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Being a former Colt, one who left Baltimore on mean terms, Jet Cornerback Johnny Sample pressed a personal grudge and won a private Super Bowl, but he lost something too. Sample recalls, "At one point I jumped on [Colts Running Back] Tom Matte out of bounds. He didn't do much after that." Another time, "momentum carried me into the Colts' bench and I got slugged with six or seven helmets." Other raps were to come. Not surprisingly, football had nothing for him after his playing career ended within a year. "I'd hoped to coach," says Sample, 48, "but the only letter I could bring myself to write wasn't answered." In 1972 a federal court convicted him of check fraud, and he served 366 days in prison. At Allen-wood, Pa., "not a jail, a summer camp," Sample realized how much he "needed to be connected somehow" with sports. "I never played tennis before I retired, but I played there every day." Now Sample is a tennis linesman at tournaments like the U.S. Open and last week's Masters in New York. As he puts it, "I'm back in the game," this time on the side of the rules.
IV Kansas City Chiefs 23 Minnesota Vikings 7"Look at Kassulke running around," Kansas City Chiefs Coach Hank Stram gloated in a famous film of the runaway. "It looks like a Chinese fire drill. "About 3½ years later, a motorcycle accident paralyzed Karl Kassulke's legs. Recalling only that the Chiefs had an intricate offense, he says, "Certain memories have been lost, but I've got my normal thinking back," and he has been "fending very well in a wheelchair." Able to drive a special car, Kassulke, 44, works for Broken Wing, a Christian outreach to the handicapped. He teaches the various transferring techniques, such as from wheelchair to bed. "And did you know I married my nurse?" As a matter of fact, they have a son who is six. "When you marry your nurse," he says, "life is complete." In and out of a coma for weeks after the crash, Kassulke guesses he borrowed on something learned in football that he is trading on still. "I knew how to take things in stride, how to size up the competition, how to fight back, I guess. You don't just throw in the towel if you lose the Super Bowl."
V Baltimore Colts 16 Dallas Cowboys 13With five seconds to go in the game, and only two years left in his football career, a 23-year-old boy kicked a 32-yd. field goal that won a Super Bowl. "What do you do after you've won the Super Bowl?" Jim O'Brien asked himself, and there was no answer. "I was single," he says, "and I was immature. I did some dumb things." He got into a barroom fight, and a bottle in the face cost him some of the vision in one eye. "That's my badge a stupidity." It took a few years, but with the help of a wife, O'Brien eventually found a life in construction management (making inventions on the side, none as yet patented). "I'm 38 now, and I've finally figured it out. The thing about Americans is, we have no heroes of substance, only athletes and movie stars. The inventors, the cancer-cure finders, are in the real game. It could have been better for me if I had never made that kick. I'd have been more serious. But practicing every day as a kid, I always dreamed of the last-second field goal to win the biggest game in the world, and there it was."