Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Super Bowl XXIII Memories



Super Bowl XXIII -  San Francisco 49ers 20, Cincinnati Bengals 16. Played on January 22, 1989 at Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami, Florida. MVP Jerry Rice, Favorite 49ers by 7, National anthem Billy Joel, Halftime show "Be Bop Bamboozled" - South Florida-area dancers, Attendance 75,597, Network NBC, Announcers Dick Enberg and Merlin Olsen, Nielsen ratings 43.5 est. 81.6 million viewers, Market share 68, Cost of 30-second commercial US$675,000, Jerry Rice 11 215 1, Joe Montana 23 36 357 2 0, Roger Craig 17 71, 8 101, Tom Rathman 5 23, Ickey Woods 20 79, Boomer Esiason 11 25 144 0 1, Eddie Brown 4 44, Cris Collinsworth 3 40, Michael Carter 1, Kevin Fagan 1, Charles Haley 2, Bill Romanowski 1, Danny Stubbs 1, Jason Buck 1, David Fulcher 1, David Grant 1, Reggie



I was finally in high school, as a freshman by this point. I had not grown as tall as many of my class mates yet, and my voice had not changed all that much yet, either. We were all closer to being grown up now, as high school was the last stop before entering the real world. Still, being just a freshman, and newly entering high school, that time still felt a very long ways away.

As a family, we went up to Montreal for a week in between Christmas of 1988 and New Year's Day for 1989, and I remember it all very well. We watched the playoffs (at least my brother and I did), and so I still associate these playoffs with that trip to Montreal, which was really the first modern trip that we took as a family to Quebec, Canada, of what would become a regular pilgrimage to Canada from that point onward. It made these playoffs feel a little different a little special. Also, there were some interesting things with these playoffs that made them feel different. The Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals were the top two seeds in the AFC, and met in the Championship Game. That was something new, and very different from the seasons before. Also, the 49ers made their emergence as the best team of the decade by dispatching with the Vikings, and then trouncing the Bears in frigid Chicago to earn their spot in the Super Bowl. It felt like another strange season, as no one enjoyed a better record than 12-4 (which was the first time that I recalled that being the best record in the league), which was shared by three teams (the Bengals, the Bills, and the Bears).

In the Super Bowl, I was hoping that the Bengals would find a way to beat San Francisco and exact a measure of revenge on them for having lost Super Bowl XVI to them seven years earlier. Indeed, the Bengals played well and, fro much of the contest, looked like they were capable of winning. It was a low scoring game, and through at least the first half, looked dull, as it was a battle of field goals. It really only started getting exciting in the second half, and particularly in the final quarter, when the memorable magic happened. This was the first of the exciting, modern Super Bowls. All of the others that I could remember had been relative blowouts (with the exception of Super Bowl XVII, although that lacked the kind of electric finish that this one had). Cincinnati hung tough against the heavily favored 'Niners, and then Stan Jennings broke free on a kickoff return for a touchdown, giving the Bengals a 13-6 lead. This provided hope that the Bengals could indeed win this thing. But San Francisco responded quickly with a touchdown drive of their own, as eventual Super Bowl MVP Jerry Rice caught a Montana pass and twisted his body to get the ball to break the plain of the end zone for the tying score. The Bengals were able to notch a field goal late in the game that seemed perhaps to have won it for them, but of course everyone remembers what happened next. Montana led his team down the field in the final drive, eventually leading them to the winning touchdown with 34 seconds left to go, and earning the third Super Bowl title of the decade for San Francisco.

Here are some of the major events that took place in 1989, the year this Super Bowl was played. This was probably the biggest news year in my own lifetime, and the closest that I have come to seeing a year as epic as the one my parents and their generation experienced in 1968. The world's population was 5.19 billion people. Just two days before Super Bowl XXIII was played, President Reagan was replaced by President George H. W. Bush after eight years in office. American troops invaded Panama with very little warning beforehand, although Americans widely approved of the measure. In Beijing, China, thousands of students protested at Tiananmen Square, marching peacefully for democracy, and building a "Goddess of Democracy" statue that came to symbolize this movement. However, both the movement and the statue were destroyed when Chinese authorities came in and massacred those assembled. Deng Xiaoping stepped down as China's leader later in the year. In Eastern Europe, what began with a general loosening of formerly tight immigration standards eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of Communist regimes all across the former Warsaw Pact nations, in what was essentially a mostly peaceful revolution. There was one exception in Romania, where President Ceausescu was forced out of office and eventually caught and killed along with his wife. Mikhail Gorbachev was named Soviet President. P.W. Botha stepped down as leader of South Africa, although there was some controversy and a struggle for power both before and after. In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced author Salman Rushdie to death after his The Satanic Verses produced an enormous amount of controversy, and was seen as evil by fundamentalist Muslims.    


http://www.infoplease.com/year/1989.html



http://boards.sportslogos.net/topic/98529-super-bowl-field-database-sb-xlvi-texture-added-122215/page-9

Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)