Saturday, Oct. 21, 1995. Notre Dame takes on 6-0 USC in the 67th edition of their epic rivalry. Undefeated upstart Kansas State travels to national champion Nebraska. No. 14 Virginia ventures west of the Mississippi for just the 10th time in 107 years to take on No. 16 Texas. The nation watches as these games cast a giant shadow across the college football landscape, obscuring dozens of other games that are reduced, for most of us, to a line buried deep in Sunday's paper: East Carolina 32, Temple 22... Ohio 29, Akron 23... Oklahoma State 30, Missouri 26... Utah 22, Air Force 21. No national implications there. Just a few blips on the Thrifty Car Rental Scoreboard. And yet, every bit as much as these big-name contests of the day, these were games that possessed all the essential elements of college football's weekly spectacle: gambles and blunders, disappointments and triumphs. Utah versus Air Force? You might not remember the game between the Utes and the Falcons in Salt Lake City, but the people who played in it -- and the fans who were still at Rice Stadium for its finish -- will never forget it.
Unlike so many of the previous 14 meetings between Utah and Air Force, all of which took place either in the lap of the Wasatch Range in Salt Lake City or at the foot of the Rockies in Colorado Springs, this game was played without even a hint of snow. The temperature was a mild 59°, the sky overcast and the light diffuse; over the bright-green turf of Rice Stadium and the blazing crimson of Utah's fans -- some of whom sported red socks and red shoes to go with their red pants, red sweatshirts, red hats, and red face paint -- no shadows fell. For the players taking the field that day, there would be no place to hide.
The day's dramas would be laid bare in the glare: A kicker whose follies nearly felled his team would find redemption, and a defensive back who had played a nearly perfect game would fail when it mattered most. A halfback would overcome psychic and physical pain for one gritty play, and two quarterbacks would find themselves in a tense contest of beat the clock. One team would eventually win, but it would be the game's subplots, the personal reversals of fortune, that stamped themselves in the players' memories.
As Air Force senior cornerback Kelvin King burst out of the tunnel and onto the field shortly before noon, he found 29,046 folks -- a near capacity crowd -- waiting for him. Above the buzzing roar he heard one Utah fan shout, "Remember last year!" and King chuckled. In 1994 he had made a last-minute interception that was the final blow in the Falcons' 40-33 upset of 12th-ranked Utah, ruining the Utes' hopes for an outright Western Athletic Conference and a trip to the Holiday Bowl. This year it was Air Force, 4-1 in the conference, that was eyeing its first outright WAC title and Holiday Bowl bid, and King says he was "licking his chops" at the prospect of bringing his team a step closer by helping to disrupt the young offense of Utah, which was 3-2 in the WAC. "The Utes don't care if Deion Sanders is in the backfield; they'll go downtown on anybody," says King, recalling that day. "Utah is a cornerback's dream."
That matchup would be a good showcase for King, who as a high school kid in suburban Atlanta had been snubbed by every Division I-A school but Air Force. Undersized and overachieveing like most of his teammates, the 6-foot, 175-pound cornerback had made the most of his opportunities at the Academy, grinding through the merciless military and academic requirements toward a degree in behavioral science while earning All-WAC honorable mention in his junior year. "It is an experience I would never give up," says King, who graduated in May. "I'm really proud to have made it through. I'm just sorry a lot of my friends didn't."
King displayed the same tenacity on the football field that served him so well in the classroom. Next to tormenting passers and frustrating receivers, he liked nothing better than to ruin a placekicker's day. And so when the Utes arrived at the Air Force 29 on their second drive of the day and junior Daniel Pulsipher trotted out for a field goal attempt, King, well, licked his chops.
A lanky pre-med student who speaks three Chinese dialects, Pulsipher has the earnest, clean-cut appearance of a Mormon missionary, which is exactly what he was for two years in Taiwan between his freshman and sophomore years in Salt Lake City. But his placid facade masks the soul of a fire-eater. "Nobody wants to win more than he does," says Utah coach Ron McBride. Indeed, Pulsipher, a defensive back and quarterback in high school in Merced and Carlsbad, Calif., had found the roles of punter and kicker limiting. "All the kicking camps tell you to divorce yourself from the game," hey says, "but I can't. Football is life."
