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Back on the final day of the 1969 season, at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, the Pittsburgh Steelers lost their 13th straight game for Rookie Coach Chuck Noll, who predicted a few of them "would soon be getting on with their life's work." Immediately Ray Mansfield, 44, a center and therefore a realist, started selling life insurance on the side. "We never have that one extreme moment of football glory," he says, "so offensive linemen are less afraid of living on." They receive on-the-job training in anonymity. A gathering of the heftiest Steelers watched the Super Bowl together that year, and at one point Mansfield gave voice to their unreasonable dream of someday playing in one. As it happened, they would play in four, starting back in Tulane Stadium at Super Bowl IX. "The few of us who spent half our Steeler careers with a hopeless bottom team gazed around that field at each other and at the younger players. They had no idea." The starving team from the starving town at the great banquet. "They had absolutely no idea."
X Pittsburgh Steelers 21 Dallas Cowboys 17The oil business has been brutal this year. Sometimes the old Cowboy Cliff Harris, 37, misses "a defined field where flags are thrown." Then he smiles and remembers the singular instant of Super Bowl X, when, for mocking Roy Gerela's missed field goal, he was body-slammed by Linebacker Jack Lambert. "In Dallas, logical thoughts were ingrained," Harris says, "emotional reactions discouraged. The funny thing is, you know how to play the best when you can no longer play at all. Even watching games now, the emotions of football flow through me, but I'm still in my mind a thinking football player. People around me boo and cheer and really don't understand." When no penalty befell Lambert, the Steelers soared, the Cowboys slumped. It struck Harris as a betrayal of ideals, and yet he was consolable later. "You have something to look forward to only if you do lose. After one that we won, I looked over at Charlie Waters and whispered, 'But whom do we play next?' When you win the Super Bowl--I hesitate to say it--you're depressed."
XI Oakland Raiders 32 Minnesota Vikings 14"I didn't like to lose," says Lawyer Alan Page, 40, a special assistant to the Minnesota attorney general, "but no one has ever explained to me how one loss blights a season." Sometimes, the worst thing to be in America is second best in the world. "It doesn't make much sense, does it?" He started four Super Bowls at defensive tackle and, ending with XI, lost every one. "Almost none of the specifics have stayed with me. In retrospect, the result really isn't all that important. The excitement is in the striving, not the attaining, going out and trying to perform, hopefully enjoying ourselves along the way." Page gives little thought to football now. "The things I learned there aren't very transferable. I suppose they shaped me, but I have never consciously drawn on them." Even the Super Bowl cannot call him back. "It doesn't particularly interest me. To some degree, it's inescapable for everyone, but I won't go out of my way to watch it. For a football player, I guess I'm not much of a football fan. To tell you the truth, Inever quite understood the whole magic vision people see around sports."