The Great Escape

By BILL PLASCHKE

Jan. 31, 2000 12 AM PT

ATLANTA — It still works, darn it. It still rocks. It can still breathe a chill through you one minute, make your throat burn the next.

The two teams are nomads, their owners are jokes, the first three and a half quarters are insulting and, oh, by the way, one of the stars is flat on his stomach and his legs aren’t moving.

With eight minutes to play in the third quarter of its biggest game Sunday, our new national pastime was crimson and staggering.

Then it happened, as it always seems to happen.

The NFL emptied its pockets and out dropped 23 minutes that will live forever.

Inside a smoke-shrouded dome, through a cynical haze, the Bowl rediscovered its Super.

“Truly an amazing thing to see,” said Barron Wortham of the Tennessee Titans.

“That was what Super Bowls are made of,” said Marshall Faulk of the St. Louis Rams.

St. Louis defeated Tennessee, 23-16, to win Super Bowl XXXIV at the Georgia Dome.

But the real winner was pro football, which proved again it is a sport without shock absorbers, bouncing a nation to places no other vehicle can approach.

You boo, and you boo, and you throw up your hands with the Rams leading, 9-0, and Titan safety Blaine Bishop lying motionless on the ground after a head-on-hip collision.

Then Titan Coach Jeff Fisher runs off the field with his thumbs up, screams that Bishop will walk again, challenges his team to fly.

Meanwhile, on the other side, Ram Kurt Warner is on his knees, honoring Bishop with a prayer.

You stop booing. And for the game’s final 23 minutes, you cheer.

You cheer the Titans as they mount three consecutive drives, pounding repeatedly with weary Eddie George, to tie the score.

“We put it all on the line, man,” George said, tears forming at the edges of his eye black. “This is very tough to deal with.”

You then cheer Warner as he ends a fantasy year with the reality of a 73-yard, go-ahead touchdown pass to Isaac Bruce with Jevon Kearse chopping at his right arm.

While the rest of his Ram teammates are dancing, Warner slowly, sorely jogs those 73 yards to the end zone to find Bruce for a hug.

“I never saw him score,” Warner said, noting he was prone at the time. “I just heard the crowd scream.”

You cheer his counterpart, Steve McNair, as he leads the Titans back down the field toward the tying touchdown, squeezing away from two grabbing linemen in the backfield to complete a pass to put them one play from a tying touchdown.

“This is not a loss for us,” McNair said. “This is something we can build on. We will be back. That is a true statement. We will be back.”

Finally, even though it doesn’t work, you cheer that last play.

You cheer McNair for his belief that he can pass the ball to Kevin Dyson outside the goal line--instead of finding someone in the end zone--because he knows Dyson is willing to fight through anything.

“I figured he could get the ball and get in,” McNair said.

You cheer Dyson for believing too.

“We run the play in practice, and in practice, I score,” he said. “I caught the ball, I saw the pay dirt, I reached.”

You cheer the Rams’ Mike Jones for leaving his assigned spot because he “felt” Dyson’s presence, for then grabbing Dyson by the foot and wrenching him to the ground.

“It’s amazing, you don’t think about the 70,000 people watching or what’s at stake,” Jones said. “You’re thinking, it’s just a football game. And I was just trying to get the guy to the ground.”

Finally, you cheer Dyson’s desperate unfurling of the ball toward the goal line even though the clock had ticked off the final second and he was more than a yard away, a year away, maybe forever away.

“I’m thinking, maybe nobody sees it,” Dyson said. “Maybe they have to go to instant replay, and who knows?”

When the whistle blew and the cannons boomed and confetti fell, Dyson knew.

He nonetheless remained sitting at the one-yard line for several minutes, as if somehow the miracle of his last-second kick return earlier in the playoffs against the Buffalo Bills would be repeated.

As if somebody would walk out and look at the ball and look at the clock and raise their hands.

If you think that’s crazy, how about the two Rams who remained standing out there with him, in front of him, still blocking his path to the end zone long after the final whistle?

Just in case.

When it became obvious the scoreboard wasn’t going to change, one of those Rams, Dexter McCleon, leaned over and congratulated Dyson before he congratulated anybody else.

“He told me, ‘Way to work, you really worked hard,’ ” Dyson said.

They all did, and they all knew it, two teams who for 23 minutes became like one unit, sportsmen, entertainers, one sweating and rug-burned example why their sport is still our sport.

“This shows, football is still the most emotional sport of all, a real roller coaster,” Dyson said. “This game we were up, down, up, down, back up, back down, every which way.”

When it was over, embattled Ram owner Georgia Frontiere was up when she accepted the Lombardi Trophy at midfield from Commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

Then she was down when she showed no class by using the occasion to rip Southern California for allowing the team to leave.

All week, those remaining Ram fans in the Southland have protested that they can support their old football team without supporting its owner.

In one childish sentence, Frontiere showed that you can’t have one without the other.

“It proves we did the right thing in going to St. Louis,” she crowed.

But even the bejeweled one could not spoil an occasion so emotional that the usually weepy Dick Vermeil initially had nothing left.

“You know I’m an emotional guy but right now . . . “ he said, face contorted but eyes dry.

Warner, the game’s most valuable player, made up for it.

When the game ended, he ran to the stands, weeping, stepping up to his wife, Brenda, for a kiss.

Five years ago she would have been kissing a guy who slung toilet paper down the aisles of a grocery store.

Now she was kissing what will surely be the best sports story of this and many years.

Said Brenda: “His story is too good for Hollywood.”

Said Kurt: “I don’t think of it as being Hollywood. It’s just me.”

It’s just pro football.

Through a maze of smoke and confetti afterward, the voice of the irksome Tagliabue echoed through a stadium where most fans were still in their seats, most too stunned to leave.

“All the world saw an extraordinary football game . . . an incredible football game,” said the commissioner.

He was right, darn it.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: [email protected].