The Nobodies Meet the Misfits

By B. J. Phillips

Workaholic Eagles vs. ragtag Raiders in the Super Bowl

Dick Vermeil, 44, is a very determined man. When the coach of the Philadelphia Eagles was a player at California's Napa College in the 1950s, he cracked his ankle and hobbled on crutches for a week before a big game. When the day came, he could not stand being away from the action, so he suited up just to sit on the sidelines. Within minutes, his coach scanned the bench, looking for a man to replace the quarterback. Vermeil went in and played the entire game on a broken ankle.

Al Davis, 51, is a very determined man. The managing general partner of the Oakland Raiders was one of the architects of the American Football League. As A.F.L. commissioner in 1966, he put together the merger that stopped a disastrous bidding war with the N.F.L. and led to the creation of the Super Bowl.

On Sunday, Vermeil and Davis will square off for Super Bowl XV in New Orleans. Each brings with him a team that mirrors his own personality. Vermeil's Eagles, this year's N.F.C. champions, are the inheritors of his pay-any-price work ethic, a squad with no well-known stars that has been forged into an efficient football machine. The Oakland Raiders, the A.F.C. champions, are a reflection of Davis and the old A.F.L., a collection of castoffs and young players who manage, with guile and grinding tenacity, to survive in spite of the odds. In a Super Bowl shadowed by ticket-scalping scandals and lawsuits over the Raiders' proposed move to Los Angeles, the matchup between Davis and Vermeil is more than a football game. It is a clash of styles.

In 1960, when the Eagles last played for an N.F.L. championship, there was no Super Bowl, the A.F.L. was in its first season, and the indestructible Chuck Bednarik was on the field for the full 60 minutes, playing center on offense and linebacker on defense. The Eagles won their game against Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers. But the Philadelphia franchise quickly fell from glory. After a decade and a half near the cellar, Owner Leonard Tose brought in a hard-eyed young coach from U.C.L.A. to revive the team.

At his first training camp, Vermeil served notice that the Eagles were going back to bedrock, Bednarik style. Practices were suddenly twice as long as usual. Rules were rigid. Shell-shocked rookies and veterans alike crumpled under Vermeil's salt-mine regime. In the first ten days, a dozen players walked out of camp. Vermeil remained unfazed: "They don't take the Marines and train them on the beach with ice cream in their hands and then tell them to fight. We're preparing these guys for eleven individual wars. That's what it amounts to."

Vermeil scoured the draft's late rounds and sifted free-agent and waiver lists for overlooked talent. With a roster of names only their mothers would recognize, Vermeil forged a team as iron-willed as himself. His brother Al Vermeil recalls: "When Dick was in college, he would get up for an 8 o'clock class, be in school until 4 p.m., work from 4 p.m. until midnight in Dad's auto mechanic shop, study from midnight to 3 a.m., then go to bed and get up at 7 a.m. and start over again. He developed the ability to push on." He, in turn, taught the Eagles to push on. Says Tight End Keith Krepfle: "He tore us down mentally and physically and then built us up together. We all had the common experience of hard work. And Dick worked harder than anybody. The details, the little things he went over. All I can say is, we've paid our dues."

Slowly, patiently, Vermeil put his team together. Quarterback Ron Jaworski was acquired from the Rams for his strong arm. Running Back Wilbert Montgomery, passed over until the sixth round because of calcium deposits in a thigh, ha emerged as one of the league's flashiest runners. As the team started its comeback, Wide Receiver Harold Carmichael set an N.F.L. record for receptions in 127 straight games, and Kicker Tony Franklin proved that barefoot boys can make it in the N.F.L. The Eagles defense is football's stingiest. In the N.F.C. championship game against the Dallas Cowboys, Philadelphia held usually lethal Running Back Tony Dorsett to just 41 yds., held Quarterback Danny White to 127 yds. passing, and won 20-7.

Vermeil has made sure his team will be ready for the Raiders. When the Eagles leave Philadelphia this week for New Orleans, Vermeil will set up a rerun of training camp. Super Bowl hoopla leaves him unimpressed: "I don't give a damn for parties, ceremonies, celebrations. To me, there's only one way to enjoy a football game, gentlemen, and that's to win it."

There are many ways to win football games, and no one has mastered as many as Oakland's Al Davis. During his 18-year tenure, the Raiders have amassed the best regular-season winning percentage in football, suffering a single losing year and missing the playoffs only three times. Depending on the talent available, the Raiders have won with the run, with the pass, with defense and with kicking--especially the punting of Ray Guy, the first kicker ever chosen in the first round of the draft. Oakland has picked up players washed up at other teams, like Quarterback Jim Plunkett, and players other teams had washed their hands of, like Linebacker Ted Hendricks, and they have thrived. Such rehabilitations have embarrassed more than one team. Says Cleveland Coach Sam Rutigliano: "I won't trade with him, and when we shake hands, I check to be sure I still have five fingers." Davis' retreads and rejects are fiercely loyal to the man who saved their careers. Says Defensive End John Matuszak: "Oakland was my last shot. Al Davis decided to help this kid out. I'll never let him down."

The Raiders were expected to finish last in the A.F.C. West this season, and after losing three of their first five games, seemed out of the hunt. Then Plunkett, the former Heisman Trophy winner from Stanford who had watched his injury-studded professional career unravel on other teams, stepped in to replace injured Dan Pastorini. The Raiders began to roll. In an amazing late-season rush, they won twelve of 14 games, outscoring the high-powered San Diego Chargers in the A.F.C. championship game, 34-27.

But the drama on-field has been tame compared with Davis' off-field actions. He tried to shift his franchise last spring to the more commodious Los Angeles Coliseum, but N.F.L. owners refused to ap prove the move. Angry at being spurned after ten straight years of sell-out crowds, Oakland and then the N.F.L. sued in state court to make the Raiders stay and play by the bay. The Los Angeles Coliseum Commission and the Raiders then sued the N.F.L. in federal court for the right to take flight in the night.

Pretrial mudslinging has even reached the posh offices of Commissioner Pete Rozelle, whom Davis charged with scalping tickets to last year's Super Bowl. Rozelle vehemently denies this, though he admits selling a dozen tickets at face value to a travel-agency director who resold them as part of Super Bowl tour packages. The scalping charge is the latest round in a long-running feud between Davis and Rozelle, czar of the merged leagues. Rozelle has refused comment, but Davis is less restrained, saying: "I think he's corrupt."

Rozelle's admission has led to revelations that team owners, officials, coaches and players throughout the league have been selling their complimentary tickets to scalpers at huge profits. Each of the contending Super Bowl teams receives 22 1/2% of the available tickets for its fans (a total of about 16,000 seats in New Orleans' 71,330-seat Superdome), while the remaining 26 teams split some 40% of the tickets (the rest go to corporate sponsors and TV networks). As much as six months before the game, scalpers will visit training camps to line up a "ticket captain," who serves as a clearinghouse for men with suitcases full of money who come to claim the coveted extra ducats. This year, such profit-taking has driven the price of a $40 seat up to as much as $400.

Will Super Bowl XV be worth $CD, or even $XL? To avid Philadelphia and Oakland fans, probably so. But to most N.F.L. observers, there is a ticket worth even more: a front-row seat when Al Davis and Pete Rozelle meet in court next month.

--By B.J. Phillips. Reported by Gordon Forbes/Philadelphia and Paul Witterman/Oakland

With reporting by Gordon Forbes/Philadelphia, Paul Witteman/Oakland

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