“NOBODY CAN EVER TELL YOU THAT YOU COULDN’T DO IT”

Phil McConkey grew up in Buffalo, and when he wasn’t playing sports, one of his favorite pastimes was standing in any of the many snowstorms that blanketed his neighborhood, tilting his head back, picking out a single flake as it fluttered and slowly descended toward the ground, and trying to catch it on his tongue.

That was one of the many thoughts that ran through his head early in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XXI. It was rekindled as a pass from Phil Simms to Mark Bavaro in the end zone clanked off the tight end and fluttered in the air.

“I just remember the ball coming down and it felt to me like one of those tumbling snowflakes when I was a little boy,” McConkey said. “The focus that I had at that point was so great and the emotions were so intense that I could almost read the emblem on the ball and see the grains in the leather on the football as it came tumbling down. It was almost ultraslow motion. I can even feel it today all the years later, that sensation of the slowness of it all. It’s something that I probably feel and reflect on more than anything else. The slowness of that.”

McConkey, who with 65 career receptions for the Giants may be the most beloved catch-for-catch player in franchise history, caught that snowflake ball for a Super Bowl touchdown, one that gave the Giants a 33–10 lead in their 39–20 win over the Broncos on January 25, 1987.

Bavaro said it should have been an easy catch for him to make. “I still to this day don’t know how I missed it so badly,” he said. “It didn’t even hit my hands, it hit my helmet.”

Two decades before David Tyree, this was the Giants’ miracle helmet catch.

McConkey chuckled at the comparison, one he said he never thought to make. But he does consider that play to be miraculous in one regard: that he was even on the field to make it.

Phil McConkey came to embody the Giants’ blue-collar mentality in 1986, and he made some of his biggest plays in Super Bowl XXI. (George Rose / Stringer, courtesy of Getty Images)

So as Bavaro lifted McConkey into the air to celebrate the touchdown that essentially clinched a championship, McConkey remembers looking around and the flood of thoughts that entered his mind. The snowflakes, of course. His showing up at the Giants’ doorstep in 1983 as a 160-pound 27-year-old who hadn’t played football in five years while serving in the Navy as a graduate of Annapolis. The first glimpse he had of himself in the bathroom mirror wearing an NFL jersey—number 93, hardly appropriate for a wide receiver—before his first preseason game. The 1984 preseason finale against the Steelers before which Bill Parcells had told him he’d made the team, sending McConkey into a stall in the bathroom to sob with joy.

“That was the culmination of many many years, many many dreams,” he said of the Super Bowl touchdown. “And that split second where it happened, even today, I’m 62 years old and however many decades ago that was, it almost seems like a fantasy to me. I sometimes have a difficult time putting it all into reality.”

The moment lasted just a few ticks of the clock but felt to McConkey like it went on for hours.

“It’s really hard to describe how it can be both,” he said. “It’s a blur, and yet it’s every emotion at that point in your life coming to the surface. It’s all of it. It is all of it. It’s being grateful to those who helped me get there, it’s being thankful to all of my teammates and coaches. It was thank you for letting me be here. You’re almost delirious.”

For the first time in the Super Bowl era, for the first time since their 1956 title, Giants fans were, too.

McConkey may have been the unlikely hero for the Giants, but there were others who were expected to make significant contributions to the game and also rose up. Some went beyond. One took it to the extreme.

Phil Simms had been peppered by reporters all week in Pasadena. He didn’t even mind. After a month of brutal football conditions in Giants Stadium, he was enjoying the Southern California elements. The press conferences were actually rather informal settings anyway. He’d sit down at a table and eat his breakfast while members of the media sat around him and asked their questions.

Friday was the final day of media obligations for the players.

“We’re ready to go out to practice, it’s no exaggeration the last question anybody will ask me, and Mike Lupica [of the Daily News] says, ‘Phil, do you realize that no matter how you play, if the Giants lose everybody will blame you?’ I remember going, ‘Hey, great thought there Mike, really appreciate it.’ We were laughing. What a way to end the week. I literally was getting up and he asked me that question.”

Simms didn’t give much of an answer at the time, but of course he knew it.