Restricted -- at least theoretically -- to the noncontact part of the game, Pulsipher still takes a lot of pride in his kicking; at the time of the Air Force game, he led the Utes in points, with 48. "Danny is a perfectionist," says McBride. "He thinks the world is perfect and that every kick should be perfect." As he booted his first attempt of the day, Pulsipher felt it was, though not perfect, one of his better kicks. "I thought I hit it well," he says.
Not well enough to get it beyond King, who slipped past Utah's 274-pound freshman Chris Fuamatu-Ma'afala to deflect the ball. Humiliated, Pulsipher stalked off the field. Says King, "I always expect to block a kick. I just thing to myself, I'm not going to let these jokers score."
But on the first play of the second quarter those jokers scored on a 24-yard touchdown pass from Utah quarterback Mike Fouts to wide-out Kevin Dyson. Air Force promptly answered with two touchdown passes from junior quarterback Beau Morgan to take the lead 14-7.
Utah would get one more shot at scoring as the first half drew to a close. With five seconds left and the Utes on the Air Force 20, Pulsipher attempted another field goal. This time his kick sailed over King and the rest of the defense and far above the left upright. Pulsipher was sure he had nailed it. But side judge Dick Katte, standing underneath the upright, disagreed and signaled the kick no good. Deeply affronted, Pulsipher ran over to him and said, in effect, 'If you need help, just ask for it.' The officials slapped Pulsipher with a 15-yard unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty, which meant Utah would have to kick off from its 20 instead of the 35 to start the second half.
As Pulsipher brooded in the locker room at halftime, linebacker Jeff Kirkman, a rodeo clown during the off-season, smacked him on the helmet and told him to forget about the negated field goal, "or else I'll throw you in front of one of my bulls."
Thus comforted, Pulsipher booted a 64-yard second-half kickoff that was hauled in at the 16 by Falcons safety LeRon Hudgins, who dashed up the middle, then sprinted up the sideline. Just as he stepped out-of-bounds at the Air Force 44 near his own bench, he was met by a charging Pulsipher, who evidently had not forgotten about the scratched field goal. Hudgins was unhurt, but Katte was caught in the collision and sent hurtling over a bench, landing on his head, losing consciousness briefly and dislocating a finger. He would recall it as "the hardest hit of my life." For his part, Pulsipher bruised his kicking knee and earned a second 15-yard penalty in eight ticks of the clock. "I swear I wasn't trying to hit them," says Pulsipher now. "My knee buckled and I couldn't stop."
As Pulsipher returned to the Utah sideline, he spied his fuming coach. "I considered strangling him right then," McBride says, "but I thought I might need him later."
Meanwhile, Air Force, now with the ball at the Utah 41, quickly took advantage of its favorable field position. On third-and-one Morgan pitched to 5' 7" halfback Jake Campbell, a senior whose father's battle with cancer back home in Sacramento had clouded his final college season. "It was the worst time," he says. "You just never knew, day to day, how long he had to live." Even with all the emotional weight he was bearing, Campbell was the Falcons' leader in all-purpose yardage, averaging 132.4 yards per game. After spending much of the second quarter of the Utah game in the training room tending to a knee he hurt on a hard slam to the ground, Campbell had been anxious to get back on the field. As he took the pitch from Morgan, Campbell cut inside free safety Harold Lusk and, he says, saw "nothing but touchdown 35 yards away." But as he accelerated up the right sideline, he felt a needle-sharp stab in the back of his right knee: His posterior cruciate ligament, strained in the second quarter, had given way. "It hurt so bad I wanted to cry," Campbell says, "but I had to get the touchdown." At the 10-yard line, his hobbling became pronounced. At the three, Campbell dived over the goal line just as two defenders fell on him.
Campbell's game was over, but his teammates took note of the sacrifice he had made. "I think if it had been me I might have just laid down," says Hudgins. "Jake showed a lot of heart. I promised him his efforts would not be in vain." But when Campbell emerged from the locker room late in the third quarter in mufti and on crutches, he found his team had not yet capitalized on his inspiration. The score remained 21-7, with the two teams mired in a punt exchange that would last well into the fourth quarter.
