A Matter Of Life And Sudden Death

The 1982 playoff between the Chargers and Dolphins wasn't just a football game and wasn't a war, exactly, but it did change a few people's lives

One player sat slumped on a metal bench under a cold shower, too exhausted to take off his blood-caked uniform. Four were sprawled on the floor, IVs dripping into their arms. One of them tried to answer a reporter's questions, but no words would come out of his parched, chalky mouth. And that was the winning locker room.

On Jan. 2, 1982, a sticky, soaked-shirt South Florida night, the Miami Dolphins and the San Diego Chargers played a magnificent, horrible, gripping, preposterous NFL playoff game. For four hours and five minutes, 90 men took themselves to the limit of human endurance. They cramped. They staggered. They wilted.

Then they played on, until it was no longer a game but a test of will. "People remember all kinds of details from that game," says San Diego tight end Kellen Winslow, "but they can't remember who won, because it wasn't about who won or who lost." It was about effort and failure and heroics. Each team's quarterback threw for more than 400 yards. Combined the two teams lost four fumbles and missed three easy field goals. They also scored 79 points and gained 1,036 yards. Miami coach Don Shula called it "a great game, maybe the greatest ever." San Diego coach Don Coryell said, "There has never been a game like this." Years later Miami fans voted it the greatest game in franchise history. And their team lost.

For his first 24 years Rolf Benirschke may not have had the perfect life, but it was at least in the class photo.

Handsome. Gorgeous smile. Son of an internationally acclaimed pathologist. Honor student. Stud of the UC Davis soccer team. Star kicker on the school's football team. Beloved San Diego Chargers kicker—by 1979, he was on course to set the career NFL record for field goal accuracy. Wheel of Fortune host. Spokesman for the San Diego Zoo, best zoo in the country. It was all blue skies and tables by the window. Looking back, maybe he should have seen trouble coming.

It all started with bananas.

Squalls had just blown through Miami, and the weather report called for nasty heat with humidity to match by game time, so Coryell ordered his players to eat bananas to ward off cramps. Lots and lots of bananas.

Problem was, it was New Year's Day in Miami Beach, and except for those being worn by the Carmen Miranda impersonators, bananas were a little hard to come by. Chargers' business manager Pat Curran had to go from hotel to hotel rounding them up at one dollar apiece. Not everybody got enough. "I think I had a couple beers instead," says quarterback Dan Fouts.

The Dolphins were three-point favorites, what with their Killer B's defense and their home field advantage—the dingy, rickety Orange Bowl, where Fouts remembers fans "blowing their nose on you as you walked out of the tunnel." Fouts was the brilliant, belligerent boss of the turbo-charged Chargers offense that knocked pro football on its ear. But the team had started that '81 season 6-5, and was routinely dismissed as a bunch of underachievers. Even Winslow, who led the league in catches for the second straight year, was hearing catcalls. "They call me the sissy, the San Diego chicken," he said the week before the game. "I'm the tight end who won't block. They say I need a heart transplant...that our whole team has no heart. But I know what I can do."

All of which set the game up as a barn burner: the unstoppable San Diego O versus the immovable Miami D, the two highest-ranked kickers in the AFC—Miami's Uwe von Schamann and San Diego's Benirschke.

On San Diego's opening drive Benirschke hit a 32-yard field goal, which figured. The guy hadn't missed a road kick on grass all year. Then San Diego wideout Wes Chandler returned a short punt for a touchdown to make it 10-0. Benirschke wedged the ensuing kick-off high into the wind, and when it hit the ground, it bounced backward into Chargers hands. That set up a one-yard touchdown run by bespectacled halfback Chuck Muncie. Three plays later the Dolphins' wunderkind 23-year-old quarterback, David Woodley, fired a beauty straight into the arms of Chargers free safety Glen Edwards, who ran the interception back far enough to set up another easy score—24-zip. And how's your Sunday going?

"I wanted to dig a hole and crawl in it," says Miami tight end Joe Rose.

Across the sideline the Chargers' veteran receiver, Charlie Joiner, had his head in his hands. "What's wrong?" Winslow asked.

