Peter King reflects on a lifetime of football storytelling

I had this thought a couple of weeks ago, during Super Bowl week in Las Vegas: I’d really like to watch the Super Bowl on TV. You always want what you don’t have, right? I’ve been to 40 Super Bowls in a row, and every year when people talk about the commercials or the mistakes made by the TV crew or the hubbub surrounding the game, mostly I have no idea what they’re talking about, because from age 27 to age 66 (now), I’ve been in the stadium for the games, and worked the locker rooms and coaches’ offices afterward.

Who’s complaining? Not me. I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth. To be a long-termer in an increasingly short-term business, to write this column for 27 years and to be a sportswriter for 44, well, that’s something I’ll always be grateful for. Truly, I’ve loved it all.

I’m retiring*. I use an asterisk because I truly don’t know what the future holds for me. I probably will work at something, but as I write this I have no idea what it will be. Maybe it will be something in the media world, but just not Football Morning in America (nee Monday Morning Quarterback).

***

I’ve got a few thousand words of some of my great memories of covering the game for four decades. I thought that would be the best way to go out.

My favorite moment

Jan. 30, 1995

12:40 a.m.

Steve Young’s suite, Miami Airport Marriott

Post-Super Bowl XXIX

The man who’d thrown six touchdowns to beat the Chargers earlier in the evening now had Miami-Dade Fire Rescue EMTs on either side of his king bed. Steve Young had saline IVs flowing into both arms after being dehydrated on a muggy Miami night and then throwing up (hastily consumed red Gatorade, mostly) in the limo on the way back to the hotel. This was one of the strangest post-game celebrations in Super Bowl history. Young had maybe 40 family members and friends in the room and spilling out into the hotel hallway, and even the wooziness wasn’t affecting his glee.

“Is this great or what?” Young said, soundly weakly enthusiastic. “I mean, I haven’t thrown six touchdowns passes in a game in my life. Then I throw six in the Super Bowl!”

Just then, someone in the crowd yelled, “Joe Who?!”

“No!” Young said firmly. “Don’t do that!”

Joe Montana. For Young’s first six years in San Francisco, he and Montana had had an uneasy truce. What do you expect Montana, the best quarterback in the game, to feel toward the man Bill Walsh traded for to replace him? It was finally Young’s team for good in 1992, then Montana was exiled to Kansas City in 1993.

Last week, Young told me something interesting about that time in his life, and that night. Montana missed the 1991 season because of an elbow injury, and even though the job was Young’s, it wasn’t a happy time for Young because of the tension with Montana and tension on a team so loyal to Montana. “I had myself in this sort of victimization knot,” he said. “One day I was flying back from spending a day in Utah and I met Stephen Covey—he’s the guy who wrote ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.’ So I confided with him how tough it was for me.” There was the pressure of expectations set by Eddie DeBartolo, Bill Walsh, and having Montana there. Young explained everything, and Covey thought for a while, and Covey said words to this effect: I gotta be honest with you. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such an opportunity for one person to be great as the situation you’re in right now. Do you want to find out how good you can be?

“Yes!” Young told him.

“Well, you’re in the perfect place to do that,” Covey told him. “You’re LUCKY to have this opportunity.”

Young told me last week: “My life changed right there. All the tension, the rigor, just fell away. That’s why that night of the Super Bowl—it was my Uncle Val who said that about Joe—all those feelings were long gone. I was really placid about it. I was like, What? Stop it. That’s over! And it really was.”

The gathering went on well into the wee hours. The other thing I remember about it? Young, even in his weakened state, was trying to be a good host. At one point, maybe around 1:30, someone in the group got up to leave. Young said, “Don’t go. Stay! I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.” After his weirdly successful football life, Young didn’t want this night to ever end.

My favorite interviews

These stand out:

John Madden, Kearney, Neb., September 1990

Grandpa’s Steakhouse. Dinnertime, middle America. Halfway point of my 55-hour, 3,016-mile cross-country bus ride with John Madden. The place was bustling. Madden brought this up two or three times on the trip—how you’d never see places like Grandpa’s, or the acres of blazing-red wildflowers we’d seen that afternoon by I-80, in an airplane. And on this night, for the first of three times on the trip, he marveled about the United States, looking around Grandpa’s.

“Look at this place,” he said. “All these people from Kearney, laughing, enjoying dinner. They love it here. You and I might think, ‘I wouldn’t want to live in Kearney, Nebraska,’ but you know what? Maybe they don’t want to live on the coasts. You get out here in the country, riding along, stopping in places like Kearney, Nebraska, and places different from where you live, and you realize: That’s why this country works.”

Brett Favre, New Orleans, January 1997

Favre had agreed to give me 10 minutes if the Packers won Super Bowl XXXI, but it was a zoo post-game and I missed him after Green Bay 35, New England 21. So I went to the team party at the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans, espied Favre with a ton of people around him, waved my arms, got his attention, and pointed to a stairwell near him, and we met in there for 20 minutes or so. We sat on a luggage cart. He was only eight months removed from Vicodin rehab, and he played this game feeling ill. “Trouble never seems to be far away,” he said, his words mini-echoing in the concrete stairwell, but coming back from addiction to holding the Lombardi would be the greatest moment of his football life.