With little more than six minutes to play, King further demoralized the Utes by deflecting a Fouts pass intended for junior receiver Rocky Henry in the end zone. On the next play Fouts was sacked and fumbled away the ball. Disgusted, hundreds of the Utah faithless packed up their red garb and headed for the exits. On the sideline Pulsipher surveyed the debris of his day and thought, Oh, man, what have I done?
The Falcons failed to score on their next possession, punting with less than two minutes to go, but smiles did start to break out on their sideline. "Kind of sloppy, but a good game," Morgan said to teammate Bret Cillessen, an offensive lineman, as they came off the field. Air Force coach Fisher DeBerry began composing the salute he would give his defense in the locker room. Offensive coordinator Bob Noblitt at last started to relax. "There was a general sigh of relief on the sideline," says Noblitt. "We all thought, We got 'em now."
On the other sideline stood Fouts, a born optimist and perhaps the only Ute who didn't believe this game was over. An alumnus of two junior colleges and a walk-on at Utah, Fouts had never started a varsity game at any level until five weeks before, against New Mexico. Though he had started every game since, he had been miserable against Colorado State on Oct. 14, and his reputation was sullied, especially among Ute fans. But he had learned a thing or two from his uncle, Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Fouts: how to grip a football, for one, and how to hang tough in circumstances like these. Mike was troubled by neither his team's 14-point hole nor the 1:49 remaining. "At that point I just decided I was looking at a new game," he says.
But after two misfires and a completion for a first down, Fouts was sacked for a seven-yard loss, leaving the Utes with second down and 17 on their own 29. Utah called a time-out with 1:11 remaining.
In the stands, Mary Morgan, mother of the Air Force quarterback was feeling unsettled. She was still a bit rattled from an exchange with a Utah fan sitting behind her, who had yelled, "Kill the quarterback!" Says Mary, "When I told him that was my son he was talking about, he said, 'Sorry, lady, but that's the only way to stop the option.'" Now, inexplicably, her unease was growing. She pulled out her camera and snapped a picture of the scoreboard, which read, as it had for the previous 27 minutes of the game, UTAH 7, AIR FORCE 21. "I still don't know why I took it," Mary says of the photograph that is now tacked on her son's bulletin board in his dorm in Colorado Springs. "I just thought it might be important."
Captured on film forever, that score would vanish within seconds. In the Utah huddle after the time-out, Fouts called a five-receiver route and looked straight at junior wideout Terence Keehan, a walk-on from New Zealand who hadn't touched the ball all day. "Get ready," Fouts told him.
When the center snapped the ball Keehan streaked down the right sideline. He was looking for the ball over his left shoulder, but Fouts's pass sailed above his head to the right. Swiveling his head around, Keehan mad an leaping grab, coming to earth on the Air Force 17 for a 54-yard gain.
After two incompletions, Fouts connected with Henry at the goal line as the wideout snaked between two defenders. Utah 13, Air Force 21, with 0:41 left. Refraining from his usual high-fiving with teammates, Henry quietly tossed the ball to the official. "I didn't think it was enough," he says. "I still didn't think we had a prayer."
Henry had already made the calculations that Campbell, propped up by crutches on the Air Force sideline, was about to make. "I figured that to win, " says Campbell, "Utah would have to (a.) make a two-point conversion, (b.) recover an onside kick, and (c.) score off a deep pass. Then I though, Naaaaaah."
On the Utah sideline, offensive coordinator Fred Graves called for a two-point conversion using the play Donald Duck left, in which everyone but the center, quarterback and two receivers lines up to the left of the ball. Air Force defensive coordinator Cal McCombs had seen this oddball scheme pop out of Utah's bag of tricks every now and then during his 12 years at the Academy and had even made his team practice against it on the Wednesday before the game. But for some reason he wasn't expecting it now. "I should have called a time-out right then," McCombs said later. "I should have warned the defense to look out for that."
