battle with you.” He still chokes up, sitting today for his interview, on his nice couch in his nice home.
As heart-wrenching as this memory may be, the film’s rendering of the next three losses is similarly dramatic. As Thomas or Marv Levy or Jim Kelly or Frank Reich (the team’s other quarterback) describes his experience, Four Falls of Buffalo turns to the familiar NFL Films mode, slow motion game footage with rousing soundtrack music. They lose to the Washington team in 1992, Dallas in 1993 and 1994. “Everything was happening in slow motion,” Reich says helpfully. “Everything was surreal, like it was in a movie.” His observation of the 1993 game speaks to yours, slow motion before you, like magic. Other former players also watch and comment, the images on their big screen TVs are remarkable and thrilling, balletic and thundering. The game hardly matters. NFL Films, you marvel, is ingenious.
The sheer number of journeys and hopes and losses — the four falls — has its own effects, on players who go to work again every year and on fans who go on to hope each new season. “It reset the love affair with that team,” notes journalist Vic Carucci. “People had become jaded, people had become upset that they just didn’t see the win at the rainbow.” Certainly, the story goes, teams play for fans and fans are loyal. The ways in which this relationship — so familiar, so profound — might be strained by too much losing, are complicated. Four Falls of Buffalo traces this complexity, showing how misfortune does indeed bring some communities “closer together” even as it also breaks others open.
It’s fiction and fact simultaneously, splendid anticipation and debilitating disappointment. Exploiting and sustaining such complexity, making it look simple: it’s the kicker’s fault. Still and always, the NFL turns profits no matter which way the stories go.