“Thirty years from now,” Favre said to me, “the kids will be getting ready for Super Bowl LXI, and NFL Films will drag out Steve Sabol—he’ll be around 102 then—and he’ll talk about how Brett Favre fought through such adversity to win this game.”

The late Sabol won’t do that. But we’re only three years from Supe 61, and someone might in 2027.

George Martin, Bruceton, Tenn., November 2007

Martin played 14 years for the Giants in the seventies and eighties. Parcells guy. Grew to love New York, and he was deeply affected by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In 2007, disgusted by the lax federal support of sick 9/11 first-responders, Martin decided to walk from the George Washington Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge, 3,000 miles, to raise money for the cause. I met him in western Tennessee, outside of Memphis, to walk 18 miles with him, including mile 1,000. Martin was 54, only a third of the way across the country, and, credit to him, had minimal pain and zero regrets. I watched him address an impromptu school assembly at the K-through-12 school in Bruceton. He asked the kids to stand and give three ovations: for the police on hand, for the fire/EMS folks, and for the teachers. Then he took all the first-responders in town out to lunch at a Mexican place. What a day. I wrote about it in my column Monday, and readers kicked in $300,000 to Martin’s cause. That was a proud moment.

Colin Kaepernick, Turlock, Calif., May 2013

Three months after San Francisco’s Super Bowl loss to Baltimore, I hung with Kaepernick before and after he made an appearance at his alma mater’s high school graduation. Three things I remember well: One, his conversations with Turlock cops curious about his myriad tattoos. Two, after the appearance, he was hungry, and he was going to stop at his parents’ home for a bite before driving back to the Bay Area. They stopped to pick up three pizzas at Little Caesar’s, and Kaepernick went in to pick up the pies. The kid behind the counter was jaw-dropping shocked to see Colin Kaepernick in his store. As Kaepernick turned to leave with three boxes, the kid said, “Beast!” Three, on the two-hour drive through the pitch-black night to the Bay Area, talking about his hopes and dreams, Kaepernick said: “I want to be someone who can’t really be compared to anybody.” That has happened, just not in the way he ever thought.

Gene Steratore, Washington, Pa., November 2013

Week in the life of an officiating crew. One of my favorite stories in 40 years, the first time I’d seen the real lives of officials, all week and during a game, as they prepped for Baltimore-Chicago at Soldier Field. On Tuesday morning, I was in the home of referee Gene Steratore. He had to leave at 11:30 to drive to his other job—as a college basketball official, to do a Michigan basketball game in Ann Arbor—but first, he was going to get his grades from his previous game, Houston at Arizona. At 10:58, the email from the NFL, with instruction to get his grades, showed up. Steratore’s heart sank. Two mistakes, called downgrades, on hits on the quarterback the league felt he should have called. That doubled his errors for the year, ruining his quest for the Holy Grail of officiating.

Steratore got up and sighed. “There goes the Super Bowl,” he said.

Tom Brady, somewhere in Montana, February 2017

This is what I could not believe when I met Brady, 39, seven days after he led the greatest Super Bowl comeback ever to beat Atlanta, played a career-high 99 plays, got sacked five times and knocked down nine times, and had the wind knocked out of him on a brutal shot by Grady Jarrett: He’d been skiing all morning on one of the most beautiful mountains in the world (he asked that I not name where we were, for privacy’s sake), and he said, “I have zero pain. I feel 100 percent.” Man, this Brady regimen. After talking for 80 minutes or so, we went outside to take a photo on a brilliant Montana winter day.

“Feel my arm,” Brady said.

He held his arm out, and I felt it. Not a rock. Pliable. (One of his favorite words.) “Strength is important to do your job,” he said, “but how much strength do you need? You need muscle pliability—long, soft muscles in order to be durable. I know how to be durable. I want to put myself in position to be able to withstand the car crash before I get in the car crash.”

Brady played in Super Bowls at age 40, 41 and 43. He won two. He retired at 45. Is there any doubt that the physical regimen he perfected and advocated was crucial in all that?

*Patrick Mahomes, on the phone from Texas, February 2024

* This is not one of the best interviews I’ve done, or most memorable. But it is the last I did of an active player for this column. It’s not like Mahomes will be the answer to a trivia question in the Peter King Career Trivia Game—but on this day, he was perfectly Mahomes.

I was trying to reach him in the wake of his third Super Bowl win, but a few things—my health, the shooting at the parade, Mahomes trying to live life, his daughter’s birthday—got in the way, and we did not connect till last Monday. I thought there was something that we talked about that explains Mahomes the person, the player and the competitor. The team-think, the singleness of purpose, the keeping the main thing the only thing, the single-mindedness …

Kansas City ball, fourth-and-one at the KC 34-, 6:05 left in OT, down three, timeout. Get stopped and the game’s over; you lose. Make the first down, and the game goes on.