“I didn’t care,” he said. “You know that as a quarterback that if you go to the Super Bowl, if you lose they’re going to find a way to dissect some part of the game because they have to pin the blame on somebody and the quarterback was going to be the easiest to dissect. That’s just part of how it goes. To lose in the Super Bowl as a quarterback, even to this day, very few guys can overcome losing a Super Bowl as a quarterback and not be in that conversation we’re talking about.”

There’s only one way to avoid it. Simms found that way.

On the biggest stage of his life, the Giants quarterback completed 22 of 25 passes, setting Super Bowl records for completion percentage, consecutive completions (10), and passer rating (150.9). He threw three touchdowns without an interception and racked up 268 passing yards. He even ran the ball three times for 25 yards, including a 22-yard scamper that was the longest run of the game for either team.

It was as close to a perfect game in a championship setting that anyone had come since Don Larsen.

For most of the game, though, Simms was oblivious to it.

“I was warming up for the second half and just happened to look up and they had numbers on the board that said I was 12 of 15 and I went, ‘Oh, 12 of 15, okay,’” he said. “I don’t know what I thought, so I kept warming up. I didn’t realize that I didn’t miss a pass in the second half either, until somebody told me when the game was over. As you can imagine, there is a lot that goes on in your head and you’re not really thinking, ‘Hmm, what are my statistics?’”

Besides the touchdown to McConkey via Bavaro, Simms also hit Bavaro and Zeke Mowatt for touchdown passes. The Giants fell behind the Broncos twice in the game. Each time they regained the lead on a Simms touchdown pass.

“It went well,” he said of the game.

The postgame locker room was a carnival. Pete Rozelle, commissioner of the NFL, handed the Lombardi Trophy to Wellington Mara, who then handed it to Bill Parcells. Just moments earlier, Parcells had gathered his team around him and said: “For the rest of your life, men, nobody can ever tell you that you couldn’t do it. Because you did it.”

The buses back to the team hotel were almost a little lighter than when they arrived. At least two key figures nearly missed their rides.

Bill Belichick, the defensive coordinator, was so overwhelmed by his first Super Bowl win that he wanted to soak up every last moment of it. He didn’t know if he’d ever make it to another one.

Phil Simms was nearly perfect in Super Bowl XXI against the Broncos but said he wished he would have enjoyed the moment of victory more than he did. (Jerry Pinkus)

So he slipped out of the locker room and went back out onto the field at the Rose Bowl to look again at the scoreboard, the seats, the entire setting. Eventually he tried to make his way back to the team, but security guards did not recognize him and did not let him into the area where the buses were being loaded. It took a few minutes before someone with the Giants vouched for him.

A similar situation happened to Bavaro, who also made a postgame pilgrimage back to the turf.

“It was a beautiful day, probably one of the nicest days I’ve ever experienced weather-wise, that California air and the hills out there, it was gorgeous,” Bavaro said. “But I think I lingered a little too long because I went back into the tunnel to get on the bus and the bus was actually moving to take off. I had to bang on the door to open it to let me in. So I almost got stranded at the Rose Bowl.”

While Belichick and Bavaro tried to soak up every detail of the experience, at least one player was at the other end of the sentimentality spectrum. He was also the MVP of the game.

“I wish I could go back in time and feel it again and maybe enjoy it even more,” Simms said. “We won. Of course I was happy. But okay, we won the game. I just didn’t go, ‘My gosh, this is the most unbelievable thing in the world!’ I don’t know. I just remember that. I wish I would have maybe celebrated more or realized what we did. Only time makes me realize it. But at the moment it was like, ‘Ok, we won. That’s what we were supposed to do. That’s why we practiced hard and everything like that.’”

On a day when he was almost perfect, Simms’s one misfire seems to have been not savoring the sensation. Bavaro and Belichick, ironically, would coach and play in other Super Bowls. Simms was on the field in just the one.

He had been maligned for most of his career, booed as a Giants draft pick, and benched by Parcells. Now he was on top, the ruler of the NFL. The magnitude of the accomplishment and the path to it didn’t really hit him until after he left the locker room and saw his wife, Diana.

“Her joy was so unbelievable that I remember that like it was yesterday,” he said. “Sitting in the stands and watching the games, no matter what, having to listen to people say things about you and 90 percent of it is going to be bad. That’s tough on wives and family. For once, there was a good long period of time where she didn’t have to hear it. So that was pretty cool. She had the whole offseason and didn’t have to worry about it.

“Until the opening game the following year.”