Posted on 10/13/2008 3:08:41 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Few, if any, North Carolina football players had ever heard of Joe Montana before Oct. 11, 1975. But since that humid, heart-wrenching, historic day, he's been awfully hard to forget.
Before Montana's "Chicken Soup" rally at the Cotton Bowl in 1979 or "The Catch" at Candlestick in 1982, a 19-year-old unknown led "The Comeback" at Kenan -- when he jogged onto the field with 6:04 left and led Notre Dame to two touchdowns and a 21-14 victory.
No one knew it at the time, but the sophomore who didn't even start the next game for the Fighting Irish would go on to lead 35 more fourth-quarter comebacks (four in college, 31 in the NFL), win four Super Bowl rings and become one of the game's greatest quarterbacks.
And it all began here, where the No. 22 Tar Heels will face the Fighting Irish again on Saturday, 33 years to the day later.
Said Bill Paschall, UNC's starting quarterback that season: "I wish the other guy, their starting quarterback, had done a little better -- just enough so they didn't have to put a new guy in. If they hadn't put Montana in, I believe we would have won that game."
A festive atmosphere
There's plenty of reason to think so.
Through 3 1/2 quarters, the Tar Heels -- 2-2, but three-touchdown underdogs to the No. 15 Irish -- "had played them like crazy,'' said Bill Perdue, a junior defensive end that year. "We had beaten them every which way -- on offense, on defense."
Several Notre Dame players remembered in interviews for this story that they were so bothered by the heat and humidity that they struggled to play in the second half.
Meanwhile, UNC's Mike Voight had already rushed for a touchdown, Mel Collins had caught a touchdown from Paschall, and the nattily dressed capacity crowd -- which paid the jacked-up price of $10 per ticket -- was excited by the Irish's first trip to Chapel Hill since 1960.
"It was an impressive atmosphere,'' said Merv Johnson, Notre Dame's offensive coordinator at the time and now the director of football operations at Oklahoma. "I remember a lot of women in the more expensive seats were wearing hats -- kind of like the Kentucky Derby. ... And UNC had the game under control; it seemed like we couldn't get anything going."
Indeed, UNC was leading 14-6, and Irish starting quarterback Rick Slager had thrown three straight incomplete passes, when Irish head coach Dan Devine opted to finally make a change behind center.
When a tall, skinny guy wearing No. 3 ran onto the field, reporters in the press box and players on the field scrambled to figure out who it was.
"You'd never heard of him, because he got off to a bad start with Coach Devine,'' said Dan Kelleher, a junior split end for the Irish that season. "I'm not saying he was a bad practice guy, he always did what had to be done ... but maybe not always exactly the way Coach wanted it."
As a freshman in 1974, Montana -- a three-sport athlete from Monongahela, Pa., who had turned down a basketball scholarship at N.C. State -- ranked as low as seventh on the depth chart.
His teammates enjoyed his fun-loving wit, but "he was the type of guy who didn't slit his wrists in practice after a mistake, he didn't let them eat him up, so the head coach sometimes thought he wasn't taking things serious enough,'' Johnson said.
Then he laughed: "But we found out after a while that that demeanor worked pretty well."
Montana could not be reached for an interview.
Grandmaster Montana
On his first series at Kenan Stadium, Montana completed two passes -- a 10-yarder to Ted Burgmeier and a 39-yarder to Kelleher -- to set up a 2-yard touchdown run by halfback Al Hunter, a native of Greenville. A 2-point conversion pass to tight end Doug Buth tied the score at 14-14 with 5:11 left.
Like his 16 seasons in the NFL would later show, Montana wasn't particularly fast and he didn't have a cannon for an arm, but he had an instinct for getting the ball down the field.
"If [Garry] Kasparov was a chess genius, Montana was a visual, defense-reading genius,'' Kelleher said. "I don't think there's another guy who could walk up to the line of scrimmage and not know where the ball was going until he saw the movement of the linebacker or safety or corner, and then he knew right where it was going to go.
"Everybody liked to say Joe didn't have a strong arm, but he knew how to put it where you needed to catch it."
That was embodied on that warm autumn day in 1975, too.
After UNC missed a 41-yard field goal wide right, Montana took the field again, threw his only incompletion, and with 1:04 left, found Burgmeier about 7 yards upfield. The split end then raced down the left sideline -- dodging a diving tackle attempt by UNC's Bobby Trott -- to score an 80-yard touchdown. The extra point gave Notre Dame the decisive 21-14 lead with 58 seconds left; Montana finished 3-for-4 with 129 passing yards.
"It was designed to be a short out pattern to get out of bounds,'' Burgmeier remembered. "But a cornerback fell after he tried to knock the ball down, so I headed upfield. And it was clear sailing after the safety couldn't knock me out of bounds."
It was the only touchdown of Burgmeier's career -- he was moved to defense after that.
'Best win ever'
After the victory, Devine, Notre Dame's first-year coach who had previously coached at Arizona State, Missouri and for the Green Bay Packers, called the game "my best win ever." The Irish went on to finish that season 8-3, and Saturday will mark their first return to UNC since then.
The story didn't end so well, though, for the Tar Heels, who left the field dejected, deflated and still wondering, 'Who was that guy?' "
That letdown began a five-game losing skid, and the Tar Heels finished 3-7-1.
"No, I'd never heard of Joe Montana before the game," said then-UNC coach Bill Dooley, who had two Catholic priests on the sideline that day for extra luck. "But I've gotten to know him since. And I remember him telling me how his coaches didn't start him the next game, either."
The following weekend, Montana came off the bench in the fourth quarter again, that time leading the Irish to a three-touchdown, come-from behind victory against Air Force. And three years later, in the Cotton Bowl against Houston, he led the Irish to another fourth-quarter comeback despite becoming so ill the he was fed chicken soup during the game to keep his body warm.
The "Joe Cool" born in Chapel Hill was not a fluke. And The Comeback at Kenan became one for the football biography books.
"Obviously, I rather would not have been a part of that history,'' said Perdue, who now owns several companies in Asheville. "But it does come up in conversation from time to time; you'll be talking about the greatest quarterbacks ever, and that will lead to Joe Montana, and I'll say, 'He brought them back against my North Carolina team when I was a junior.' I'll never forget it."
Montana, who went on to become a three-time Super Bowl MVP and NFL Hall of Famer, has made sure of it.
And, as one who loves trivia, it was another North Carolina school, NC State, that Joe Montana almost chose over Notre Dame. The difference, they had offered him a basketball scholarship with the promise of being able to play football as well. He loved basketball also, but the allure of Notre Dame won in the end.
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