"Man, you just don't do this to a Don Shula team," Joiner moaned. "He's gonna pull Woodley, put in [backup veteran Don] Strock, start throwing the ball, and we're gonna be here all damn day."

Joiner was wrong. Strock kept them there all night.

The year he nearly died, Benirschke was perfect. He opened the 1979 season with four-for-four field goals in four games, then spent the rest of the season in area hospitals. He had what the doctors originally thought was a demon intestinal virus that they eventually identified as ulcerative colitis. Basically it was eating up his intestines, microscopic bite by bite.

Two surgeries, 78 units of blood and 60 lost pounds later, Benirschke wasn't dead, but he was a reasonable facsimile. "After the second surgery," he recalls, "I knew that if I had another, I wouldn't make it."

Three days later the doctors told him he needed a third operation.

Everything changed the instant Don Strock and his mod-squad haircut and double-hinged arm strode on the field three minutes into the second quarter. "You could just sense the difference," says Chargers linebacker Linden King. "Strock had a real presence out there." Calling his own plays, with nothing to lose, Strock drove the Dolphins to a quick field goal, then a touchdown.

The Chargers' O, meanwhile, was suddenly getting battered. The Killer B's strategy was to turn Winslow into a complicated collection of lumps, so on every pass play the defensive end would take a lick at him, linebacker A.J. Duhe would say a quick hello with his forearm, and then one of the defensive backs would take a shot at him. Early in the second quarter Duhe opened up a cut in Winslow's lip that needed three stitches.

Winslow had been a one-man outpatient clinic coming into the game: bruised left shoulder, strained rotator cuff in his right, sore neck from trying to compensate for both. It was so bad that Sid Brooks, the Chargers' equipment guy, had to help him put on his shoulder pads before the game. Brooks would get good at it—Winslow went through three pairs that night.

Ahead 24-10 with just 36 seconds left in the half, Benirschke attempted a 55-yarder that was plenty long, but right. His first miss since November. With good field position off the miss, Strock came back sizzling. In three plays he took Miami to its 40-yard line with six seconds left in the half—too far out for a field goal. Just for fun, Miami called timeout and tried to dream something up. "What about the hook-and-ladder?" said Shula. Interesting idea. Dumb idea, but interesting. The Dolphins hadn't tried that play all year, possibly because it hadn't worked once in practice all year.

So they tried it. Strock hit wideout Duriel Harris on a 15-yard curl on the right wing. Nothing fancy. In fact the pass was under-thrown, so Harris had to dive to catch it. Every Chargers defensive back on that side rushed to finish Harris off...except that when they got there, Harris was missing one thing: the ball. He'd lateraled to running back Tony Nathan while falling down. Nathan had come straight out of the backfield, cut right and tucked Harris's lateral under his arm without breaking stride. It was the alltime sucker play. "I never saw him," says San Diego corner Willie Buchanon.

Neither did Harris, but buried under the pile of duped Chargers, he could hear a roar. When he finally sat up, he saw Nathan in the end zone, lonely as an IRS auditor, holding the ball over his head. Touchdown. The lead was suddenly just seven.

The Chargers' sideline froze in shock. "It was a beautiful, beautiful play," remembers Coryell. "Perfectly executed."

Said Fouts, to no one in particular: "Aw, f—-! Here we go again." Then he went into the locker room and set new records for swearing, punctuated by a heaved helmet that nearly decapitated Chandler.

Not that anybody could hear Fouts ranting. The schoolyard flea-flicker had so inflamed the Orange Bowl crowd that Shula could not deliver his halftime speech in the Dolphins' locker room because of the din. "I've never heard anything like it," says Strock. "It was like we were still on the field. It was that loud. We were in the locker room, what—10, 15 minutes?—and it never stopped!"

It would get only louder.

Benirschke never had that third operation. While looking at a pre-op X-ray, doctors noticed that the abscess in his abdomen had disappeared. They couldn't figure it out. Benirschke's father couldn't figure it out. Benirschke, now a devout Christian, calls it a miracle.

Still, the stud college hero was down to 123 pounds and the approximate shape of a rake, and was going to have to learn to live with two tubes coming out of his abdomen for his ostomy pouch. Kick again? He was hoping just to walk again.

