No More Bungles for Bengals: Cincinnati and Super Bowl LVI

Dick Young hammers it out.

The pandemic will yet again prevent us from holding our annual Super Bowl morning get-together, the one that encourages pre-lunch boozing on Budweiser and the gorging of appetite-spoiling Kransky sausages. It won’t, however, stop our friend Peter Crossing in Adelaide from sending us the 2022 version of his infamous Super Bowl quiz. Peter has a wicked way with setting quizzes, which means the prize – our miniature version of the Lombardi Trophy – is generally very hard earned. I might be tempted to offer Peter this poser: What links the Cincinnati Bengals’ first Super Bowl appearance, 40 years ago, with Britain’s longest-surviving typewriter factory? Answer: Jack Reynolds. I’ll explain later.

One Jack Reynolds: He once hacksawed apart a Chevy Bel Air

Let me start with Dick Young, one of five sports columnists whose opinions of the Bengal bungles in the 1982 Super Bowl in Pontiac, Michigan, were run by the Cincinnati Enquirer in a full-page “Commentary” post-mortem the day after the San Francisco 49ers’ 26-21 win. I readily confess I’ve haven’t seen a lot of Dick Young’s writing - he was then with the New York Daily News - but I certainly liked what I read in his insightful analysis of Super Bowl XVI. Young began by lamenting the decision to award 49ers quarterback Joe Montana the Most Valuable Player “… in the entire second half …  he throws four passes, completes two, and gains 25 years. That’s a trophy?” Like most of the columnists writing in the Enquirer on Tuesday, January 26, 1982, Young gave credit for the 49ers triumph to their defence. Mike Lupica, also of the New York Daily News, said that that defence was “led by a grizzled old warrior named Hacksaw Reynolds” (aka Jack Reynolds. We’re getting there.).

But getting back to Dick Young first. What he wrote about Super Bowl XVI was how sports writing should be done. Having rabbited on about this style of sportswriting for an hour or so at last year’s Virtual Herman’s, I didn’t get invited back for this month’s gathering. But I remain unrepentant about speaking up for “sports fans who used typewriters”, because in the main they knew their sports and they understood what readers paid good money to read. Young (1917-87) was known for a direct and abrasive style. The Boston Globe's Bob Ryan (below) said of Young, “He's the guy that broke ground, the guy who went into the locker room, and that changed everything.”

Ira Berkow ranked Young up there with Red Smith, Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Jimmy Cannon and Jim Murray. Jack Ziegler, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, said Young was a “key transitional figure” between the “gentlemanly” sports reporting of old-time writers like Rice and Arthur Daley.

Those “gentlemen” never got thrust into a locker room locker, which is what happened to Steve Serby of the New York Post a couple of months before Super XVI. New York Jets quarterback Richard Todd grabbed Serby around the neck and shoved him into the locker, causing concussion and bruising. A $1500 fine was announced by National Football League commissioner Pete Rozelle during Super Bowl week in Pontiac. I’ve known of attacks on sportswriters far worse than this one. In my own case a Canadian swimmer, disqualified from a medley relay at the Commonwealth Games that same year (1982), clocked me an unguarded good one in the tunnel outside the Chandler pool (I was carrying a typewriter at the time). But this sort of thing never deterred any of us from getting on with the job of writing what we were qualified enough, and informed enough, to write.

                   Getting one back for the good guys: Muhammad Ali and Richard Todd.

Anyway, Super Bowl LVI week has got me thinking, as may have been gathered by now, about Cincinnati’s first appearance in the big showdown. Cincinnati being my favourite US city, I’ll be rooting for the Bengals to break their Super Bowl duck at their third attempt. Their clash with the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, will be shown live here on Monday morning. This year, given the usual suspects will once again not be gathering, I may need my son Danny to sit with me and give me a running Dick Young-style analysis. He wasn’t even born when the Bengals first played in a Super Bowl, but in his short life he was developed more intimate knowledge of various American pastimes than I ever have or will. He is doubtless up there with Malcolm Hole, a young Englishman who was visiting Cincinnati when the Bengals met the 49ers in 1982. He was an ardent Bengals supporter who got to be in Pontiac for the Super Bowl, and got to write about it for the Cincinnati Enquirer. He did a pretty fair job of it, too.

Ken Anderson (14) of Cincinnati scrambles against the 49ers in Super Bowl XVI

at the Silver Dome in Pontiac, Michigan. 

Ah, 1982, when ads like this still appeared in Cincinnati newspapers.