In the Utah huddle, Fuamatu-Ma'afala got the word: a trick play, going to him! Taking the handoff from Fouts, the big fullback from Honolulu followed five blockers into the left side of the end zone unmolested. The Air Force defenders were more miffed than worried. After all, there were just 41 seconds remaining and all the Falcons needed to do was recover the inevitable onside kick and run out the clock. King thought, Dang! I wish we could have beaten them 21-7 instead of 21-15.
Pulsipher had practiced onside kicks during the off-season, asking his wife, Rebecca, to stand 20 yards away from him as he attempted to bounce kicks over her head. But he had tried only one in a game, and it hadn't worked. "To get the high bounce on an onside kick, you have to hit a tiny, quarter-inch square right below the white stripe," says Pulsipher. It is the smallest of sweet spots, even when the kicker is just practicing and the key to his team's entire season doesn't depend on his finding it. "Maybe Dan was feeling some anxiety right then," says special teams coach Sean McNabb. "Sometimes he'll want to do something so bad...."
There was no high bounce. Connecting well below the imaginary square, Pulsipher drilled the ball straight at Air Force fullback Nakia Addison, who was hovering behind a gap in the front row of the Falcons' return formation. The sound of the ball hitting Addison's chest was like a small explosion -- BOOM! "It was the most unique sound I've ever heard," says Utah defensive back Calbert Beck. "It was a deep, deep thud." Technically, it was a mistake, a blown kick.
All Addison had to do was catch it.
In retrospect, one could argue that Addison should have tried to avoid the kick altogether and let it go out-or-bounds. But every instinct told Addison, a former centerfielder, to grab it. "It came right at me, fast -- I still see it every now and then," he says. "I wanted to knock it down and keep it in front of me." But the ball hit him so hard that it ricocheted to his left and squirted out from underneath Air Force tight end Steve Hendricks. For Hudgins, standing on the sideline, things suddenly shifted into nauseating slow motion. "I saw a white jersey jump on the ball, the ball squirt out and a red jersey land on it," he says. "My heart dropped."
As the ball knuckled toward him, Utah defensive back Artis Jackson thought about scooping it up and running, but he had a pulled hamstring in addition to a broken thumb and pinky, and besides, he says, "Someone who had tried that before had fumbled and gotten yelled at. So I just jumped on it. It knocked the wind out of me."
Breath was suddenly hard to come by all around Rice Stadium. The momentum transfer was so abrupt "it was as though someone had walked into the stadium and flipped a switch throwing the current the other way," says Utah fan Jim Kimball. It happened so quickly that DeBerry didn't think to call a time-out, a lapse he would regret.
After a five-yard false-start penalty, the Utes had 50 yards to cover in just 38 seconds. In the huddle Fouts looked at Dyson. "Get on your horse," the quarterback said. "I'm going to launch it."
"Dyson, a sophomore receiver from Clinton, Utah, had been having a good game -- seven catches for 116 yards and a touchdown -- despite the fact that for most of the day he had been pitted against King, who was having the game of his career: five tackles, a blocked field goal and two deflected passes near the end zone. The two knew little about each other before the game, but they had gained mutual respect over the course of the afternoon. "He definitely made me pick up my game," says Dyson. "And he'd complement me, say things like 'Nice catch.'"
As the King-Dyson duel approached its climax, King took a strange gamble. Guessing that Fouts would try to make short passes to the sideline to work the clock, King decided to defend against the quick out. At the snap he began a slow backpedal and hesitated a beat just as Dyson tore past him down the left sideline. "I just can't explain the feeling," says King now, "but I didn't think in a million years he'd go deep."
Fouts dropped back and unleashed a bomb, his best throw of the day, and Dyson expertly hauled it in 50 yards downfield. A second later he was in the end zone, feeling oddly bereft of his shadow, King, who was a good five yards behind him. "It was weird," says Dyson. "He had been with me all day."
King, suddenly and inexplicably a goat, dropped his head in despair. In just 10 seconds the score had gone from 21-7 to 21-21, and the crowd, now numbering just half of the original, was in full throat. "All of a sudden it was like there were 100 mouths screaming on both sides of my helmet," the Falcons' Hudgins recalls. "I wanted to cup my ears it was so deafening." Standing just a few yards away, Campbell heard only silence -- "like when a movie goes quiet," he says. Both men felt sick to their stomach.