“What happened during the timeout? What happened in the huddle?” I asked.

“I wish I could take all the credit, but it was kinda crazy,” Mahomes said. “We were going through our plays. We were trying to decide if we wanted to run or pass. We had a couple run plays dialed up. We were trying to find that perfect play. I was thinking of passes because I wanted to pass it obviously and have the ball in my hand. So MVS [Marquez Valdes-Scantling] came into the huddle on the side, and was like, ‘Hey let’s go with Slide T’s,’ which is wild because it’s not even a play designed for him. It’s really designed for Travis [Kelce] and Rashee [Rice]. When MVS said it, it clicked to me. I was like, ‘That’s it. That’s perfect.’”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“What it means is kind of a bootleg play where I fake a run. I get on the perimeter and there’s a throw to Trav as he’s sliding across … and Rashee going across the middle trying to cause some disturbance, some interference-type stuff. I liked it because it gave me the option to throw to Travis, it gave me the option to throw it to Rashee, and it gave me the option to run. I told coach [Andy Reid], I was like let’s call this … I told coach, ‘If it’s not there I’m gonna run for it.’ He trusts us to go out there and call it … Once I kinda got outside and I saw room to run, I just went and got it.” Gain of eight. Game, saved.

“Do you recall thinking, ‘If we don’t make a yard, we lose the Super Bowl?’”

“I don’t,” Mahomes said. “I don’t think I thought about that at all. All I could think about was I told Trav if [defensive end Nick] Bosa comes up field I’m gonna drop it off to him and just hope. He’s gotta get the yard. The last thing I think I told Rashee was: ‘If it’s not there, you gotta find a way to get open.’ Then I was able to run for it. Got the first down, and kinda kept the chains rollin’.”

Three morals of the story:

1. Great players don’t clutter their minds with things like, If this doesn’t work, we lose! That cannot help Mahomes make a play.

2. Great players listen to good ideas. Valdes-Scantling had one. Mahomes (and Reid, presumably) liked it. It worked.

3. Great players like having the ball in their hands on the biggest plays of the season. Didn’t we all think there was a good chance Mahomes would end up figuring a way to make the first down by himself?

What happened on this one play, and Mahomes’ cogent explanation of it, says so much about why he’s won three Super Bowls in his first six seasons starting in the NFL.

Game of my career

Jan. 3, 1993

Orchard Park, N.Y.

Buffalo 41, Houston 38

The Bills, down 35-3 in third quarter, rallied for the biggest comeback win in NFL history behind a journeyman backup, Frank Reich. It was his seventh pro start.

The things you remember … It’s 28-3 at halftime, and two Houston media guys use the landline next to me in the press box (no cells in those days, of course) to make non-refundable plane reservations for the playoff game in Pittsburgh the next weekend. But my biggest memory from that day? I was alone with Reich, 31, in the Bills’ locker room 90 minutes after the game, and he asked the equipment guy to bring his wife Linda in. She came through the door and started running at her husband. He lifted her in his arms and started twirling as they hugged. It was an FTD commercial, for crying out loud. Nosy me, I got close.

“I love you!” Linda said.

“Praise the Lord,” Frank said.

“We talk about that moment sometimes,” Frank Reich told me the other day, “and you’re always in the story. You were right there.”

“What do you remember about that game?” I asked.

“Well, you remember I was part of the biggest college comeback when I was at Maryland, right?” he said. Yes: Maryland, down 31-0 at the Orange Bowl to Miami in 1984, rallied behind Reich to win 42-40.

“So, at halftime, walking out of the tunnel for the second half against Houston, I feel this hand on my shoulder. It’s [coach] Marv Levy. He says, and I swear, ‘Frank, you led the greatest comeback in college history, and now you’re going to lead the greatest comeback in NFL history today.’”

“Wow,” I said. “Never knew that. What’d you think?”

“I thought Marv was crazy.”

To start the great comeback, Reich actually dug a deeper hole; he threw a pick-six to start the second half. Yikes. Now 35-3. This went through Reich’s head: Everybody’s thinking we can’t win without Jim Kelly, and I’m giving them every reason to think that. Then Reich went out and threw four TD passes in the second half and the Bills won in overtime. Reich played/sat for 13 NFL seasons, starting 42 games. He had one four-TD game. This was it. Pretty crazy to think that those four touchdowns came in a playoff game, in 23 minutes.

Reich was driving in his car in North Carolina when I reached him the other day. The game happened 31 years ago. But his recall was so good, you’d have thought it happened 31 minutes ago.

“Sometimes,” Reich said, “you have a moment in your life and you really don’t know if it’s going to be a moment that lasts. But this moment, I knew it was gonna be a moment, forever.”

Read more in Peter King’s full Football Morning in America column.