Doug Flutie from the Fifth Avenue Gazette

January 2, 2006

Editor’s note – Marie insisted that I point out the fact that it was she who urged me to stop messing around in the kitchen and to come watch a moment in yesterday’s game between the New England Patriots and the Miami Dolphins that was one for the ages. It’s not every day you get a chance to glimpse an historic event. If I had missed it I would have cried.

Sixty-four, Forty-three, Just One
Foxboro, Massachusetts – On November 23, 1984, a 22-year-old Boston College quarterback from Natick, Massachusetts, threw a 48-yard touchdown pass on the last play of a game against heavily favored Miami in the Orange Bowl. The successful Hail Mary entered sports legend as one of the greatest moments in college football history and vaulted the diminutive Doug Flutie to national stardom.

Listed at 5’9” and 180 pounds, Flutie is actually smaller than that.

He is a rarity, a little big man, a freak of nature. In high school he was an all-league standout in football, basketball and baseball. At Boston College he won the Heisman Trophy, the Maxwell Award and the Walter Camp Award.

Deemed too small to win at quarterback in the National Football League, where quarterbacks are supposed to be able to see over their own linemen, Flutie began his professional football career with the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League. When that league folded in 1986, he joined the Chicago Bears where he appeared in only four games, throwing just 46 passes on the season. In 1987 he was signed by the New England Patriots, for whom he started just 13 games in three seasons.

In 1990 he left the NFL and signed a two-year contract with the British Columbia Lions of the Canadian Football League. He struggled in his first season. However, the following year his star shone brightly and he signed a million-dollar-a-year deal with the Calgary Stampeders.

Flutie won his first Grey Cup in 1992 with the Stampeders. he would go on to win two more with the Toronto Argonauts, in 1996 and 1997, before returning to the NFL with the Buffalo Bills in 1998.

His career CFL statistics include 41,355 passing yards and 270 touchdowns. He holds the professional football record of 6,619 yards passing in a single season. He still holds four of the CFL's top five highest single-season completion marks, including a record 466 in 1991. His 48 touchdown passes in 1994 remains a CFL record. He earned three Grey Cup MVP awards, and was named Most Outstanding Player a record six times (1991-1994, and 1996-1997).

In his 1998 return to the NFL with the Bills, he was selected to the Pro Bowl after resurrecting a season that had begun with him on the bench and saw his team post a 1-3 record in its first four games. As a starter, Flutie posted an 8-3 record and led his team to the playoffs.

Subsequent tenures in San Diego and finally in New England have seen Flutie continue to defy age and explanation. At 43, he is playing in his 21st season of professional football. He has never been seriously injured. He boggles the mind.

This year, widely rumored to be his last, Flutie has seen limited action playing behind Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady (who was seven-years-old when Flutie won the Heisman).

Yesterday, in a meaningless game, Flutie was on the field for one play, an untimed extra point attempt.

In its infancy, the game of football closely resembled rugby, its progenitor. The football itself was much rounder than today’s prolate spheroid. As in rugby, points could be scored by kicking a dropped ball at, or immediately after the moment the ball touched the field through a goal (hence the term “field goal”). The so-called dropkick was a common feature of the game well into the 1930’s until changes to the shape of the ball were complete, and until other rule changes made it impractical.

The last recorded instance of a successful dropkick in the NFL was on December 21, 1941, when the Chicago Bears’ Ray Mclean drop-kicked an extra point against the New York Giants. That was just over 64 years ago – 21 years before Old Man Flutie was born.

However, the dropkick remains in the NFL rulebook as a legitimate means of scoring either a field goal or an extra point.

Yesterday afternoon, following a Patriots touchdown, Flutie took the field. The commentators could not fathom what was to come. Even the opposing coaching staff were mystified.

Flutie stood alone in the backfield. There was no kicker on the field. There were 10 linemen including four tight ends. Standing at the 12 yard line, Flutie took the snap from center, dropped the ball to the field, and kicked it cleanly through the uprights.

I have never seen anything like it.

I watched Kirk Gibson hit his famed walk-off home run in game one of the 1988 World Series. I watched Michael Johnson run the 200 meters in 19.32 seconds in 1996. I saw Buster Douglas knock out Mike Tyson. I have never seen a dropkick. I definitely have never seen a dropkick by a 43-year-old backup quarterback.

I know I’m probably a little bit overly sentimental about sports. But if you saw what Doug Flutie did yesterday and didn’t get choked up, you’re just not a normal person.

Sport is at its best when it lifts us out of the mundane and into the triumphant. Sport matters. Sport is a metaphor for life. Sport, done right, is sublime. Sport lays bare the character of its players, and sport shows us why character matters.

There is much to be learned from Doug Flutie – an athlete in a world of millionaire punks who founded a non-profit foundation in honor of his autistic son to raise money for research, an athlete who has never been charged with drunk driving, spousal abuse, or tax evasion, an athlete who was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship in the same year he was named college football’s most valuable player.

John Wooden once said that a player that makes a team great is better than a great player. How much better still must a player be if he makes all of us better?

Sure, it’s sappy. Sure it’s just football. Sure it doesn’t really matter much in a world in which 24,000 people die every day from hunger. Sure it didn’t settle anything. The Patriots still lost and even that doesn’t matter.

It was just one moment, one untimed play. It was just one point. Just one. Well, there is also just one Doug Flutie.