He asked the Chargers' conditioning coach, Phil Tyne, to help him get back some strength. Tyne started him on weights—a dumbbell bar with nothing on it. Benirschke couldn't even lift that.

Still he made his way back. By 1980 he not only was a spokesman for sufferers of ulcerative colitis (von Schamann eventually became both a sufferer and a spokesman) and the 120,000 Americans who have ostomy surgery each year, but was also back playing football.

He showed his "bags" to his teammates one day in the shower. It was a little awkward, explaining it all, until special teams captain Hank Bauer finally said, "Hey, Rolf, do you have shoes to match?"

When the second half started, the Orange Bowl fans were still roaring, and Strock was still firing, throwing another touchdown to Rose on the Dolphins' first possession. The game was now tied at 24 and starting to look like the ultimate no-heart loss for a no-heart team. Except to Winslow. "No," he said to himself on the sideline. "No. We are not going to be the team that blew a 24-0 lead in the playoffs."

A whole bunch of Chargers must've felt the same way because this is when the game really got good. "Never in my life," says Eric Sievers, the second San Diego tight end, "have I been in a game like that, when nobody took a single play off."

Back came the Chargers. Winslow took a 25-yard touchdown pass from Fouts to give them the lead again, 31-24. Returning to the bench, Winslow started to cramp—first in his thighs, then in his calves. "And I ate my bananas," Winslow says.

Back came the Dolphins. Strock hit reserve tight end Bruce Hardy for a 50-yard touchdown. Now the noise in the Orange Bowl sounded like a DC-11. "It made my ears pop," recalls Ric McDonald, the Chargers' overworked trainer that day. "It would be at this incredibly loud level and then it would go up about 10 decibels. Guys were coming up to me and screaming, 'My ears are popping!' You could stand two feet from a guy and not hear him."

Maybe that's why a Fouts pass was picked off by Lyle Blackwood, who lateraled to Gerald Small, who ran it to the San Diego 15 to set up another easy touchdown run by Nathan and a 38-31 Miami lead less than a minute into the fourth quarter.

That score seemed to kill the Chargers. They tried to put together a drive on their next possession but had to punt after seven plays, and Strock, starting on his own 20-yard line, led a brutal, clock-munching drive that put the Dolphins on the San Diego 21 with five minutes to play. A three-pointer by von Schamann, the AFC leader in field goal percentage, would ice it. "We thought they were dead," Rose told NFL Films. "It was like, C'mon, throw in the towel! It's hot, we're tired. Let us win the game."

On first down, Nathan ran right for a short gain. On second down and seven, Andra Franklin took a safe handoff and plunged up the middle, where he got tortillaed by Gary (Big Hands) Johnson, and the ball was ripped out of his grip by San Diego's 280-pound lineman Louie Kelcher. Safety Pete Shaw fell on it. San Diego lived.

San Diego, the city, however, had no idea. Right around then a storm there caused a huge power outage. It was as if half a million people were simultaneously stabbed in the knee. All over town, in the wind and rain, fans huddled in their cars listening to the game on the radio. One caller to a TV station threatened to shoot the president of San Diego Gas and Electric if the game didn't come back on. This was the playoffs.

Back came the Chargers. Fouts connected with Joiner for 14 yards, Chandler for 6, Joiner for 5 and then 15 more, Winslow for 7 and Chandler for 19. "It seemed so easy," says Fouts. "There was just no pass rush from Miami. They were gassed."

Winslow was really cramping now—his thigh, his calves and now his lower back. If you ever get your choice of cramps, do not pick the lower back. A cramp there means you can't stand and you can't bend over either. "Kind of like paralysis," Winslow remembers. Each time Winslow was helped to the bench by teammates, the San Diego trainers surrounded him like a NASCAR pit crew: one working on his calves, another stretching his shoulder, a third massaging his back, a fourth trying to pour fluids into his mouth through his face mask. Somehow, Winslow got up each time and got back into the game.

First-and-goal from the nine. Fouts dropped back, scrambled and lobbed one toward the corner of the end zone to Winslow, who jumped for it but couldn't get high enough. Fouts had cursed his overthrow the instant he released it, but then something strange happened. James Brooks, the Chargers' sensational rookie running back, had the ball and the grin and the tying touchdown. On his own initiative Brooks had run the back line of the end zone—behind Winslow—just in case.

