It is known for the Liberty Bell, for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, for Ben Franklin and his kite. All that is historic and nice, but in Philadelphia, it is old stuff that happened more than 200 years ago.
Much more important to people in Philadelphia is something else that would really be historic, something they hope to see for themselves -- the Super Bowl trophy.
The Eagles have never won the Super Bowl. They went to it following the 1980 season, but lost to the Oakland Raiders. Lost badly, 27-10.
"There's a certain level of frustration," said ESPN's Ron Jaworski, who was the quarterback on the 1980 team. "Last year, the stars seemed to be aligned to get back to the Super Bowl. In the NFC championship game, the Eagles had the home field, in the Tampa Bay Bucs they were playing a team they had beaten four straight times, and it was cold and windy, hardly Florida weather. But they let that slip away."
But the City of Brotherly Love is again the City of Hope. In a 20-17 comeback triumph over the Green Bay Packers in overtime Sunday, the Eagles advanced to the National Football Conference championship game for the third consecutive year. They will go against the Carolina Panthers here next Sunday with a trip to Super Bowl XXXVIII at stake.
The Eagles have not been the NFL champions since 1960. In that 17-13 victory over the Packers, time expired with linebacker Chuck Bednarik sitting on Packers fullback Jim Taylor at the 8.
Before that 1960 title, the Eagles, who have been in the league since 1933, won the title only twice -- in 1948 over the Chicago Cardinals, 7-0, as Steve Van Buren scored the only touchdown in a snowstorm at old Shibe Park, and in 1949 over the Los Angeles Rams, 14-0, at the LA Coliseum when tight end Pete Pihos scored on a touchdown pass from Tommy Thompson.
But the Eagles' pride in their two-year reign was quickly punctured. In their 1950 opener, the Cleveland Browns, absorbed by the NFL after winning all four All-America Football Conference titles, walloped the Eagles, 35-10. After that game, Pihos, now in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, put the Browns' talent in perspective for his wife.
"Honey," he said, "we met a team from the big league."
The Browns went on to dominate the NFL for six seasons. The Eagles, meanwhile, never did much until 1960 when Bednarik emerged as pro football's last two-way player, a center on offense and a linebacker on defense.
"In that 1960 championship game with the Packers, I played 58-and-a-half minutes," Bednarik said Friday on the telephone from his home near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania "I snapped for all the punts and place-kicks too, so the only time I was not on the field was for our kickoffs, and I was 35 years old."
What Bednarik did in the last few seconds of that game is burned into every Eagles fan's memory. Those Packers were Vince Lombardi's first divisional winner. Needing a touchdown, Bart Starr, their young quarterback who later would lead them to five NFL titles, including the first two Super Bowls, had moved the offense to the 23 with 17 seconds remaining.
"Starr had nobody open in the end zone, " Bednarik recalled, "so he threw a screen pass to Taylor, who swung out toward the sideline. If he gets by me, he scores and we lose, but I tackle him. He's squirming to get up, but I stay on top of him so he can't get up. I'm watching the clock -- five, four, three, two, one -- and when the gun goes off, I tell him, `You can get up now, this game is over."'
RSS