Super Bowl XVI, played on January 24, 1982, at the Pontiac Silverdome, was the first Super Bowl held in a cold-weather city. It was one of the most watched broadcasts in American television history to that time, with more than 85 million viewers, and a final national Nielsen rating of 49.1 (a 73 share). Both teams were making their first Super Bowl appearance. Cincinnati's 356 yards of offense to San Francisco's 275 marked the first time in Super Bowl history that a team which was outshone in total yards won. Lupica wrote that, given their error rate, “it was amazing the Cincinnati Bungles only lost … by a score of 26-21.” Three Cincinnati  turnovers helped San Francisco build a then-Super Bowl record 20–0 halftime lead. The Bengals scored their final touchdown with 16 seconds left, but couldn’t recover the ensuing onside kick. Cincinnati tight end Dan Ross recorded a Super Bowl-record 11 receptions (still the most ever by a tight end in a Super Bowl) for 104 yards and two touchdowns.

Running like a rugby player: Cincinnati Bengals Dan Ross rushing in the 1982 Super Bowl.

As for “Hacksaw” Reynolds, whose defensive work so stymied the Bengals, he started with the Los Angeles Rams in the 1970 and played there 11 years before going to the 49ers in 1981. He won two Super Bowls with them. Reynolds earned his nickname in 1969 by cutting an abandoned 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air in half with a hacksaw after his previously unbeaten University of Tennessee team returned from an embarrassing 38-0 road loss to Ole Miss. Reynolds appeared in a non-speaking role in the Simpsons episode “Sunday, Cruddy Sunday” when Dan Marino calls him and former Baltimore Colts defensive lineman Bubba Smith to tackle Homer for intercepting a pass meant for Bart.

The other Jack Reynolds, the one from a typewriter town: The West Bromwich Albion team that defeated Aston Villa 3-0 in the English FA Cup final at the Kennington Oval in London, in 1892. Reynolds is third from left.

Why the other Jack Reynolds is worthy of mention is that he brought fame and fortune to West Bromwich Albion, a club which had its origins in the Salter Typewriter Factory outside Birmingham, later used by the British Empire and Smith Corona typewriter companies. This Reynolds (1869-1917) was the first player to represent both Ireland and England internationally. Reynolds won the FA Cup with West Brom and played five times for Ireland before it emerged that he was actually English. Subsequently he played eight times for England. He is the only player to score for and against England (barring own goals). Reynolds was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, but grew up in Ahoghill in County Antrim. He joined West Brom in March 1891 and scored for them in the 1892 FA Cup final when they beat Aston Villa 3–0.  He later had a spell as a player-coach in New Zealand. He was regarded as one of the great footballers of the 1890s and was one of the highest paid players of his generation.

My real interest, of course, is in an entirely different code of football, and again Cincinnati comes to mind. I guess if the Bengals win Super Bowl LVI it will give American football a real fillip in the city (not that one is probably needed). And that won’t do my favoured code any good at all. When I was visiting Richard Polt in 2013, I was unaware rugby union was played in Cincinnati. But I’ve since found it was introduced there by an Irishman called Mick O’Byrne in 1971 (happy rugby half-century, Cincinnati!). O’Byrne placed an advert in the University of Cincinnati newspaper and got a response from Buck Shiels and others – enough “others” to form a team to play four matches. Queen City RFU was formed in 1973, followed by the Cincinnati Wolfhounds in 1974. That was the year Cincinnati hosted an international touring team, Greystones from Dublin. A high school program was started in 1976 with players from Indian Hill, St Xavier, Mt Healthy and Hamilton Garfield. Another Dublin club, Monkstown, visited. Cambridge Chronicle sportswriter Wade Swormstedt noted in Cincinnati Magazine in December 1983 that “Cincinnati has become the hotbed of a sport few Americans understand.” But one Cincinnatian understood it well enough to play at international level when he toured Australia with the US Eagles in 1983. Jake Burkhardt had previously been a linebacker for the University of Dayton, but found rugby far more rewarding. “Rugby caters to the athlete who’s more of a free spirit,” he said. He finished up playing two Tests for the US, which is a more than anyone suiting up on Sunday for Super Bowl LVI will ever get to experience.

I note that while Cincinnati’s Xavier University continues to shun American football (“unbeaten since 1973” states the university’s T-shirt I bought there in 2013), rugby appears to be thriving at Xavier, very much helped along by New Zealander Zane Te Kanawa. I just hope a Bengal win in Inglewood won’t do it any harm.