"That was one of the alltime brilliant heads-up plays I've ever seen," Fouts says. "In all the hundreds of times we'd run that play, I'd never thrown to anybody back there."

When Benirschke added the pressurized extra point, the game was tied at 38. Fifty-eight seconds left. For the first time in more than two hours, the Orange Bowl crowd was silent.

Just when Benirschke figured he had his problems licked, his insides attacked him again. During the 1981 season, the small section of colon the doctors hadn't removed in the previous two surgeries began sloughing blood. More tests. More hospitals. More surgery. More impressions of a rake. And yet he built himself back up—again. He didn't miss a single game that year. "You discover within yourself a greater courage," he says, "a greater perseverance than you ever knew you had."

It would turn out to be a handy trait.

Fouts is still ticked off that Coryell had Benirschke squib the ensuing kickoff. The Dolphins took over at their 40, 52 seconds on the clock. Strock's first pass was nearly intercepted by Edwards. His second pass was intercepted, by Buchanon, who fumbled it right back. First-and-10, 34 seconds left, Strock hit Nathan for 17, then running back Tommy Vigorito picked up six yards, to the San Diego 26. Miami let the clock run down; Shula called timeout with four seconds to go, and von Schamann ran out to kick a 43-yard field goal that would bring this game to an unforgettable end. It was as good as over—von Schamann had already won three games this season with last-second kicks. Winslow, who was slumped on the bench trying to hold down some liquids, ran back onto the field to try to block the kick. He was on the "desperation" team. Never in his career had he blocked one, and now he could hardly stand, much less leap, but he went in anyway. Why not? It was the last play of the season. "Get me some penetration, guys," Winslow yelled to Kelcher and Johnson, "so I can have a chance at the block."

They did. The snap was a little high, but Strock's hold was good. Winslow summoned everything that was left in him, heaved his 6'6" body as high as it would go and blocked von Schamann's kick with the pinkie finger on his right hand. "To get as high as he did after all he'd been through?" Fouts says. "Amazing."

When Winslow hit the ground, he got history's first all-body cramp. He lay on the field, spasming from his calves to his neck. He was carried off again. He would return again.

Overtime.

Benirschke is a humble man who has spent half his life raising cash for critters and blood for people, but he seems to have "trouble" on his speed dial. He nearly lost his wife, Mary, in childbirth after she'd spent the last five months of her pregnancy in bed. He nearly lost his newborn daughter, Kari, that same day—the nurses woke him up in the hospital at 4 a.m. so he could say goodbye to her. Somehow she survived. She has cerebral palsy, but she's alive and she's happy.

He and Mary adopted a second daughter, Christina, in 1995 and were beside themselves with joy. Eight days later, the biological mother rang their doorbell and took Christina away.

He flew to Russia to bring home an orphan, only to be told he also had to take the boy's brother, who had a cleft lip, refused to eat, was malnourished and infected with scabies. Benirschke was given no health reports. He couldn't reach his wife. He ran out of time. He brought home two orphans.

"We never ask, 'Why us?' " Benirschke says. "We just try to build our patience and resolve as deep as they'll go."

He'd need more.

The idea of overtime on this thick, broiled night was about as appetizing to the players as a bowl of hot soup. Still, the marathon ran on. "You hear coaches say, 'Leave everything on the field,' " says Miami lineman Ed Newman, now a judge. "Well, that actually happened that day. Both teams. We really did give it all we had. Everything."

Even Benirschke was exhausted. Not physically, mentally. All game he'd been stretching, running, kicking—always averting his eyes from his teammates. He was the one apart, the one man on the team with the clean jersey, getting himself ready for the moment he knew was coming: when all the gazelles and gorillas would leave the field and ask him to finish what they could not.

San Diego won the flip, took the kickoff and cut through Miami. In five minutes they were at the Miami eight-yard line, second down. Coryell called for Benirschke to kick a 27-yarder. On the sideline, San Diego's Shaw started pulling the tape off his wrists. Rolf just doesn't miss from there, he thought. No lie. Benirschke hadn't missed from inside the 30 all year, and two of those kicks had given the team last-second wins. Come to think of it, Benirschke had kicked a 28-yarder to beat Miami in the Orange Bowl in overtime last season.

