Five Signature Moments in Minnesota Vikings History
Get ready to get Mossed. And Diggsed. And frostbitten. And have your heart broken at the last minute.
Jim Marshall’s wrong-way “touchdown” is NOT a Vikings signature moment.
Marshall’s scoop-and-score-a-safety against the 49ers is certainly one of the most memorable bloopers in NFL history. But it occurred in 1964: before the Purple People Eaters, before Bud Grant, before the start of the Super Bowl era. Marshall, who would play 20 seasons and become one of the NFL’s great iron men, was still at the start of his career.
Yes, Vikings history is full of fluky random stuff. And yes, the franchise has been uniquely cursed. But the flukes and curses have not manifested or synergized quite like this in over 50 years.
Vikings football does have a unique character, however: often brilliant, usually resilient, always doomed. Let’s see if we can capture the glory – while not wallowing too deeply into the heartbreak – in just five moments.
5. Randy Moss’ Turducken
Date: November 26th, 1998.
What a letdown. It was like sitting down for a grand Thanksgiving dinner and discovering someone forgot to stuff the turkey.
The Dallas Cowboys ran onto the field Thursday with no Deion Sanders, and should have brought back Don Meredith to sing, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”
Taking the advice of team doctors, Sanders rested his ailing big toe. No Deion and no hope for the Cowboys, leaving rookie wide receiver Randy Moss to carve up Dallas’ secondary, serving up a 46-36 victory for the Minnesota Vikings before 64,366 in Texas Stadium and establishing Moss to a national television audience as the NFL’s No. 1 showman.
Make it a Hail Moss and throw it up for grabs every play--he’ll catch it. The only way to stop him is pass interference, which puts the Vikings in position for someone else to score.
Afterward, ask him about being so good, and he will snap, “I’m not talking.”
Twelve games into his professional career, and after a big-play performance that included three catches for 163 yards and three touchdowns, he was grumpy, telling the media, “I don’t know what you’re standing around for. . . . I don’t feel like talking.”
Happy Thanksgiving to you too.
Everyone else was talking, but who cared? Moss put on the show, and while quick to make himself available for Fox and John Madden’s tiring turkey routine, he told the reporters in the locker room, “You all not TV.”
Then he put on his earrings, adjusted his gold necklace with the gold dollar sign, pulled up frayed bluejeans with telephone and beeper attached, tugged on army boots, put on headphones and breezed out of the locker room on the arm of a security guard.
Thanks for the memories. – T.J. Simers, Los Angeles Times, November 27th, 1998.
Gosh. Such subtle symbology! Why would Moss want to shun an even-handed journalist like Simers?
You can retch or laugh at Simers’ racist subtext, but it takes talent to low-key rip Deion Sanders for missing a game with turf toe, dismiss Moss’ accomplishments because of Sanders’ absence, thug-code Moss for his jewelry and pager a few paragraphs after hinting that Primetime was goldbricking, then get butthurt at Moss for not offering you an exclusive postgame St. Crispin’s Day speech. This column is like a time capsule containing pure poison.
Moss, we were told, was a troubled young man. He smoked the devil’s cilantro. In high school, he badly beat up a guy at a party who taunted his friend with racial slurs. What a miscreant! No wonder Notre Dame and Florida State kicked him to the curb! No wonder he slipped to 21st in the draft!
Sarcasm aside, the old-school NFL media of the time had no qualms about portraying Moss as Public Enemy #1 as a rookie. Moss responded with understandable distrust and a splash of youthful insolence, all punctuated by his distinctive Appalachian burr. By Thanksgiving of 1998, most of us had only seen Moss on NFL Primetime highlights and heard about him as some fascinatingly sinister character who needed special care and feeding: part John Dillinger, part Hannibal Lecter.
Moss’ public image didn’t change much after his Thanksgiving hat trick. But it became much easier to ignore the bad-boy baggage. He would lead the NFL in receiving touchdowns as a rookie, then do so two more times for the Vikings as he matured into someone who would set the industry standard for prima-donna receiver behavior. His name would eventually become a verb meaning to out-jump/muscle/class a defender, as he did to Kevin Smith a few times on that Thanksgiving Day.
And if you watch Monday Night Countdown this autumn you will see Moss, now a cancer survivor, laughing and delivering insights as a distinguished legend of the game. Moss is now 48 years old, almost exactly the same age Simers was when he wanted Moss to get that gold-dollar-sign chain off his lawn in Thanksgiving of 1998. Some folks age more gracefully than others.
We will circle back to the 1998 Vikings later, for better or worse.
4. Anthony Carter Calls His Shots
Date: January 9th, 1988.
Carter first flashed his brilliant NFL playoff colors on Jan. 3, 1988, when he silenced a New Orleans crowd by setting a league record on an 84-yard punt return to start a 44-10 Viking rout. A week later, Minnesota faced the 49ers in San Francisco. Carter jumped all over Candlestick Park, rising above the crowd to catch 10 passes for a playoff-record 227 yards.
"It was a beautifully graceful exhibition of athletic ability," says George Seifert, who was the 49ers' defensive coordinator then and is now their head coach. "Many times we had great coverage. But Anthony had such timing, a superb sense of approaching the ball. He played above us. He was like Ruth pointing to the stands that day." – Ralph Wiley, Sports Illustrated, August 1989.
Here, before a stunned crowd of 62,547 at Candlestick Park, he caught 10 passes for 227 yards and ran for 30 yards on a reverse. He did that despite two injuries in the game, a strained groin muscle and a jammed left shoulder.
The steady drizzle made for uncertain footing on the soggy grass. Still, Carter broke the playoff record of 198 yards receiving by Tom Fears of the Los Angeles Rams against the Chicago Bears in 1950. The record for playoff receptions is 13 by Kellen Winslow of the Cleveland Browns against the Miami Dolphins in 1981.
''The coverage was there,'' McKyer said. ''He was making the catches. He has a lot of athletic ability. He basically just outplayed us. He outplayed us to death.''
''He almost beat us by himself,'' said Jeff Fuller, the 49ers' strong safety. – Frank Litsky, New York Times, January 10th, 1988.
(Note: the NYT piece is quoted verbatim, because who I am to argue with my former benefactor, the esteemed paper of record? But Winslow, of course, played for the Chargers, and that game occurred in 1982.)
The Vikings went 8-7 in 1987. They were 0-3 in strikebreaker games behind 37-year old replacement quarterback Tony Adams, who had been out of organized football since a stint with the Toronto Argonauts in 1979 and 1980. The real Vikings went 8-4.
The 49ers went 13-2 in 1987, 3-0 in strikebreaker games behind … Joe Montana, Roger Craig, Dwight Clark and other regulars who broke ranks with their fellow union members one week into the doomed strike. The 49ers went 10-2 against real opponents.