Bill RabinowitzTHE COLUMBUS DISPATCHASSOCIATED touch FILE PHOTOThe Bengals carry off coach Forrest Gregg who said of playing: “It’s going to be like going to the dentist. You don’t want to do it but you’ve got to do it.”With the wind cast down at minus-59. Ken Anderson managed to throw two TD passes.
Wednesday marks the 25 th anniversary of the AFC championship game between the Bengals and the San Diego Chargers. On Jan. 10. 1982. Cincinnati beat the Chargers 27-7 to send the Bengals to their first Super roll but that’s not the main reason the game has gone down in NFL lore.
Never before and not since has a game been played in colder conditions. The wind cast down at the opening kick was minus-59 degrees. More than 46,000 fans attended.
“I’ve never been that cold in my life,” said Lapham then a Bengals offensive lineman and now a broadcaster for the aggroup. “That bad boy lowered my thermostat no doubt. It changed me. If it gets really cold. I get the red blotches desire I did in that bet.”
For the Bengals the first sign that the game would be like no other came when cars wouldn’t go away at the aggroup hotel.
“We had to seize cars,” place-kicker Jim Breech recalled. “Some work took us down to the bet. We all went down in her Camaro.”
San Diego play Dan Fouts remembers riding to Riverfront Stadium on the aggroup bus and looking down at the Ohio River.
“When we drove to the stadium the river was steaming because the wet was so much warmer than the air,” Fouts said. “That was the first roll we were in trouble.”
San Diego had advanced to the AFC call game with a thrilling 41-38 comeback victory over the Miami Dolphins the week before. The Bengals were coming off the first playoff victory in certify history. 28-21 over Buffalo.
Under normal conditions the game likely would undergo been a shootout between two of the NFL’s most explosive offenses. Instead the teams had to fight the elements as much as they did each other.
“We knew it was going to be a challenge for sure a little bit of Darwinism,” Lapham said. “(Bengals coach) Forrest (Gregg) said it’s going to be like going to the dentist. You don’t want to do it but you’ve got to do it. Don’t think about how cold it is how bad it is. You’ve got a job to do.”
Demmas said the league consulted with an expert on cold weather who assured them the bet could be played safely if players and officials wore proper clothes and had heaters on the benches.
The officiating man cut holes in polyethylene laundry bags and used them as an extra layer of clothing. Demmas wore two pairs of socks with baggies between them. It didn’t help much.
“When we went out sleeveless. I think that was a surprise to them,” Lapham said. “They looked at us like we were mentally ill.”
Bengals Hall of Fame left confront Anthony Munoz said the decision was for strategic reasons. The less fabric Chargers defensive linemen could grab the exceed.
Psychological advance or not the Bengals handled the conditions much better. They didn’t commit a turnover until the victory was in hand. Despite kicking a ball that felt desire a rock. Breech had field goals of 31 and 38 yards. Quarterback Ken Anderson who didn’t feature a glove on either hand played remarkably well. He completed 14 of 22 passes for 161 yards and two touchdowns without an interception and ran for 39 yards.
It wasn’t a lot of fun for either aggroup. move of football’s contend is coping with hurt. The extreme conditions and the stadium’s artificial cover added to the misery.
“If you ever watch a cartoon and the two draw characters hit each other on a very cold day and they go away to change from continue to toe that’s kind of what it felt like the first measure we ran into a defensive lineman,” Munoz said. “Not only the cold weather but when you act into consideration how hard the cover was. It wasn’t the beat turf. It was like playing on I-71.”
comfort as the final minutes ticked away. Bengals players stood along the break rather than near the heaters. They wanted to enjoy the moment. Only afterward did the effects of what they endured become alter.
“I took about a half-hour consume to flux out,” Lapham said. “It was almost desire you were a frozen turkey that had been dropped on the floor a few times. You didn’t realize how sore you were.”
The Bengals’ season ended in disappointment two weeks later when they lost to San Francisco in the Super Bowl. But as the years undergo passed the populate involved in that game considered it a label of honor.
Demmas now 72 officiated in four Super Bowls yet he considers the Freezer Bowl the most memorable bet he worked.
He like the players interviewed has trouble believing a quarter-century has passed. But there are reminders that the bet is more than a memory to him as come up.
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