ALBUQUERQUE n Although the name may not be familiar to you, Jim O’Brien ranks right up there in the city of Baltimore when people talk about their sports heroes.
No, Jim O’Brien, 61, doesn’t have the luster of some of the city’s other heroes n Johnny Unitas, Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer and Cal Ripken Jr. certainly rank among the city’s all-time sports greats n but he provided the East Coast harbor with its only Super Bowl victory.
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Not many people are as fortunate to have a shining moment like that, albeit capping what had been a less than stellar Super Bowl, as the Colts and Dallas Cowboys combined for 11 turnovers.
“It was hotter than hell,” O’Brien recalled, while behind the wheel of a golf cart last Friday at Arroyo del Oso Golf Course in Albuquerque. He was playing in former NFL player Preston Dennard’s annual celebrity tournament, raising money for Albuquerque Public Schools athletics.
The 16-13 Super Bowl V win was sealed with O’Brien’s kick, which came with five seconds remaining in the game. Linebacker Mike Curtis had picked off a Craig Morton pass in Dallas territory. The Colts had turned another interception into the TD that knotted the game at 13.
To get to the Super Bowl, Baltimore beat Cincinnati 17-0, and then beat Oakland 27-17 in the AFC championship game, helped by two O’Brien field goals.
The win over the Cowboys helped Colts fans feel better after the bad taste left in their mouths two years earlier when “Broadway Joe” Namath had boasted to all that would listen that his New York Jets of the American Football League would beat the favored Colts of the NFL and the Jets.
O’Brien was born in El Paso but grew up in Cincinnati after his parents divorced. He played at the University of Cincinnati.
“I was a straight-on kicker. I was the only kid who could kick on our team, from like all the way through junior high and high school. … In high school, I actually practiced.”
O’Brien also was a wide receiver, and one reason he made the Colts after they drafted him in the third round of the 1970 draft was his versatility at both positions.
As a Bearcat, O’Brien set the school scoring mark after he amassed 142 points in his junior season of 1968. He scored 12 touchdowns, kicked 13 field goals and tacked on 31 points-after. The 142 points led the nation, as well, as he edged Southern Cal’s O.J. Simpson, who scored 132 points on the strength of 22 TDs.
“It wasn’t like you blamed him for doing something wrong that you did and he didn’t do anything wrong n ever,” O’Brien said. “He might over-throw the ball a little bit, (but) he knew everybody’s position, and he knew where they were supposed to be, what they were supposed to do on every defense. He really knew football.”
O’Brien remembers where he was the day Unitas died. It was Sept. 11, 2002, when old No. 19 died from a massive heart attack.
O’Brien was in the Indianapolis airport gift shop, he said, buying a Colt hat, when a friend told him the sad news.
Baltimore fans lost their Colts when their owner, Bob Irsay, whisked them away and into Indianapolis after the 1983 season. Baltimore fans had to be content with a new franchise, the Ravens, who went on to win Super Bowl XXXV 34-7 over the New York Giants in 2001.
That helped soothe hurt feelings of the fans.
“I have no alma mater, really, because they don’t have a Baltimore Colt team,” lamented O’Brien. “They have an Indianapolis Colt team and they’ve never invited us to one thing.”
Other than his game-winner, the modest O’Brien doesn’t have much to say about his career, which he said contained, “nothing exemplary.
“It would just have been another ‘Who’s he?’, and luckily we made it into the Super Bowl and I got a little more famous.”
O’Brien said he remembered “it was hotter than hell down on that AstroTurf n it was 100 degrees on the AstroTurf,” he said. “I think it really wasn’t a sloppy game, I think it was a good defensive battle that was error-prone because guys were causing guys to drop balls, to fumble, to miss. When somebody’s hitting in your kidneys at full blast, it’s kind of tough to jump up there and catch a ball. … It became a defensive battle, and defensive battles are designed to create errors. I’ve always heard that guys get into Super Bowls and they wonder why good teams lose.
“I think the reason is because the coaches choke as much as the players do in that the coaches sort of pull in their horns and get real conservative, and I think that’s what causes a team to lose, as opposed to just playing your game the same as you would during (the regular season).”
Before the game that sweltering January day, O’Brien did some handiwork on his right shoe. The shoe had been given to him by the team’s back-up placekicker, Lou Michaels.
“He gave me his shoe. His shoe had an extra layer of an extra plastic layer. So on the front, on the AstroTurf because you don’t take a divot like you do on grass, I cut the cleat half off so I’d have a little more clearance,” he explained. “It was legal.”
AstroTurf was fairly new then, he said, and the Colts played most of their games on natural grass.
A 6-foot, 195-pounder, O’Brien didn’t get much time at wide receiver until the 1972 season, when he caught 11 passes and scored twice. In 1973, he was reunited with his former Colts head coach, Don McCafferty, who was then with the Lions. In Motown, he caught two passes while playing in 10 games, effectively ending his NFL career after four seasons.
“He traded for me,” he said. “I played half the year as a receiver because some guys got hurt, and I played half a year as a kicker because, “He traded for me,” he said. “I played half the year as a receiver because some guys got hurt, and I played half a year as a kicker because Errol Mann got hurt.”
Today, O’Brien, a real estate developer in California, prefers playing sports n golf, tennis, and racquetball n to watching sports.
“I don’t tell a lot of stories from my repertoire,” he said of his celebrity appearances. “I didn’t pay that much attention when I was doing it. We’ve all gotten a lot better.”
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