Memories ripe for Rypien
Every city should have a Mark Rypien.
This is true in countless ways – as a symbol of good works and easy friendship, just for starters – but at the moment, with the Northwest in the throes of Seahawks typhus, he performs another invaluable service.
He’s an access point, a portal to both the lunacy of Super Bowl week and the transcendent state when opportunity is married with the best an athlete has to give – the essence of competitive sport. From Shadle Park High School and Washington State to the top of the athletic universe and back.
You mean not every community has its own Super Bowl MVP?
Pity.
The good memories come flooding back this week for Rypien, who quarterbacked the Washington Redskins to a 37-24 victory over Buffalo in Super Bowl XXVI in Minneapolis – and he recalls them all. The first touchdown ever reversed by instant replay. The Buffalo blitzes that had him constantly dragging himself off the Metrodome turf – but usually after completions. The scary ankle sprain he suffered days before the game. And, of course, toting his older daughter, Ambre, off the field on his shoulders and saying those magic words for the Disneyland camera.
Hey, it only seems like yesterday. Ambre Rypien was 3 at the time. Now she’s a high school senior.
Yet it was only three years ago that Rypien’s career of spectacular highs and tragic lows finally drew to an end – after a two-week summer audition with the Seahawks, coincidentally. Seattle lurched to a 7-9 finish in 2002, but during his brief stay in camp Rypien sensed something special even then – in the person of quarterback Matt Hasselbeck.
“My brother Tim asked me what he was like and I told him, ‘He’s as sharp as they come,’ ” Rypien said. “He just practiced so well and that means something to a team. It’s like in hockey – if I’m practicing against a goaltender and I’m putting the puck in the net every fourth shot, I’m not going to be too confident about him back there in a game. I think Matt breeds confidence in that team, in the other players, by what he does in practice.”
At the time, Hasselbeck was roughly the same age and experience level as Rypien was when he won the quarterback job in Washington. The practice protocol applied, too, but a bigger step for Rypien toward his Super Bowl destiny occurred when they were keeping score – in the 1990 playoffs, a 20-6 first-round victory at Philadelphia.
“That had guys thinking, ‘Hey, we can win with Ryp’ – just as they’d won big games before me,” he said.
A thousand details and an untold accounting of intangibles go into winning a Super Bowl, of course, and Rypien can make a list. Then there’s just dumb luck, and it was on Monday after the NFC Championship game that he struck the mother lode.
He found housing for his cheering section with one phone call.
“I was the travel agent,” he remembered, “and stumbled into a great situation. St. Paul’s Cathedral had a retreat house for nuns and priests across the street, and for the Super Bowl they had it serviced out by Marriott and beds in there enough to take 60 people. When I called Monday, the Chamber of Commerce said only two couples had partaken of the accommodations and I said, ‘I want the other 56.’
“And it was a good thing, because the next nearest lodging was in Wisconsin.”
That done, Rypien could sleep easier – at least until the night before the game. He gave up trying at 6:30 a.m., and with kicker Chip Lohmiller and fellow Cougar Eric Williams jumped in a cab to the stadium at noon, or two hours before the team bus was to leave.
“I did manage to catch an hour-and-a-half nap at the stadium,” he said, “but I was geared up to the point where it was almost uncomfortable. I’d never felt that way before.”
He didn’t feel much more comfortable when that TD pass to Art Monk was reversed, or when Jeff Rutledge muffed the snap on the subsequent field-goal attempt, or when another drive was botched when his passed bounced off guard Mark Schlereth’s helmet and into a Buffalo defender’s hands.
Or when he kept landing on his backside. Sometime in the first two series, a particular hard Buffalo hit left him with a cracked rib that was only discovered when X-rays were taken at the Pro Bowl the next week.
“We set a record that year for least sacks allowed,” Rypien recalled, “and that has to do with a lot of things – getting rid of the football, a great offensive line and having a scheme that’s going to allow us max protection. Well, the first four balls I threw, I wasn’t just hit – I was knocked on my keister. I came to the sidelines and I wasn’t getting in my guys’ faces, but I was concerned – ‘What’s going on?’ And they told me, ‘Relax, it’ll be fine.’ It wasn’t scheme or anything. Basically, Buffalo was sky-high on adrenaline. They told me, ‘They can’t do this for 60 minutes’ – and lo and behold, they were right.
“When we finally did score, I think we scored six of the next seven or eight times we had the ball.”
When running back Gerald Riggs blasted in with the touchdown that put Washington up 17-0, Rypien charged to midfield pumping his fist furiously – an image that remains the game’s signature moment. Oblivious to the spectacle as he called plays in the huddle and signals behind center, Rypien threw for 292 yards and two touchdowns. On the sidelines between series, he’d gaze up at his entourage and think, ‘I’ll bet they’re enjoying the hell out of this.’ “
He certainly did.
“There’s no bigger game than this,” he said. “For the highlight of your career, everything you did, to play the best when it counted the most, well, that’s something that can never be taken away. They can never say, ‘If only he would have won the big game.’
“Maybe my career wasn’t as great as I would have liked it to have been. I would have loved to win two or three more Super Bowls. But to play your best when your team needed you the most, that’s an incredible feeling.”
Best of all, he can relive it this week every year. And his hometown can, too.