Just A Super Bowl of Crescendos

By Tom Callahan

Super Bowl XXIII, like most things in football, began with Paul Brown. He hired Bill Walsh in the 1960s to assist in coaching the new Cincinnati Bengals. When Walsh got his own command in San Francisco, reserve quarterback Sam Wyche followed along to tutor passers. Together Wyche and Walsh scouted and drafted Notre Dame's Joe Montana. In two triumphant Super Bowls, Montana has been the player of the game. Now he is the central figure in a third.

Meanwhile, Brown retrieved Wyche five years ago to coach Cincinnati -- as it happens, the 49ers' opponent this Super Sunday in Miami. For the first time in many a Roman numeral, perhaps in the whole stolid history of the most consistently disappointing annual spectacle in America, a two-sided chess match is not only promised but guaranteed. The only question about Walsh and Wyche is which of them is wormier with ideas. Their imaginations are so active that the very canons of the sport are under strain. The National Football League is worried.

Wyche, like every fan from the beginning of time running out, or at least since the onset of two-minute warnings, got to puzzling over why even sluggish teams always seem able to move the ball at game's end. Increasingly, he has had the Bengals operating in a hurry-up mode from the start, dispensing with huddles, relying on sinister (defined: left-handed) quarterback Norman ("Boomer") Esiason to communicate the plans aloud in a complicated tongue. The effect has been to freeze the other team's situation specialists on the sidelines or create a confusion of too many men on the field.

Two games ago, however, the Seattle Seahawks started swooning on third downs, and last week Buffalo coach Marv Levy suggested his Bills might also feign strategic injuries in the American Conference championship game. Fearing a sham, commissioner Pete Rozelle issued a fuzzy decree on "the spirit of the rules" and momentarily turned Wyche's ingenuity into an offsetting penalty. Cincinnati beat Buffalo anyway, 21-10, but the theme of Super Week was established. Some 2,200 journalists, double the U.S. press corps at the Moscow summit, will be concerned with ethics.

All the fancy stuff aside, Cincinnati is as rugged a team as has ever employed a passer named Norman, a runner named Elbert and a linebacker from Dartmouth who serves on the Cincinnati city council. Councilman Reggie Williams does boast a salty tattoo on one bulging forearm, depicting a piece of music. "It's a crescendo," he says. "You have to have a certain rhythm in your life." While scoring 18 touchdowns, rookie Elbert ("Ickey") Woods has smoothed the black edge off several unenlightened symbols that have crept into currency in Cincinnati. Fans have taken to calling the stadium "the Jungle," and throughout the games they chant like a minstrel chorus, "Who dey think gonna beat dem Bengals?" Ickey's popular touchdown "shuffle" would be the last straw were it not so preposterously white that it somehow saves the day.

The rabble wanted coach Wyche cashiered last year, when the team won only four games (its total losses this season). So many of his inventions were exploding on the pad, Wyche acquired the nickname "Wicky Wacky" and waited woefully for general manager Brown's expected summons. When Brown did call, it was with advice, and not on X's and O's but on p's and q's. The man who founded the Cleveland Browns and gave them his name, who was fired once himself and had to live for a time on his face-mask patent, basically ordered better nutrition and more sleep. The sagest maneuver of the season may have been the removal of the cots from the coaches' offices in Cincinnati.

Public opinion has never stampeded Brown, 80. In fact, it has tended to lock him in place. In 1950, after the short-lived All-America Football Conference disbanded, the leftover 49ers and Browns were derisively absorbed into the N.F.L. "They don't even have a football," remarked first commissioner Elmer Layden. Before Cleveland's big-league debut against the champion Philadelphia Eagles, Brown gathered his rinky-dinks all around -- players with names like Groza, Motley and Graham -- and delivered a pep talk of two sentences. Referring to the star of both the Eagles and the league, he said dryly, "Just think. Tonight you're going to get to touch Steve Van Buren."

The Browns won the game that night, the title that year and the decade on balance. Montana is Van Buren now, and it is the decade that the 49ers are after. For the first time in his ten seasons, San Francisco's darling quarterback has had an internal rival, one with the disturbing name of Steve Young. Montana is only 32 but has charted enough maladies, highlighted by back surgery two years ago, to feel older. His favorite receiver and off-field running mate, Dwight Clark, 32, retired with creaky knees this season. "Losing Clark," coach Walsh theorizes, "may have started Joe toward that feeling of isolation that inevitably comes to the old pro."

Walsh's delight in taking quarterbacks apart and putting them back together again also affected Montana's spirit. Recognizing the opponent's quandary in preparing for both -- Montana is a drop-back passer, Young a rollout runner -- Walsh coyly invented a quarterback controversy. He cut it out only when Joe started rolling steel balls in a clenched fist while quoting Y.A. Tittle on the three ages of athletic life. "Y.A. told me that when you're young, they love you. When you're in the middle, they hate you. But when you're old, they love you again."

By that standard, Montana must be a codger. Since his 34-9 and 28-3 displays against Minnesota and Chicago, the Bay Area has never loved him more. Esiason won most of this year's quarterback awards, but Montana has no peer at the moment. Along with Walsh's brain and Montana's arm, a 49er composite features receiver Jerry Rice's hands and Roger Craig's legs. The handiest all- around back in football, Craig is one of three ex-Nebraska runners on call. "It isn't just that they're sound fundamentally," Walsh says, "it's that they love the game so."

Going for five straight, the National Conference has been alone in adoring the Super Bowl lately.Washington mistreated Denver last year by 32 points. The '80s average spread has been 20, the only single-digit margin coming in the 49ers' 26-21 victory over Forrest Gregg's Bengals of 1982. It is said coach Gregg succumbed to the tensions that go with a $100 ticket and a 120 million -- viewer TV audience. Wyche has taken a lighter tack. His first marching order to the players is "Go for that shaving-cream commercial you've always wanted." It's a smart start.