February 5, 2023 by Philip Lewenstein

Memories of Three Vikings Wins Soothe Pain of Another Playoff Loss

The Minnesota Vikings’ 62^nd year, highlighted by a 13-4 regular season, including an NFL- record 11 one-score victories, ended in heartbreak January 15, 2023, with a home 31-24 Wild Card loss to the New York Giants.

My most painful Minnesota sports fan experiences have been watching the Vikings who, since losing their fourth Super Bowl in 1977, have lost six NFC championship games and other excruciating playoff games (“A History of Heartbreak in Minnesota Sports,” February 18, 2021, www.philsfocus.com).

I have watched—mostly on TV but occasionally in person—almost every Viking game for the 62 years except for a few years when I lived out of state. Holding onto memories of three exciting games I attended helps soothe the pain of this season’s final heart-breaking defeat.

With the decades-long Super Bowl drought and scars from the unbearable championship losses, I have been watching joylessly with low expectations.

However, this fall on November 13, I interrupted my quiet Sunday ritual while the Vikings faced the Bills in Buffalo.  After a succession of remarkable plays, the game went into overtime; I became animated; I lifted my near-75 year-old body off the couch and screamed at the TV, disregarding the need to watch my blood pressure and heart rate and rhythm. The Vikings won 33-30 and improved their record to 8-1.

Then, on Saturday afternoon December 17, in the franchise’s game number 1,000, the Vikings pulled off the largest comeback in NFL history. Trailing the Indianapolis Colts 33-0 at halftime, the Vikings rallied for a 39-36 overtime victory that clinched the NFC North Division title.

On a special page, the Star Tribune chronicled every win, loss, and tie for the Vikings at 1,000 games—535 wins, 454 losses, and 11 ties—a .540 winning percentage (“A grand old time,” by Steve Zimmerman and C. J. Sinner, December 18, 2022).

The paper described the team’s history as “From the opener in 1961, to frozen games in numbing wind chills, to toasty ones under an inflatable roof to four Super Bowls, with 949 regular-season games and 51 more in the postseason, a miracle or two, a missed kick or three.”

The Vikings finished the 2022 season 13-4 with high hopes for the playoffs as the third NFC seed, but there was no more magic in mid-January at U.S. Bank Stadium.

To ease the pain of the most recent heartbreak, I reflected on three great games I attended and will always remember: 1969 blowout of Baltimore Colts, 1972 comeback over Los Angeles Rams, and 1981 upset of Philadelphia Eagles.

Vikings Shock Colts on Way to First Super Bowl

In fall 1969, I was a senior at the University of Minnesota and, as sports editor of the Minnesota Daily, I requested Vikings season tickets even though we didn’t cover the Vikings regularly. My tickets arrived, and I headed for Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington on Sunday, September 28.

The previous season, the team’s eighth in the NFL and second under coach Bud Grant, the Vikings beat the Packers twice, achieved an 8-6 regular-season record, and won their first Central Division title.

Minnesota played its first playoff game in franchise history against the Colts (who moved to Indianapolis in 1984) on December 22, 1968, losing 24-14. The Colts won the NFL championship game but lost to the New York Jets 16-7 in Super Bowl III.

The Vikings lost the 1969 opener 24-23 to Francis Tarkenton and the New York Giants and headed back to the Twin Cities to face the Colts.

Nobody anticipated what happened nine months after the playoff loss to Baltimore. On a pleasant, 53-degree Sunday, quarterback Joe Kapp made NFL history with seven touchdown passes in a 52-14 victory. He finished with 449 yards passing. Kapp’s quarterback counterpart, the great Johnny Unitas, was limited to 68 yards passing, completing 8 of 22 with an interception.

“We had some strong revenge, especially playing at home, and we really wanted to use that home-field advantage to our purpose,” said former Vikings receiver Gene Washington who had six catches for 172 yards and two touchdowns.

The Vikings took control early and led 14-0 in the first quarter after Washington’s 83-yard reception for the team’s second score. The Vikings led 31-7 at halftime and scored three more touchdowns in the second half.

Minnesota won its next 11 games before losing 10-3 to the Falcons in Atlanta. The Vikings  finished the regular season with a 12-2 record. Victories over Los Angeles and Cleveland sent the Vikings to Super Bowl IV before heartbreak struck with a 23-7 loss to Kansas City on January 11, 1970, at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans.

Tarkenton Lights Up Rams in Spectacular Second-Half Comeback

Fast-forward three years to November 19, 1972, and I was working in San Bernardino, California, as the night sports editor for the Sun Telegram. One of our reporters, who was covering the Vikings-Rams game on Sunday at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, invited me to join him.

It was an opportunity to see my all-time favorite Viking, Francis Tarkenton. In the franchise’ s first game on September 17, 1961, against the heavily-favored Chicago Bears, Tarkenton, a rookie, came off the bench late in the first quarter and led the Vikings to a 37-13 victory. A legend was born.

I still have and treasure my autographed picture of Tarkenton (“Best Wishes to You, Phil”), which my father obtained at a meeting in Duluth featuring Tarkenton in the early 1960s.

On March 7, 1967, the Vikings traded Tarkenton to the New York Giants. He had told the Vikings he would no longer play for them and asked to be traded. Coach Norm Van Brocklin, who did not like Tarkenton’s scrambling style, resigned the next day, but Tarkenton did not rescind his demand.

