The play is among the most historic in all of professional sports! Yet, the key detail has remained a mystery for half a century.
A Hall of Fame quarterback skittering right, then left, searching for a receiver. His team is about to lose by one point inside the next spare seconds. The quarterback launches his pass in desperation.
Downfield, the target leaps toward the spiraling football. So does the assassin of a defender.
They collide.
This is all visible by the sporting journalists perched above the grandstands.
And the football ricochets.
A trailing fullback, himself a Hall of Famer, catches the ball as it is about to hit the turf.
He runs it into the end zone.
TOUCHDOWN!
Or was it?
Victory rescued from defeat.
Or was it?
Terry Bradshaw! Franco Harris! Frenchy Fuqua! Jack Tatum! Art Rooney!
Glorious NFL individuals comprise the cast of characters.
Plus, the last scene in a brightly lighted room in the bowels of the once-stately Detroit News, downtown.
Bradshaw was the frenetic passer. John “Frenchy” Fuqua, keeper of the mystery, was Bradshaw’s intended target. Jack Tatum, dangerously unforgiving, was the defender.
And Franco Harris — a sad, untimely, ironic death victim two days ago — was the running back who caught the dropping football and lumbered into the end zone with it, 50 years ago Friday.
Lumbering into history
The Steelers were about to lose this playoff game to the enemy Oakland Raiders when Bradshaw lofted the ball wildly, as etched in my memory.
There remain these flickering images: the airborne collision; the football striking one or two of the leaping figures; or maybe both. Then the football rebounding and Harris catching it and tromping onward into the end zone.
And into history.
And this ink-stained wretch rushing to the locker room to try to grasp sense of the situation passing the bewildered, misty-eyed Art Rooney, the pixie of a clubowner in the stadium catacombs.
Art Rooney, who had purchased the NFL franchise in 1933, with his racetrack winnings from Saratoga. He named the football team the Pirates, after the Pittsburgh’s baseball team as was the custom in the early NFL.
Rooney’s team quickly became a laughingstock. The jabs hurt Art, a kindly, friendly gentleman. He had never watched his team, renamed the Steelers, win a playoff game.
“When I got there to Pittsburgh,” Bobby Layne, who was banished in 1958 via trade from the Lions after three championships, once told me, “they did their drafting from Street & Smith’s Pro Football annual magazine.”
One draftee was a prominent, suffering running back — Fran Rogel.
“Hey, diddle diddle, Rogel up the middle,” was the Steelers’ weekly football chant. They started every game with the same simple play.
This was the reputation of the Pittsburgh Steelers 50 years ago this week when they played their first playoff game in 15 years. The Steelers would lose the next week in the playoffs to the Super Bowl.
But the weird, still mysterious playoff would become rooted for the Steelers’ championship dynasty of the 1970s. The Steelers would play in four Super Bowls later in the decade. Four in six years and win all four. They became a dominant franchise — from then until now.
The mysterious play acquired its own name — The Immaculate Reception. The Steelers had the ball fourth down, 60 yards from the goal line, 22 seconds on the clock, down by the one-point.
The live vision remains. The young Bradshaw scrambling, bouncing right and left, evading pass rushers, escaping. Then, in an instant of freedom threw long-distance downfield.
The ball arcing. Striking Fuqua in the helmet or Tatum’s body. Or maybe both. And returning in the direction of its launch point. And Harris catching the ball and running onward to victory.
The picture remains clear in my mind plus my unspoken words: “What the …?”
An immaculate mystery
All of it happened 50 years ago Christmas weekend, a half century ago this Friday.
When only sports journalists, athletes and Santa Claus went to work.
As The News’ emissary that Christmas weekend in Pittsburgh 50 years ago, I was off from the pressbox seconds after Franco entered the end zone. That’s when I passed Rooney going the other way in the catacombs of two-year-old Three Rivers Stadium.
The mood in the locker room was joyous.
And secretive.
“I know that happened and I’m not saying,” Fuqua told a row upon row of nosy journalists, in quest of the truth. Frenchy had a huge grin.
The NFL did not have the benefit of instant replay then.
And the rule then was different, according to modern internet documentary evidence.
If the ball was ricocheted off the receiver, or touched the grass, it was a dead ball — an incomplete pass. If it touched Tatum and flipped back to Harris, it was a legal pass catch.
Oakland wins if it went off Fuqua. Pittsburgh wins if it bounded off Tatum.
The touchdown stood and the Steelers were victors, alive in the playoffs. The first playoff victory in franchise history.
The thing is, John “Frenchy” Fuqua was from Detroit, a Detroit Eastern High School product. As players did before they earned millions, they took jobs during the offseason.
Frenchy Fuqua just so happened to work offseason for The Detroit News. He worked in circulation.
A few years later, lusting for a column, I approached Mike O’Hara in The News’ sports department. I suggested we head to the back of the building where we went on rare occasions. To circulation. I figured that Fuqua would fess up now that a powerful interval had separated The Immaculate Reception and the moment.
Frenchy was affable as always. And he knew what we were after.
He was smiling. The three of us worked for the same newspaper.
“I know what you want,” he said — not a mystery there.
“I know what happened, and I’m not telling.”
And Frenchy laughed.
So, the mystery lasted. And lasted. And now still lasts.
Perhaps the only other witness with a clear view of the play would have been Franco Harris himself. He was due to Pittsburgh this weekend for the Steelers’ retirement ceremony of his No. 32 uniform.
Franco died, ironically, some time between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. And the solution to the mystery likely perishes with him.
Perhaps, on the 50th anniversary of The Immaculate Reception, that’s the way it should be.
Jerry Green is a retired Detroit News sports writer.