But a field goal unit is not one man, it's 11, and some of the sapped men on San Diego's field goal team were getting water and didn't hear the coach's call. They were late getting onto the field and didn't even make the huddle. "Eddie," Benirschke called to his holder, Ed Luther, "We're not set!"

"We're O.K.," Luther said. "Just kick it."

Benirschke prepared for the snap, but his rhythm was off. The ball was snapped, Luther put it down, and Benirschke hooked his kick just left of the goalpost.

Benirschke was nearly sick with regret. "I knew I'd never get a second chance," he remembers. "I thought, How long will I have to live with this?"

That miss was, strangely, a blow to both teams. The players were now on a death march. Men in both huddles leaned on one another for support. "Guys would refuse to come out of the game just so they didn't have to run all the way to the sideline," says Sievers. Whatever side of the huddle receivers happened to be on was the side they lined up on, formations be damned.

Neither offense was able to sustain a drive, and the two clubs staggered through what seemed to be a pointless, hopeless, endless dance. There was a punt, a lost San Diego fumble, two more punts. "I remember Kellen had his eyes closed in the huddle, mouth hanging open," Sievers says. "He looked like a slow-motion picture of a boxer—his mouthpiece falling out, saliva dripping from his lip."

Shula was hot that his players were helping Winslow up after a play only to see him beat them with another great catch. (He had 13 in all, for 166 yards.) "Let him get up by himself!" Shula kept yelling.

At one point in this blast furnace of noise and sweat and exhaustion, Winslow was blocking Miami corner-back Gerald Small. When the play ended, both men tried to get off the field for the punt, but they couldn't move. They just leaned on each other for a few seconds, too tired to get out of each other's way. They shoot horses, don't they? "I'd never come that close to death before," Winslow says.

Finally, nine minutes into overtime, Miami made one last Jell-O-legged breakaway. Strock hit wideout Jimmy Cefalo for a big gain, and von Schamann set up for a 34-yarder to win it. Across the field Benirschke looked like a man about to get fitted for a lifetime of goathood. He knelt on the sideline, "waiting for the inevitable," he says. "It was like watching your own execution. Only in slow motion."

"I wanted to get the kick up right away," said von Schamann later, thinking of Winslow's block earlier. He tried too hard. His shoe scuffed the painted green dirt and the ball went straight into the right arm of defensive end Leroy Jones. It was the only NFL field goal attempt Jones ever blocked.

Three times Strock had prepared to ride off into the sunset at the end of the movie—and three times his horse had broken a leg.

In 1998, 19 years after his last surgery, Benirschke took a standard physical for a life insurance policy. Doctors said his blood showed elevated levels of liver enzymes. This time, Benirschke had hepatitis C, which causes an inflammation of the liver that can lead to cancer and, often, death. Doctors told him that one of those 78 units of blood he received during his surgery in 1979 had probably been infected with the hepatitis virus.

Benirschke dug in. Again. As he'd done with the ulcerative colitis, he decided to make himself an expert on hepatitis C. There were days he wished he hadn't.

Back came the Chargers. "You find something deep down inside you," says Winslow, "and you push on." Almost robotically Fouts drove his team again. He hit Brooks and Chandler and Chandler again, and then Joiner for 39 yards, down to the Miami 10.

Fate, in a forgiving mood, presented Benirschke with a second chance. Guard Doug Wilkerson approached Benirschke on the sideline. "You know that giraffe at your zoo?" he asked.

"Yeah?" said Benirschke, warily.

"Well, if you miss this, I'm gonna go down there and cut its throat."

The giraffe lived. This time San Diego's field goal unit was ready and the rhythm was fine. Benirschke says he didn't even have butterflies. The snap was sweet, and the kick perfect. Wasn't it? "There was just this silence," Benirschke remembers. The linemen for both teams were still lying on the ground. Nobody was celebrating. Benirschke turned to Luther and said, "Didn't it go through?"