Tarkenton played five seasons in New York and was selected to four Pro Bowls. On January 27, 1972, the Vikings traded two draft picks and three players to bring Tarkenton back to Minnesota. Under Grant, Tarkenton led the Vikings to three Super Bowls; he was the NFL’s most valuable player in 1975 and was a nine-time Pro Bowl selection. In l986, he was the first Viking inducted into the pro football hall of fame after his 18-year career.

Thus, I was excited to see Tarkenton on this late afternoon, 57-degee day in southern California. The Vikings entered the game 5-4, and the Rams were 5-3-1. Tarkenton did not disappoint me before a crowd of 77,982.

Unable to run the ball effectively, the Vikings trailed 20-10 at halftime. In the third quarter, the Vikings cut the lead to 20-17 on a 30-yard fumble return by hall of fame safety Paul Krause and took the lead on Tarkenton’s 76-yard touchdown pass to Bill Brown.

Tarkenton exploited a weak Ram corner-back with three more touchdown passes in the fourth quarter—70 yards to John Henderson, 5 yards to Brown, and 66 yards to John Gilliam. The Vikings won 45-41, and I was ecstatic.

The Vikings lost three of their final four games and ended the season 7-7, but rebounded to qualify for three Super Bowls during the rest of the decade.

Vikings Surprise Eagles behind Tommy Kramer

In early October 1981, my great Uncle Ray from St. Louis Park called me and asked if I would like to accompany him to the Vikings-Eagles game at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington. The game was a likely sellout, and I wondered how Ray would get tickets.

The Eagles had defeated the Viking 31-16 on January 3 in an NFL divisional playoff game. The Vikings jumped ahead 14-0 and led 14-7 at halftime but only scored two points in the second half. The Eagles qualified for Super Bowl XV, but lost to the Oakland Raiders.

Entering the October 18 game, the Eagles, coached by Dick Vermeil, were 6-0 while the Vikings were 4-2 under Grant in his 15^th season. It was the Vikings’ last season at the Met before moving to the new Hubert. H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis in 1982.

Ray contacted Vikings president Max Winter, whom he had known as a boy growing up in north Minneapolis; Winter provided two tickets in the upper deck, near the 50 yard-line, and Ray called me with the good news.

On a cool Sunday morning, temperatures in the low ‘40s and wind at 27 mph, I left my Little Canada home and headed to St. Louis Park to pick up Ray. He was prepared with his heavy overcoat, galoshes, hat and cane, and a pocketful of hard candy. Ray, a men’s clothing store salesman in downtown Minneapolis for many years, always offered candy to customers, friends, and relatives. 

Ray was an enthusiastic, passionate sports fan. He was a Gopher basketball season ticket-holder for decades at Williams Arena, cheering loudly, often pounding his cane, and berating the officials from his mid-court seats about 12 rows up from press row.

Every year Ray would give me a large pocket digest of facts and figures on college football. One summer while in high school, I visited Ray. We took a bus from downtown Minneapolis after his work day to Metropolitan Stadium for a Twins game, finally arriving back to St. Louis Park about midnight.

Back to the Eagles game. As the crowd roared, the Vikings scored 21 points in the second quarter and led 21-9 at halftime before winning 35-23. Quarterback Tommy Kramer threw for 257 yards and four touchdowns.

The Vikings would finish the season 7-9 and miss the playoffs for the second time in three seasons. The Eagles, expected by many to win the Super Bowl, would finish 10-6 and lose their Wild Card playoff game to the New York Giants.

In the decades since their last Super Bowl appearance in 1977, the Vikings have experienced the good (including two miracles), the bad, and the ugly. Despite the indelible heartbreak, who can forget the miracle victories in 1980 and 2017.

I remember watching game 304, which became “Miracle at the Met,” on December 14, 1980. The Vikings, behind 23-9 in the fourth quarter, defeated Cleveland 28-23 on Ahmad Rashad’s 46-yard, one-handed touchdown on the final play. The Vikings finished 9-7 and won the NFC Central Division title based on a tiebreaker with Detroit. However, Philadelphia beat Minnesota in the playoffs.

In game 918, which became the “Minneapolis Miracle”, on January 14, 2018, Stefon Diggs’s 61-yard catch and run from Case Keenum on the final play of the game gave the Vikings a 29-24 playoff victory over New Orleans and a spot in the NFC championship game, a 38-7 loss to Philadelphia.

This season featured magical wins, but in the end no miracles. Trying to understand the outcomes of this season and past years may be futile.

Jason Gay of The Wall Street Journal summed it up in his January 17, 2023, column:

“Decades from now, mystified scientists will gather to study the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings, to try to figure out what they were all about—if they existed to compete in football, or merely to psychologically torment a population of long-suffering fans.

“Tests will be run; helmets will be carbon-dated; archaeologists and academics will scour the ruins of old Twin Cities stadia. Brainy lab coats will review these regular-season box scores and heart-breaking playoff collapses, the fact that a 13-4 team could be quite statistically terrible, and ask a simple, probing question: How?”

Describing the Wild Card game, Gay says, “The Vikings were…the Vikings. At any minute, I thought they would explode for a 24-point quarter. I also wondered why they seemed to play so casually, like it was barefoot badminton at their aunt’s birthday. On Minnesota’s final, fourth-down play, quarterback Kirk Cousins attempted and completed a three-yard pass, which would have been fine…except that the Vikings needed eight yards to keep playing.

“Research scientists, with goggles and tools. One day this franchise will be excavated like a lost city.”

For me, the heartbreak lingers, but three memorable games I attended soothe the pain. SKOL!