Render up my body
into the burning heart of God
in the belly of a black-winged bird
--Counting Crows
Now that the Super Bowl is over, and football is put away in the Man Closet for another sad season, I can reflect... upon the bittersweet agony that is being an Atlanta Falcons fan.
The number one seed. Big clutch wins all season. In the spotlight? The fearsome #6 seed come to town, annnnd....Good night. The Packers were the better team that night, and indeed the best team in the league,... but still.
It's not like I should be surprised.
I have loved the Atlanta Falcons for almost as long as I have loved football. Hold your applause. Before the tale of star-crossed love begins, I must first disclose a brief and meaningless fling I had with "America's Team" of the Bold Blue Star. The Cowboys were 9-1, looking every bit as good as the defending champion, and dreaded, Steelers. The Cowboys were the reigning champs of the NFC, ultimately 21-17 victims of the Steelers in X, but EVERYbody's favorite team had come back strong in '76 and had barely been chinked on their run to almost Super Bowl XI.
Anyway, the larger-than-life Cowboys came to Atlanta and Dad got us tickets to the game, on (what a little research shows) was November 21, 1976. Our nation had turned 200, I had turned six, and the Falcons had turned stomachs for a decade on their way to missing the playoffs in every single year of their miserable decade of existence.
The Pre-Dirty Dirty Birds came in at 3-7, Dallas came out and quickly went up 7 on a TD run by one of the quintessential Cowboy Cowboys: Scott Laidlaw. (How much more Cowboy could you get? Well, maybe they'll trade for Colt McCoy.)
It was still 7-0 at the half, but the diminutive Efren Herrera (I'm sorry to digress again, but Efren would later become momentarily famous for wrapping his essentially circular Latin American frame around a 20 yard pass on a fake field goal that embarrassed the Falcons on Monday Night Football) added three in the third. 10-0 Dallas.
Somehow, by some sort of miracle, Atlanta put up a field goal early in the fourth. The dribble of life that it gave the crowd kept us from leaving to beat the half-full (well, probably half-empty) stadium traffic. I remember the outcome of the rest of the quarter, but I had to consult the stats for how it happened exactly. The most thoroughly un-Cowboy name on the field had to be Mike Esposito, who is remembered in Falcon mythology as 'that guy who scored against the Cowboys that time,' ran in from 35 out to tie the game. With just minutes left, the back-up to Steve Bartkowski's back-up (Mike Moroski), Third-string QB Scott Hunter plunged it in from a yard out and the Falcons held on to give Dallas its second loss of the year. The win also propelled the Falcons on to a 4-10 record and another solid legacy of crap that would stretch only two more seasons.
But I was in.
That day that we sat the Cowboys down in the big, blue round edifice of mediocrity that was Atlanta-Fulton County, I made a decision. I was going for the home team, for Dad's team, and for football on the grand scale. I took down my Cowboys pennant, and replaced it with a bright red Falcons pennant. I started collecting football cards, I had all my friends getting them, we would trade and try to put teams together. I added other hard-luck teams to my stable as they made little runs at the big boys, the Chargers, the Cardinals; expansion franchises in Seattle and Tampa. I read magazines and cut out headlines and glued them into geeky little scrapbooks. But I dressed, slept and breathed Falcons as they finally finished the season at .500 in '77, but my passion was completely out of control by the time they scraped into the playoffs as a wild card in '78. They had three divisions and two wild cards then, we played the NFC East runner up Eagles in Atlanta and came from behind in the last two minutes to push on to Dallas the following week. (That entire game is on You Tube) And then, oh damn you Dallas! Why do you treat me this way? The Falcons fell to the eventual Super Bowl losers, and little solace came from the Cowboys' inability to rise to meet the Steelers yet again in XIII. Those Cowboys fell from the top of my list to the very bottom in two years' time, and they didn't help their cause any when the knocked the Falcons out of the playoffs the next time they made it too, but that's another story -- a 'Too Tall Tale' if you will.
So, that's how this year is better than those first few flirtations with fabulousness so many years ago. At least the Packers were kind enough to beat the Steelers (in the house of the Cowboys) after tromping all over my poor, poor heart. And we're still a young team, just missing a couple pieces, and various other cliche's notwithstanding, we are on a roll. There is a Super Bowl out there for us in the next three years at the most. And when that glorious day comes, we will erase our lingering Atlanta sports demons, those that still hung under the glorious eaves of A-FC Stadium even after Glavine took Game 6 against the Indians, those spectres of Bartkowski and Bubba Bean and even stupid old Jeff George and the Vick mess, can all just float away. It's been 45 years. It just has to happen soon.
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