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Urban Legends of the NFL: Did Frightened Refs Stage the Immaculate Reception?
- Updated: October 5, 2016
The most important play in NFL history had just occurred, and no one knew what the heck just happened.
The intended receiver and primary defender were lying on the turf in a daze. Several of the officials missed the key moment. Even the television cameras and film crews weren’t quite ready for what took place.
The Immaculate Reception was the stuff of urban legend the moment Franco Harris crossed the goal line to secure a 13-7 win and a trip to the AFC Championship Game.
There are several tales intertwined around the Immaculate Reception. We will touch on a few but focus on one: that the referees only called the play a touchdown, instead of an illegally deflected pass, out of fear for their own safety. Officiating crew chief Fred Swearingen saw Steelers fans toppling onto the field and ran to the Three Rivers Stadium dugout to call stadium security. When the safety of the officials couldn’t be assured, he signaled a potentially life-saving touchdown.
Or so the story goes. Usually when told by old Raiders.
“That’s ludicrous,” according to Barry Mano, president of the National Association of Sports Officials, an expert on referee safety protocols.
Art McNally, the NFL’s head of officiating in 1972 and the man Swearingen spoke to during that fateful dugout phone call, “literally cackles himself into a wheezing silence” when asked about the notion that the officials that day called security to check on their safety before making their decision, according to longtime Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Gene Collier, writing in 1998. “‘Ha! People put two and two together I guess,'” McNally said.
Did the referees, or the Raiders for that matter, have any reason to fear angry mobs of early-’70s Steelers fans?
The answer to that question is a part of the Immaculate Reception legend that is very rarely told.
The Play and the Debate
The NFL Films footage of the Immaculate Reception may be the most famous sports highlight in American history. It’s as recognizable to sports fans as the Mona Lisa. But like the Mona Lisa, it’s so familiar that it’s easy to take its beauty and significance for granted.
Forty years after the fact, an entire episode of A Football Life was devoted to the play; we’ll reference it at times here. But that program was produced in 2012. Some of the old-timers retold their tales for approximately the billionth time, but you know how tall tales can get after decades of retelling.
So here’s a quick recap of exactly what happened in Pittsburgh back in 1972
WHO: Raiders (10-3-1) at Steelers (11-3).
WHAT: Divisional playoff game, which at the time was the first round of the postseason.
WHEN: December 23, 1972.
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WHERE: Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, which was a dual-use football and baseball stadium (hence the dugout). The play begins with the Steelers having the ball on their own 40-yard line, 4th-and-10 with 22 seconds left in the fourth quarter.
WHY: Entering the 1972 season, the Steelers had reached the playoffs just once in their near-40 year history. It had been nine years since they even had a winning season. The Raiders were former AFL champions enjoying their best season since the NFL-AFL completed their merger three years earlier.
The Immaculate Reception represents the birth of the Steel Curtain Dynasty, the Steelers-Raiders rivalry and the Raiders’ reputation as the wrestling-style heels who win and lose on the fringes of the rulebook. It also presaged both instant replay and “What’s a Catch?” debates. There was a lot going on.
HOW: Trailing 7-6 with no timeouts left on fourth down, Steelers coach Chuck Noll called a play called 66 Circle Option. The play broke down quickly because of the Raiders pass rush, which forced Terry Bradshaw to scramble and throw to fullback John “Frenchy” Fuqua.
Raiders safety Jack Tatum slammed into Fuqua just as the ball arrived. The ball ricocheted backward toward rookie running back Franco Harris, who scooped the ball up and raced 60 yards into the end zone.
That’s where the only highlight any of us saw for decades ended. This Urban Legend is about what happened next…
According to NFL rules in 1972, a receiver could not legally catch a pass that had been touched, batted or deflected by another offensive player after leaving the quarterback’s hand. Officials were not certain whether Bradshaw’s pass had hit Fuqua or Tatum. So they huddled. Raiders coach John Madden howled that the pass bounced off Fuqua, making the catch illegal. Steelers fans had begun leaping onto the field to celebrate, even though there were still five seconds left on the clock.
After a conference with his officials, crew chief Fred Swearingen walked over to the baseball dugout, which had telephones. With instant replay decades from arrival, Swearingen spoke to someone on the phone. Then he emerged and immediately signaled a touchdown. Security began clearing fans from the field for the extra point.
Newspapers reported varying accounts of what happened in the dugout. Some said Swearingen watched a replay, though there is no evidence that there was any television equipment in the dugout. Most agree that Swearingen spoke to NFL executive Art McNally on the dugout telephone, but the details changed from story to story: McNally called Swearingen, Swearingen called McNally, McNally watched the replay, McNally made the touchdown call, and so on.
Raiders safety George Atkinson offered some eyewitness testimony of the referee conference 40 years later in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “We wandered over to hear what they were talking about. We thought they were deciding if the play was dead; instead, they were concerned about security. I heard it with my own ears.
“They were concerned how much security was there if they made the wrong call. Other than that, why would they have to call upstairs? For what? There was no instant replay. They were calling security there.”
There are plenty of reasons to doubt Atkinson’s testimony. It arrives after 40 years of telling exaggerated “wild Raiders” stories in NFL Films productions, for one thing. Referees shooed players away from their discussions in the 1970s just as they do now. Are we supposed to believe that Swearingen’s crew simultaneously feared for its safety but let a bunch of hostile players nicknamed “Butch” and “The Assassin” listen in on their deliberations?
Atkinson may have been misremembering things a bit, but he was restating something that had made the rounds for decades. Some Pittsburgh folks even spoke about the legend to NFL Films.
“People say that the referee came out and said to the security man, ‘Can you protect our lives?’ Steelers broadcaster Bill Hargrove said in the program. “The guy said ‘no,’ so he said ‘touchdown.'”
Added Mark Madden, Pittsburgh talk radio personality: “I know, in my heart, that when the referees got together to debate the call, they said, ‘look, if we rule this incomplete, we’re not getting out of Three Rivers Stadium alive.”
To get to the bottom of this, we need to find out exactly who called whom on that dugout phone after the Immaculate Reception, and why.
“What Are You Going to Call?”
Thousands of words were written about the Immaculate Reception in the next day’s newspapers. But while most beat writers and columnists scoured the locker room in search of quotes from Tatum, Fuqua, Harris and others, treating the referee’s deliberations like a minor detail, Bob Oates of the Los Angeles Times focused on the mysterious phone call.
On instant replay the evidence was …