"Yes!" Luther said, and Benirschke was mobbed by his teammates.

"Hold on! Hold on!" Benirschke yelled. Not every hero has to watch out for his ostomy pouch.

San Diego 41, Miami 38. Sudden death.

At the bottom of the pile Winslow felt a spoonful of joy and a truckful of pain. As players from both teams struggled to their feet, a Miami player gave Winslow a hand up. Winslow took three or four wobbly steps, then fell, wracked by spasms. Sievers and tackle Billy Shields helped Winslow up and carried him off, a moment recorded in the famous Al Messerschmidt photograph.

At the line of scrimmage, the massive Kelcher and 270-pound Chargers guard Ed White hadn't moved. The photographers and the reporters and Winslow were long gone, and still they lay there. "Louie, you know we're gonna have to get up and walk," White groaned. "They don't carry fat guys off the field."

Both locker rooms looked like field hospitals. Miami's Newman wept. Wilkerson was so overheated, he sat under a shower fully clothed. Despite the IV in his arm, White had no color and couldn't connect his brain to his mouth. "I really thought Ed was gonna go," says McDonald, the trainer. "I'm not kidding. I thought we might lose him."

Winslow's body temperature was up to 105°, and he'd lost 13 pounds. Pretty much everything on the sissy had stopped working—except his heart.

Kelcher, hair matted with sweat, blood caked on his hands, needed someone to cut the socks off his feet. He could not stand. An hour later, he said, "I feel like I just rode a horse from Texas to California."

Said White, "I feel like the horse."

Reporters mobbed Benirschke, who had scored the first and last points in this epic game. Is this your biggest thrill? they asked him. "Yes," he said with a little smile. "In a football game."

No player on either team would ever take himself that far or that high again. There would be more misery: San Diego went to Cincinnati the next week and lost the coldest playoff game in NFL history—a-59° windchill. There would be payback: Miami beat San Diego in the playoffs the next year. There would be sorrow: Miami linebacker Larry Gordon would die the next year jogging; Muncie would be arrested for cocaine trafficking; Woodley would have a liver transplant. And there would be honor: Shula, Coryell, Fouts, Joiner and Winslow all were inducted into the Hall of Fame. But there would never be another game like the one they played that night.

"People come up to me sometimes and say, 'Too bad you never went to the big one,' " says Fouts. "And I say, Really? Well, do you remember who played in Super Bowl XIV? And they'll say, No. Super Bowl XXII? And they'll go, No. How about our playoff game with Miami in 1982? And they all go, Oh, yeeeah!"

Winslow retired six years later at 30 with a bum knee and an aura of glory that just won't fade. "Not a day goes by that somebody doesn't bring up that game," he says. "It's wonderful and it's humbling to be remembered for something people see as so heroic."

A motivational speaker now, Winslow has two enduring memories from that day. One is his permanently sore shoulder. The other is a shoebox filled with pictures of kids named after him. Winslow's count was up to 129, until the author showed him a picture of his son, and made it an even 130.

Reach for a can of beer in Benirschke's fridge these days and what you will mostly find are the needles he uses to inject the drugs he hopes will save his life. "There's a chance I'll die," he says, "but we're not focusing on that." Instead, he's a spokesman on hepatitis C. Five million Americans have it, he'll tell you, but only 250,000 are being treated for it. Some people think there's a reason God gave Benirschke all these diseases. Who would handle them better?

Doctors say the virus is undetectable in his system, but he'll be tested again in six months because 65% of those who get rid of it get it back. He may need a liver transplant.

Whatever happens, Benirschke is ready for it. His wife, Mary, says, "People don't realize what you can go through."

Funny, isn't it, how much of Rolf Benirschke's life has been like that game? Up, down, joy, woe, win, lose and start all over again? Would it be asking too much for him to get one more second chance?

SI October 25, 1999

Then Winslow gets frostbite that he can still feel today.

Betcha Red Zone didn't have that problem! Not with his trusty Philco!



Am I right RZ?

Wow....your post just showed up.

You really need to dump your server.



I was at a bar with 2 ladies that night. I don't even need to ask if you remember where you were.....Waiting in line at the Murph to get a ticket to an away game again?

dick...