Bill Curry, the guy with so many football connections that his career needs its own junction box, has a single simple rule about attending a Super Bowl.
“I only go if I’m invited to play,” he said.
“So, I haven’t been in a long time.”
He will be in Florida this weekend, but a coast away from Miami where Kansas City and San Francisco play for the championship of everything. He and his wife, Carolyn, will be seeking some warmth and a beach to stroll, and will watch a little football, too, after hopefully catching a nice sunset.
But here it is worth noting that the first time the Chiefs were in the Super Bowl, Curry was on site. Right there on the field, staring hard at Kansas City’s Buck Buchanan. That was back before it was even called the Super Bowl. Back way before you had to be a classical cultures major to translate the number behind the game.
As he spoke earlier this week from his 27th-floor apartment off Peachtree Street, Curry was adorned by a favorite ring. It marked the first-ever Super Bowl, when his Green Bay Packers beat upstart Kansas City of the American Football League 35-10. The Packers center, who played a quarter-and-a-half before injuring his ankle, Curry also picked up his winner’s share that day of $15,000, about one-eighth what it is today.
Everything was smaller and simpler then.
For instance, the game. It was almost an anticlimax to that season’s NFL Championship game, played in Dallas, the Packers overcoming the Cowboys 34-27.
“Running around in the L.A. Coliseum, which seats 105,000, and there were about 60,000 there. It was like a spring scrimmage,” Curry said of that first Super Bowl. “It was eerie, not the normal championship atmosphere with a packed house, lot of excitement and all that. It was strange.” There is a different strain of strange at work these days.
And then there’s the ring. Super Bowl rings now are practically jewel-encrusted manhole covers that only the kings of the weight room can lift above their waist. The one from No. 1 is of relatively modest, rounded design, inscribed with the bare details and topped with a half-carat diamond. (By contrast, New England’s 2018 ring was nearly 10 carats total).
As a player, Curry has three titles in the bank – the 1965 NFL championship and Super Bowl I with the Packers and a Super Bowl V win with the Baltimore Colts.
Around these parts, he is largely remembered for where he coached. That would be his alma mater Georgia Tech (1980-86), Alabama (1987-89) and Georgia State (in its infancy, 2008-12). Curry is part of the DNA of two college programs in his hometown of Atlanta. With Georgia State he has an almost parental connection. And with Tech, where he also played, the emotions run toward indebtedness. “I owe everything to that education over there,” he said.
And, by the way, Curry can’t imagine the Yellow Jackets not being stirred by the long, steady bugle calls of second-year coach Geoff Collins.
“When the will is exerted and the leadership is there, Tech will always rally. It’s just too important to everybody,” Curry said, sounding his own call.
Still, let’s concentrate on Curry the former player. After all, the man snapped the ball to Bart Starr and Johnny Unitas, stretching the canvas for two great artists. Good heavens, he played in the first Super Bowl, 53 long years ago. And now 77, when he is in a pensive mood, Curry doesn’t long for the days of blowing whistles and making fancy pregame speeches. It’s playing the game that he misses, and likely will as long as he draws breath.
“I don’t find myself dreaming about coaching,” he said. “I dream about playing. I’d love, love, to be able to tee it up one more time. I couldn’t play at my former weight (235 pounds). I’d be the water boy. But I’d love to be physically up to it.
“I always loved the competition, putting up my best against your best and let’s see who can win.”
Any excuse to catch up with Curry will do, and the coming of another Super Bowl is better than most. For the fact is, those who trace back to the first of these championships are a vanishing lot. Curry points this out himself by referring to the cover of the book he came out with in 2008, “Ten Men You Meet in the Huddle: Lessons from a Football Life.” There he is in black-and-white, one of 11 members of those mid-’60s Packers on the field preparing to huddle up. Eight of those players have since died, he said.
When he talks about his now, Curry concentrates on the themes of introspection and gratitude. He has this vibrant life, portioned among his Ph.D./author wife, her Women Alone Foundation, two children and seven grandchildren. He’ll still make the occasional speaking appearance, reminding his listeners of his days as an unblinking conscience of football while coaching and working games for ESPN.
Curry has largely held onto his health and his faculties, both quite elusive for septuagenarians who played as long as he.
“Well, he has had five shoulder replacements, which must be some kind of record,” Carolyn said.
Without resentment, he’ll tell these colorful stories about a player’s life a half-century ago that don’t hold up in light of today’s neurological science. That’s just the way it was.
Like the conversation he had with tough-as-jerky Packers coach Vince Lombardi - for whom the Super Bowl trophy is named - after Curry sustained a concussion that left him profoundly disoriented.
It went something like this:
Lombardi: Do you know where you are?
Curry: No.
Lombardi: Do you know what day it is?
Curry: No.
Lombardi: Do you know who won the game?
Curry: We did.
Lombardi: You’re fine.
“That was our concussion protocol then,” Curry said.
And two days later, Lombardi ordered Curry into a fully-padded practice battle with fearsome linebacker Ray Nitschke just to see if his center had any reservations about sticking his head back into the fray.
Curry remembers asking the Baltimore Colts’ old athletic trainer Ed Block while on the training table what kind of shape he should expect to be in at age 60.
“If I tell you, are you going to quit playing football?” Block said.
“No,” Curry told him.
“Then don’t ask,” was the trainer’s advice.
The descents into dementia and eventual deaths of old friends such as Falcons linebacker Tommy Nobis and Miami Dolphins linebacker Nick Buoniconti have been jarring to Curry. By his reckoning, he lost 11 teammates – from high school through the pros – just last year. This is especially difficult for a man who regards a teammate as family. As Curry looks around at his own good life, it even spurs something in him resembling survivor’s guilt.
But there also is this:
“When I’m feeling bad (he has been fighting a persistent cold) and start to think ‘woe is me,’ I realize, ‘Wait a minute, I’m the luckiest guy in the world,’” he said. “Out of all the guys who played as long as I did— 10 years (in just the NFL) – and what we did to our bodies, honestly of the ones I know about, I am the luckiest one.
“It is luck. It wasn’t conditioning. Genes might have had something to do with it. People say I’m blessed. But why would God bless me and not Nick Buoniconti? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s the luck of the draw. You get some extra time, and we cherish it.
“The good news is we get to enjoy every day, and we should. It would be wonderful if you could live your whole life that way. You really should.”
So, yes, by all means find a nice warm place to watch the big game, laugh at the commercials and indulge every memory of having played it a lifetime ago.
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