As the two teams lined up for the point after, King was spinning in his own little purgatory. The man who had been the game's outstanding player for 59 minutes was now in desperate need of redemption. "It was like a big hurt," says King. "I was just wishing for something to happen. I thought, Please, Kelvin, block one more kick!" But Fuamatu-Ma'afala, who had been burned by King in the field goal stuff in the first quarter, was out for a little expiation too.
Perhaps neither, however, had as much to atone for as Pulsipher, who had two failed field goals, a lucky botched onside kick, 30 yards in penalties and an injured ref on his day's ledger. The pressure might have been unbearable had Pulsipher not been under the mistaken impression that his team was already ahead 22-21. "I go out there, thinking, no big deal, just a normal PAT," he says now. "I was pretty calm because I thought we were ahead."
His holder, Keehan, was well aware that the score was tied. "I had never been more nervous in my life," he says. But the snap was good, the hold was good, and the kick was good. The goat had become the hero.
The distraugh King still had 31 seconds to cling to hope, to wish his heart out on the sideline. "Offense, please make something happen," he repeated to himself. "Defense, fall down, fall down, fall down...."
But the offense did not make something happen; the defense did not fall down. In the final seconds allotted him for deliverance, Morgan threw one bomb over Utah's Beck that just missed wideout Craig Hancock at the five-yard line and a last second Hail Mary that was reciprocally intercepted by Beck, who ran it back 85 yards into the end zone. But even the absurdist playwright who had scripted these last few minutes wouldn't allow 21 points in 41 seconds. No, Air Force had an ineliglble receiver downfield and Utah was called for an illegal block. Touchdown nullified, game over. The score would remain, irrevocably, Utah 22, Air Force 21.
Morgan doesn't need a photo of the scoreboard to remember the final score; it is seared into his memory forever, as is the sight of his offensive line in the seconds following the final gun. "I could make a painting," he says. "One guy was staring off into space, another was just standing there with his hand on his hip. The sky was overcast, and there was a haze moving in. It was like a graveyard."
"It felt," says Cillessen, "like somebody died."
Moving only by habit, the Falcons gathered in front of their band for the traditional alma mater. They stood there in anguish, chins on chests, tears streaming down their cheeks. As they trudged back to their locker room, King lingered behind his teammates, unable, he says, "to look them in the eye." As he sobbed outside the door, McCombs wrapped his arm around King's shoulder and said, "Kelvin, you didn't lose the game for us -- we lost it as a team. Let's go."
DeBerry, a devoutly religious man, has searched for explanations for the most devastating loss of his career and concludes that "we simply were not meant to win it."
McBride, a devoutly superstitious man, has searched for explanations for the most rewarding win of his career and concludes that "it just goes to show, as long as there is breath and life, you got a chance."
"All I know is, in my 27 years of coaching," says McCombs, "I've never been as stunned as when I looked at that scoreboard at the end of that football game."
It was a turnaround that had a once-in-a-lifetime feel to it for Utah, too. "It was like winning the lottery," says Henry. "It was like being handed 22.5 million bucks." Indeed, it seemed to make all things possible for the Utes, who went on to dominate their three remaining opponents. Their schedule ended with a hugely satisfying 34-17 pasting of BYU, earning Utah its first share of the conference title in 31 years.
Of Air Force, Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph columnist Ralph Routon wrote that in his three decades of covering sports, he had never seen any team at any level take a loss so hard. For the injured Campbell, the weekend would get worse. The morning after he arrived back on campus, he learned that his father, Lynwood, had died.
Despite a consensus among local sportswriters that the Falcons were so emotionally destroyed by the game that they might not win again all season, Air Force beat Fresno State 31-20 the very next week. One of the highlights of the game was an interception by Kelvin King. The Falcons finished with a 6-2 conference record, a piece of the WAC title and a bid to the Copper Bowl. "The sign of a true champion," DeBerry would proudly say, "is to get up one more time than you're knocked down."
And it might be said that the sign of a classic college football game, no matter how small the states or how far from the spotlight, is that for both the winners and the losers it remains unforgettable.